Join us for an interactive role-playing game session set in Renaissance York, featuring women printers operating in the city. This event is presented in collaboration with York Festival of Ideas 2025.
Use your power of imagination to bring to life York’s unique role in print history. Our interactive role-playing game session is set in Renaissance York and features women printers operating in the city.
Come along and discover how researchers from the Universities of York and Edinburgh are exploring how games use world-building to recover, complicate or reimagine local histories.
Suitable for ages 18+ and all experience levels. Please arrive five minutes before the start of the event.
About the game facilitators
Professor David Harper is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. He works on Renaissance and Restoration literature from a book historical perspective. His book, Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Criticism (Routledge, 2024) explores the impact of Milton’s epic on the development of English literary studies. He is also a letterpress printer in his Mischiefe Press.
Janet MacKinnon has been a Dungeon Master since 2013 and a player since 2005. She is a dabbler in many styles of nerddom: karate and fencing, cocktail and horror movie history, and writing, including some fan fiction but she won’t say where to find it. She works in Financial Services Technology as a Product Owner.
Dr Jane Raisch is Seniora Lecturer in Renaissance and Early Modern Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. She principally works on the reception of ancient literature in 16th- and 17th-century Britain and Europe, but also researches the reception of games and the history of Renaissance printing.
Dr Rae Rosenberg is a Lecturer in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a Ph.D. in Critical Human Geography from York University, and his work explores the contestations of living and forms of resistance amongst multiply marginalised LGBTQ2+ people, particularly through intersections with structures of racialisation, colonialism, and misogyny.