This article explores the Middle Ages as a creative “topic,” examining how personal encounters with medieval places, objects, texts, and histories can generate creative as well as scholarly engagement. Drawing childhood experiences, public history, and translation together with creative non-fiction, it argues that medieval scholarship is enriched by acknowledging the speculative and creative dimensions of reconstructing a fragmentary past. The article considers creative non-fiction as a mode of historically grounded enquiry that combines research with narrative, description, uncertainty, and perspective. It proposes creativity not as an alternative to scholarship, but as a productive extension of it.
