“Meet a Medievalist Maker” is an ongoing series of blog posts introducing our members and the work they are doing. Each post is organized around our Four P’s: a project they are working on (or have completed but want to highlight); their process: medium, etc; a peek at their work: images or excerpt; and a prompt: instructions for a brief exercise they share to allow readers to experience/explore their process. Would you like to write a post introducing yourself and your work? Send us an email!
Process
I am a filmmaker, writer, actress and musician. I find myself drawn towards drama, character and language.
I’ve always been interested in adapting favourite books to screen and stage. I remember finding a copy of the production book of the BBC TV series of Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake as a teenager and thinking that drawing these stories into life seemed like the perfect career. In sixth form, I co-directed a performance of Old Times by Harold Pinter with my partner, Luke Walker, and later decided to study literature at King’s College London, with the idea of becoming a playwright. Whilst there, in addition to studying classical theatre, I took courses in modern experimental theatre and creative writing drama, which transformed my understanding of narrative and what could be achieved in adaptation. We were also encouraged to go and see as much innovative theatre and cinema as the city could offer.
Music has always informed my performance. When I was a girl, my speaking voice was noted as being quite low for my size and this stood me in good stead for being cast in lots of comic roles, witches and male roles. Highlights included being painted green to play the carnivorous, blues-singing plant in Little Shop of Horrors at secondary school and later a Korean prisoner of conscience in Another Sky for human rights charity PEN as an undergraduate. Trained on the piano and violin until age 14, I decided to put classical instruments aside for a long time. I took up guitar and bass and started singing in a school band, eventually going on to write and record music with Luke inspired by alt-rock as well as folk music of the 1960s. I found that my voice did not seem to stand the harsh belting treatment I had been subjecting it to and took singing lessons.
After my MA in Postcolonial and Global Literatures at Queen Mary University of London, where I focussed on the South East Asian novels of Marguerite Duras and Joseph Conrad, I considered pursuing doctoral study but struggled to specialise. I tried jobs in food writing, publishing, theatre and eventually settled on tutoring English and French as a trade. Luke and I began making simple music videos to accompany new recordings and he made a sound piece named Isaura/Armila about Venice for Cities and Memories, where I narrated excerpts from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. All this led to adapting the Book of Margery Kempe, almost as an accident, a story which I discuss under “Project”!
Needing to transform into Margery Kempe, I took acting classes with a brilliant teacher, James Kemp at Effort Productions, whose Character Analysis approach was developed by the Swedish coach Yat Malmgren of Drama Centre, when it was the only Stanislavskian school in London. Struggling with tension in my voice, I also began taking Bel Canto singing lessons with a wonderful opera singer, Barbara Maria Rathbone. Inspired by my neighbour (and soundtrack collaborator) at the Greenland Fishery, the composer and hurdy gurdyist Stevie Wishart, I have joined the King’s Lynn Minster Choir, with director Adrian Richards and early music singing teacher Andrés Hernandez-Salazar.
Even nearing the end of filming and approaching the soundtrack and edit, Margery continues to teach me. She releases unconscious, repressed processes and desires that previously seemed hidden in the body.
Project
For the last eight years I have been working with Luke on the first ever feature film based on the Book of Margery Kempe, Into The Mystic. It has become a hybrid film: part period drama, a three-act screenplay adapted from the Book of Margery Kempe; part documentary using footage of Margery Kempe, dressed in white, wandering around the period buildings in King’s Lynn without effacing any contemporary features.
This project started in 2018 with a desire to film a series of historical talking heads. Margery was first on the list as we both studied her Book as undergraduates. The footage of Margery talking to the camera about wearing only white clothes was so startling that we felt compelled to continue. We recorded me reading the first chapter as a radio drama. This developed into adapting key dramatic scenes for the screen, and we began recruiting friends as actors and crew on weekends. We focussed particularly on her interactions with Jesus, her arguments with her husband over a chaste marriage and her interaction with the old friend who propositions her on the way to St Margaret’s. Luke was interested in her visionary sequences and the questions raised over sickness and madness. I was particularly drawn to her conflicted desire and the problems she had with various men for reasons that were less clear to me at the time, but I can now see had their roots in my patriarchal family environment.
In 2024, after having shot a large proportion of the dramatic screenplay, the home in which we were filming was being sold. Through Norfolk Screen, I got in touch with Philip Eke - Senior Tourism Officer for the Borough Council of King’s Lynn and West Norfolk - to enquire about permissions for filming in Margery’s hometown. Doors were opened; local funding from a historical trust was secured. One thing led to another and, at the end of 2025, we relocated to King’s Lynn in order to finish shooting the screenplay and incorporate new, documentary-based footage of Margery in contemporary Lynn, which suited the episodic, non-linear, visionary quality of her narrative. Along the way, many talented volunteer crew from London as well as local graduates and students have joined us, on and off screen. Starry names include my former lecturers Professor Bob Mills as a vision of Richard Rolle and Dr Sarah Salih as Brigitte of Sweden, as well as Anwen Hurt as Margery dictating her autobiography to Professor Anthony Bale as Margery’s scribe.
We have been fortunate to have been platformed by the academic Margerine community, including Dr Sarah Salih at the Interdisciplinary Seminar on Medievalism in 2024 and MAMO 2025, and invited to deliver a keynote for Dr Laura Varnam’s 2026 Gender and Medievalism Conference at University College, Oxford, with the co-founder of the Margery Kempe society, Dr Laura Kalas. Happily, we have also been invited to present trailers at several local public heritage organisations in Lynn including True’s Yard Fisherfolk Museum, the Lynn Museum, King’s Lynn’s Heritage Open Day and their wonderful annual medieval Hanse Festival.
Peek
These images are two stills from the in-progress film.
Prompt
Take a scene from one of your favourite medieval texts that focusses on an interaction or dialogue between two people.
Start by describing the setting with stage directions, as in a script or screenplay. Think about the time and place and what characters are wearing.
Write out the key parts of the dialogue between the two characters in script form.
Next, then think about how they arrived at that point in time and where they will be going immediately after.
Fill in details that the text does not include. Extend the scene out before and after your main interaction, add in more physical details, add in more dialogue.
Recommended reading
Bale, Anthony, Margery Kempe: A Mixed Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)
Howes Hetta, Transformative Waters in Late Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Mills, Bob, Derek Jarman’s Medieval Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Salih, Sarah, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Varnam and Kalas, Laura and Laura, eds., Encountering the Book of Margery Kempe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021)
Social Media
Instagram: @mirabelledominewalley
Bluesky: @mirabelledomine.bsky.social
