The Medieval Letters
Essays on medieval history, culture, and the written world
About
The Medieval Letters is a digital humanities project exploring how the medieval imagination endures within modern thought, culture, aesthetics, and identity. It asks how medieval texts, objects, and ideas continue to shape the ways we understand ourselves – not only in scholarship, but in popular culture, political language, visual media, and the stories contemporary societies tell about their pasts.
The project also began as a challenge to a familiar misconception: that between 400 and 1500, the world outside Western Europe and the Mediterranean was static or marginal. By drawing on materials from the Iranian world, the Sahara, the Silk Road, South Asia, and beyond, The Medievalist Letters highlights a medieval past that was far wider, more interconnected, and more intellectually dynamic than its popular reputation suggests.
Written by a humanities student based in Wales, the series examines where the past resists simplicity: from archaeology and belief to language, materiality, and the politics of interpretation. Many essays consider how encounters with premodern worlds illuminate present-day questions of ethics, identity, authorship, and power. Others explore feminism, modern culture, and even current affairs through the lens of historical thinking – treating the medieval not as an escape from the present but as a framework for understanding it.
The project sits at the intersection of history, philosophy, and literary criticism, informed by material culture studies and the intellectual history of the humanities. It treats interpretation as both a moral and creative practice – a way of connecting scholarship to lived experience and positioning medieval studies as a field of broader cultural reflection.
Alongside longform essays, shorter reflections trace the daily work of a humanities student: reading, writing, and learning how to think. Together, they form a record of inquiry – a modern commonplace book where academic rigour meets curiosity, and where the medieval past becomes not a distant object but an active, continuing conversation with the present.
Get Involved
The Medieval Letters is a space shaped by curiosity, conversation, and the shared work of thinking with the past. If you’d like to take part in the project, there are several ways to join in:
Share a Thought
If an essay sparks an idea – a question, a connection, a disagreement – you’re welcome to write in. Thoughtful exchanges help the project grow, and often lead to new avenues of research.
Suggest a Topic
Is there a medieval object, story, theme, or modern cultural moment you’d like to see explored? Suggestions are always welcome, whether they come from academic interest, personal experience, or simple curiosity.
Collaborate
The project occasionally hosts guest reflections, especially from those working in history, literature, language, feminism, material culture, or digital humanities. If you’re interested in contributing a short piece, get in touch.
Support the Work
If you enjoy the essays and want to help sustain the project, sharing it with a friend, colleague, or fellow reader is one of the most meaningful ways to support it.
Subscribe
If you’d like to follow the project more closely, you can receive new essays and shorter reflections directly in your inbox. No algorithms, no noise – just occasional dispatches on medieval texts, modern culture, feminism, and the afterlives of the Middle Ages.
Subscribing is free. You’ll hear when a new piece appears, when a thread of research develops, and when the project experiments; from audio readings to visual notes from the archive.
Latest Essays
About the Author
My name is Eve, and I’m a history student from Wales interested in early medieval cross-cultural contact.
I started The Medievalist Letters because I’ve come to feel that the way we are taught to study the past can be too narrow – that meaningful understanding often emerges not from a single discipline, but from the conversation between many.
Medieval Letters 