What if we made a video game using the data gathered from the Atlas of a Medieval life project? It’s a simple question, but the answer stretches wide and far and in many directions like a system of a tree’s roots. Some might ask, “why make a video game of all things?” to which I would reply, “why not?” The goal here is to color in the pictures created by asking “what if” and then think about what those pictures might mean and signify. So, in other words, possibly creating a video game based on the data collected from the Atlas of a Medieval life project would allow us to meditate on how we in the present engage with the past on a more theoretical level.
… read moreStudent Research
Inventing Roger de Breynton via Leaflet Storymap
The totality of this semester’s work converged upon the rallying cry: “we have to invent him.” This semester’s work meaning intensive study in digital humanities, medievalism, and biography; him being 14th century Hereford-based ecclesiastical administrator, Roger de Breynton. Roger embodies an enticing number of paradoxes that make him worth studying. He is unremarkable in many ways. He is not among the rare number of medieval subjects for whom we may find preexisting biographical materials, illustrative contemporary sources, or his own personal writings. However, we have more than we would expect for someone of his stature, in his period. It is for this reason Breynton is an exceptional case but simultaneously a proverbial everyman.
… read moreReflections on the Life and Legacy of “Saint” Katherine of Ledbury
What makes a saint? For most of the Catholic church’s early history, the canonization process was ill-defined. In the early church, all saints were martyrs, agreed upon to be in heaven after dying for the faith. However, as the Byzantine empire adopted Christianity after the reign of Constantine in the early fourth century, this strict definition of sainthood became outdated; the new legal status of the Christian faith made holy self-sacrifice much rarer.
… read moreBishops’ Registers and Biography and DH: Oh my!
Or, The Uses and Limitations of Bishops Registers in Biographical Exploration Using Digital Humanities Methods
In Spring 2021, I worked on the Atlas of a Medieval Life project at the University of Texas at Austin. The aim of the project, according to its website, is to “explore the ways in which computational methodologies and data-visualization platforms can bring the medieval subfields of literary studies, cartography, and biography into fruitful dialogue.” This is a hefty task, one that necessitates imposing limitations in order to produce results. The scope of the project, then, is to focus on one man, Roger de Breynton. Roger (c.1290-1351) is described on the project’s website as “a historically obscure but widely-traveled and well-connected Canon of Hereford Cathedral.” In other words, he’s a professional man from the Middle Ages who shows up in a lot of Medieval documents, but little secondary scholarship. He was introduced to me as a jack-of-all trades sort who performed various functions and traveled quite extensively during his lifetime.
… read morePlotting the Land in Medieval Herefordshire
When I initially introduced myself to this course and its material, I had strong reservations about my place researching the life of a fourteenth century individual. While my academic background is varied and I have taken a few history classes set in the Medieval period, it was about eight years ago. My more recent work has been focused on the sacred landscapes of the Bronze Age in Greece and on digital applications in archaeology. At first glance, there are no obvious connections between Roger de Breynton and his world of Herefordshire, England and my current fields. Context is so crucial to archaeology that I found it difficult to conceive of a project, of doing work without the context of the world that Roger was living in. Luckily, over the weeks of applying the digital methods I am familiar with and learning new ones, I was able to come to the realization that landscapes are fundamentally the same. Sure, there are differences in soil, vegetation, topography and all sorts of other things, but understanding how people interact with the land is some kind of a universal truth.
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