Tag: medievalism

The Guild of Medievalist Makers

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29/07/2025

13:41

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In April 2025, the Guild of Medievalist Makers was launched, co-founded by Eleanor Baker, Kristen Haas Curtis, and Laura Varnam. The Guild was the grateful recipient of an Oxford Medieval Studies Small Grant in Trinity Term 2025 to support the launch of their website and to assist with publicity materials for their first two conference appearances this summer. In this blogpost, Oxford co-founders Eleanor Baker and Laura Varnam introduce the Guild and its activities.

The Guild of Medievalist Makers is a newly formed organisation for academic and academic-adjacent creatives and makers dedicated to furthering creative-critical practice in the humanities and making space for creative play.

The Guild’s founders are medievalists who make: Eleanor Baker is a linocut artist (who produced the cord in our Guild logo, more on that below!), Kristen Haas Curtis is a cartoonist and creative writer, and Laura Varnam is a poet. We founded the Guild in order to connect with other creative medievalists, to foster future collaborations, and to promote the burgeoning field of creative criticism in the humanities.

Our mission statement is embodied by the acronym CORD: Community, Outreach, Recognition, Development. Our website fosters Community by providing a dedicated and accessible online space for medievalist creatives to find each other and for academics who might be looking for creative partners to get in touch with us.

  • Finally, we support the Development of members’ creative-critical skills by running online and in person events, including co-working events and workshops, as well as maintaining an online bibliography of resources and scholarship.

This summer, co-founder Laura Varnam represented the Guild at two important conferences in Medieval Studies: the Middle Ages in the Modern World at King’s College, London (https://themamo.org/) and the Gender and Medieval Studies conference at Christ Church Canterbury (https://medievalgender.co.uk/2025-canterbury/)

Laura Varnam at the Guild stall at MAMO

At MAMO, Laura ran a stall advertising the Guild and she had chats with lots of delegates about their creative-critical work in medievalism. We’re very grateful to everyone who subsequently signed up to join the Guild at MAMO! (Our sign-up page is here: https://www.guildmedmak.com/join-the-guild)

Bunting (designed by Eleanor Baker), postcards, and Kristen’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale cartoon (https://hellomizk.com/comics/the-nuns-priests-tale/)  at the MAMO Guild stall

At the Gender & Medieval Studies conference, Laura also shared our newly printed Guild postcards and pin badges, and she advertised the Guild to delegates.

If you’d like to join the Guild please visit our website. And we’re very grateful once again to OMS for their financial assistance in launching the Guild!

The Netherhole Martyr – Dramatic Reading

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14/03/2025

05:44

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When? 2 May 2025, 6-8pm
Where? Old Library (drinks) and Crypt of St-Peter-in-the-East (performance)

Come one, come all! Prepare to worship the power of a good shit and marvel at the agonies and ecstasies of excrement!

The year is 1320 in the stinking town of Netherhole. A young nun feels the hand of God clutch her guts, an ambitious Earl issues a dangerous decree, and a ghost rises from the river. Doctors, priests and rumours descend and Netherhole’s fortunes are changed forever.

The Netherhole Martyr is a play recounting a year in the fortunes of the people of Netherhole, a Yorkshire town in the grip of religious fervour after a young novitiate enacts a painful communion with the divine through her constipated bowels.

This semi-staged reading of the play, held in the spectacular Crypt of St-Peter-in-the-East at St Edmund Hall, celebrates its recent publication by Strange Region Press. Written in shades of Donne and Swift, the text of this surreal and macabre work by Good Friends for a Lifetime is fully illustrated by Sigrid Koerner and Hannah Mansell.

The event is free to attend and no booking is required. Copies of the book will be available to purchase. The event will begin with drinks in the Old Library at 6pm, followed by a performance in the Crypt that will last approximately 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Maeve Campbell, Minna Jeffery and Lily Levinson are Good Friends for a Lifetime. They met on the MA Text and Performance at Birkbeck and RADA. Their first production, Shades of Mediocrity, about friendship, the cult of male genius and Simon & Garfunkel was performed at Camden People’s Theatre and the Old Red Lion. They were associate artists at Bathway Theatre, University of Greenwich, in 2021.

Strange Region is a publisher of experimental writing by artists, novelists and poets. They endeavour to use publishing as a tool to celebrate writing as performance, as architecture , as a mechanical component of creative practice and as a space to enjoy the perilous corners of the human experience. 

Medieval Afterlives Season Workshop

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04/12/2024

09:36

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Date: Tuesday 21 January, 13.00-14.00, with lunch provided from 12.30
Location: Colin Matthews Room, Radcliffe Humanities (and online via MS Teams)

As part of the preparations for annual ‘Cultural Seasons’ in the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, this is an invitation to brainstorm ideas for a Cultural Programme Season on Medieval Afterlives. From Oxford Medieval Studies, Prof. Marion Turner (English), Prof. Henrike Lähnemann (MML), Prof. Nancy Thebaut (History), and Prof. Elizabeth Eva Leach (Music) are already collaborating with the Cultural Programme on possible opportunities for the season and John Fulljames, Director of Oxford University’s Humanities Cultural Programme, is keen now to extend an invitation to others to join the conversation to explore and test the potential for the season and bring together researchers who could be involved in shaping and delivering it.
The focus of the season will be on contemporary creativity, while also centring Oxford’s extraordinary medieval resources where appropriate – our manuscripts, instruments, objects, architecture, and spaces. This season might engage with novelists, poets, musicians, graphic artists, puppeteers, playwrights, actors, composers, designers, children’s book writers, textile workers, cartoonists, computer game programmers, AI technology, and more.
We would like the season to be ambitious and international while also engaging grass-roots, local communities, especially schools and young people. It will be wide-ranging, inclusive, accessible, innovative, and fun. We also want to be open about the dark side of medieval appropriations in recent years, especially by the far right (see the previous TORCH OMS workshop on Medieval Studies and the Far Right), and to examine and counter these narratives. While we want to bring in high-profile writers and artists, we also want to celebrate the creativity of everyone, including students. The season would be likely to take place circa 2028.
One overarching question might be whether this kind of contemporary creativity is an end in itself, or a gateway to the medieval past. Please come along to this initial group meeting for all interested parties, which will be structured around the question: What has medieval research to do with contemporary creativity?

If you have something you would like to share or discuss in advance, please feel free to reach out to the researchers who are already involved or the Cultural Programme via Justine Shaw. Please RSVP to: Cultural Programmes with ‘Medieval Afterlives Workshop’ (culturalprogramme@humanities.ox.ac.uk) in the subject line by 7 January 2025.

Image: ‘Serenade to Chaucer’, a pop-up version of Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’ by Paul Johnson, runner-up of the Redesigning the Medieval Book competition by the Bodleian Library.