Getting Medieval: An Interview with Innkeep Contributor James Baillie

Hail and well met! How farest thou? Ahem. As you probably already know, Steam is hosting a medieval festival, and Innkeep is participating! This seems like a good opportunity to chat about Innkeep and things medieval with our narrative consultant and song writer, James Baillie. James is a bonafide academic medievalist, specialising in Byzantine and Georgian history, as well as a game developer, writer, and all-round creative type. He is the founder of the online creative community, Exilian, and also runs Coding Medieval Worlds, an ongoing yearly conference that brings together medievalists and game developers. When you’re encountering some particularly interesting lore in Innkeep, or listening to a cool song, there’s a good chance that James is behind it!

James Baillie with a bird friend.

Hi James! Could you tell us what medievalism actually is? What is a medievalist? Tell me what you get up to.

A medievalist (noun) is a fairly general term for people who work with or study the medieval in all its forms. Medievalism, though, and medievalist as its related adjective are a bit different: whereas medieval history is the study of what actually happened or was written down in the medieval period, when academics talk about medievalism we mean the ways that the medieval appears today, and the things we associate with the middle ages as an idea. So there can be things that are medieval but not used much in medievalisms (people often think of the medieval period as somewhat lawless and its lawgivers as brutally arbitrary leaders whose word was the only law, for example: in reality law codes and documents are some of the biggest segments of medieval evidence we have), and very un-medieval things that people today associate with the middle ages anyway (orcs in the way people think of them today, which are largely an invention of the later 20th century but are nonetheless a quintessential part of “medieval fantasy”).

As a medievalist I both study ‘actual’ medieval history (or at least, the traces and discussions about it we can have based on our surviving evidence) and also medievalisms today. My particular focus points are the medieval history of the Caucasus region, particularly the small country of Georgia, but also the ways in which computers and history interact. I work on databases and data structures for studying history and the ways in which our ideas about history get turned into those formats – which as well as academic database work also includes studying computer games, as one very common way that people today interact with medievalisms in computer formats.

A facsimile of the Khanmeti Lectionary, which was written in Old Georgian in the 7th century AD.

So what initially got you interested in the medieval period?

I was so young when I got interested first that it’s almost hard to say: I read books, especially historical atlases which I always loved, and I watched shows like Time Team and read books on mythology and visited castles with my family, so there was a fair bit mixed into my childhood. I played Civilisation II and Age of Empires I & II as a child, and the Total War games, which I think influenced how I think about history in quite structural, computer-represented terms and what we can do with that.

My more specific interests grew as a teenager when I went to a second hand bookshop and picked up Runciman’s The Fall of Constantinople, which is not fantastic history but is brilliant storytelling about the dramatic end