IT TOOK TIME—we took our time—to get medieval on Twitter, even in terms of the platform’s own abbreviated lifespan. We can date the beginning of the manoeuvre precisely, however. On January 7, 2014, some ten years after Twitter’s emergence on the scene, Dorothy Kim published a piece on the blog In the Middle. Kim offered guidance to medievalists on how, and why, they should engage on Twitter, in preparation for the impending Modern Language Association (MLA) conference. The advice, and associated analysis, was rooted in Kim’s own experiences of the platform. Her initial embrace of Twitter was decidedly reluctant: colleages at a digital humanities conference forced her to create an account. They had been “shocked” to learn that she was, thus far, Twitter-less; it was “more or less expected” that digital-humanities scholars had an account. It was not, at that time, “expected” for medievalists to be on the platform, not at all. Forcibly launched into the Twitter-verse, Kim observed the platform with an interdisciplinary eye, with the expertise of a scholar working across the digital humanities and medieval studies. The medievalist was forced to “get social” by getting on Twitter; so doing, Twitter itself had “gotten a medievalist.” “Getting medieval” on the platform was almost an inevitability.

Kim’s blogpost remains the most significant piece of medievalist scholarship on Twitter, not least because it functionally instantiated #MedievalTwitter. Though the hashtag had been used in a haphazard manner before this point, Kim was the first to articulate an ethics of activist medieval(ist) tweeting, generating for herself as an individual, and for the field more generally, a vision of what the digital space could and should be.