Welcome to the Medieval Ideas Creative Lab, at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. The PI on this project is Professor Anthony Bale. The Lab is a new initiative to explore how the creative arts and creative industries might engage with medieval sources.

The Lab has a mailing list for announcements and events: please sign up here

Medieval Ideas Creative Lab GIPHY channel (in development)

Upcoming events

Creating medieval GIFs: From churls, scholars and fighting snails to contemporary images of human and artificial forms of intelligence with Dr Eleanor Dare. Workshop, 28 March 2026: details and booking here. There are likely to be future online iterations of this workshop.

Medieval Ideas Creative Lab Digital Artists’ Bursaries: the bursaries for 2025 have now been awarded. We will be updating this page in due course with the successful candidates’ creative journeys! The 2025-26 bursaries were awarded to Eleanor Dare, Henry Driver, Stephanie Amin and Mark Lotfy, Alistair Gentry, Alan Warburton, and Jane Glennie.

Past events

20th January 2026: Susan Maddock (Honorary Research Fellow, UEA; Ex-Principal Archivist at the Norfolk Record Office) on Margery Kempe. ‘”Free from their husbands”: Margery Kempe and other wives and widows in fifteenth-century Lynn.’ Stanley Library, Girton College, 5:30pm. All welcome.

15th-16th January 2026: Creative Medievalisms Now: Writing the Middle Ages Today and Tomorrow, symposium. Details and booking here

16th October 2025 – Telling Medieval Stories. Two spoken-word performances by Debbie Cannon (‘Green Knight’) and Lara McClure (‘Oral Tradition’). Details here.

30th January 2025, Julian Harrison (British Library), ‘Medieval Women and curating manuscripts in the 21st century’

11th November 2024, Anthony Bale in conversation with graphic artist Gareth Brookes

——————————————————————————————————-

Last updated 6 March 2026