This article explores the benefits to undergraduate learning, and the broader critical significance of, the ‘creative translation’ of Old English literature. First-year students of English language and literature at Oxford University were encouraged to inhabit and understand poetic texts by producing creative, free modern versions that responded to the content, form, style, and sound of the source text. How far this approach helps students is analysed through their own perspectives on the process, gathered via interviews. Their writing is explored as a visible product of their learning, and as a creative-critical response to medieval texts: in particular, did the process of collaborative composition give the students a uniquely experiential insight into Old English poetic practice? Thus some broader conceptual issues in the fields Old English literary studies and translation studies are approached through teaching, learning, and creative-critical practice.

This article draws on a pedagogical case study in order to reflect on the value of using a Humanities disciplinary practice (the 'close reading' of literary studies) as a method of educational enquiry and to provide a worked example of this approach. We explore the introduction of a pedagogic strategy -students writing abstracts for essays and sharing them in advance of group discussion -into the tutorial at the University of Oxford, and an evaluation of it. We then read the student 'texts' (written abstracts and evaluation forms) more closely, to problematize the initial evaluation findings and reveal hidden aspects of student learning and the teaching relationship. We reflect upon our approach and suggest some of the difficulties and advantages of 'close reading' student texts while achieving scholarly 'distance' as a pedagogic research practice. In addition, we explore further the relations between social science and humanities approaches to educational enquiry.

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A publisher's error was made in the Acknowledgements in Helen Brookman's article for postmedieval 10.3 (Fall 2019), ''Accessing the medieval: Disability and distance in Anna Gurney's search for St Edmund.'' Dr. Marie Tidball's last name was misspelled. Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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