The
medieval beasts collection

This is our very first collection. It takes inspiration from the curious blend of careful observation and wild imagination that shaped Medieval accounts of the natural world. This very often took the form bestiaries: manuscripts that document the animals, imagined or real, of the Medieval world. To these proto-Attenboroughs, the universe was a complex and fantastical design, and each animal endowed with secret meaning. 

 

Gaius Julius Solidus wrote of tawny colored Bulls that could run faster than birds. Guillaume le Clerc described Fire Stones that, if brought together, would burn down the whole world. Thomas of Cantipré thought that Plovers were birds that lived on nothing but air.

 

I chose these bestiaries as the inspiration for the first collection not only because of their spectacular illustrations, but because they show how what we imagine affects the world around us. They describe a delicate relationship between what is real and what we see.

 

Sewing —that ancient art by which, stitch by stitch, a lasting world is made — does the same.