On the 27th of April 2024, Eleanor Baker and I (Kristen) met at Oxford’s Vaults & Garden cafe to start scheming (image above taken from my comic diary). Laura Varnam joined in the scheming not long after. On Monday, the 7th of April 2025, the three of us launched the Guild of Medievalist Makers. Eight months (and so many Zoom-meeting-hours later), the Guild has grown beyond all of our earliest dreams and expectations, thanks in no small part to our enthusiastic, supportive, and brilliant Guild members.

As of the morning of my writing this post, eight months to the day since launch, the Guild has 101 members whose affiliations span more than 65 different academic, cultural and creative institutions (and a few oceans as well). Guild members work in a wide variety of creative mediums, including linocut, embroidery, creative writing (fictional and non-fictional), weaving, spinning, performance arts, calligraphy, music, crafting materials and more. Members write novels and poetry and humorous pieces, make comics and illustrations, record music, give performances, and more. (Is anyone doing research-informed cooking? We want to know!)

Our biggest initiatives this year have focused on connection and co-working. On our blog, we have shared eleven “Meet a Medievalist Maker” posts in which members are invited to introduce themselves and their work to readers, including a prompt to invite involvement and experimentation for those looking to try something new in their own practice. We have also hosted seven online co-working sessions, “Making Space”, in which participants met to set goals, spend an hour working in companionable silence, and report back on our experience. In what has been a shockingly busy year, there were months in which the “Making Space” session provided my single creative hour during a deadline crunch and I, personally, am so grateful for the camaraderie and support I felt during these sessions!

The Guild was not only active online: numerous in-person events also provided us with opportunities to share the Guild’s creation with colleagues. Laura represented the Guild at two conferences in June (the Middle Ages in the Modern World conference, at King’s College, London, and the Gender & Medieval Studies conference at Christ Church, Canterbury) and she co-ran the ‘Creativity in the Classroom’ workshop, with Catherine Clarke, at the “Chaucer our Contemporary” colloquium at the Institute of English Studies in London in October. The “Cartooning the Medieval” symposium held in June 2025 at Chicago’s Newberry Library also gave Kristen an opportunity to share the Guild with a number of US-based medievalists. After each of these events, new members joined the Guild. We are very grateful to Oxford Medieval Studies, part of Torch (The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities) for awarding the Guild a Small Grant to support the production of publicity materials and the running of our website for our first year.

We have big plans for the Guild in the coming year! We are planning to launch an online directory (accessible to members) in order to further collaboration and to encourage mentoring relationships between members. We will be hosting online craft workshops led by Guild members which will offer a more in-depth and hands-on experience of different creative-critical modes for fellow GuMMies. The Guild will also be hosting several creative-critical workshops in person at the New Chaucer Society congress in Freiburg, Germany in July of 2026.

Until then, why not catch up on any MMM posts you might have missed or go find a new prompt to play with?

MMM posts in order of appearance: