The Immersive Global Middle Ages: Digital Humanities and Medieval Studies

This book demonstrates how virtual reality (VR) can be used to bring our modern, embodied selves to other places and times, real and imagined, in the Global Middle Ages, approximately 500-1500 CE. This book demonstrates how virtual reality (VR) can be used to bring our modern, embodied selves to other places and times, real and imagined, in the Global Middle Ages, approximately 500-1500 CE. The culmination of a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded program, this volume argues that collaboration, in both theory and praxis, is key to how we research and study the global digital past. Crucial to this study of the medieval globe is the “digital turn” in scholarship and application of digital humanities. These approaches implement immersive experiences, which are digitally constructed virtual reality worlds where a user can explore, evaluate, and contemplate the nature of life in places and times across the medieval world. Moreover, this book's contributors discuss the ways in which we can both create narratives and make arguments in a non-textual medium, which are nonetheless grounded in evidence from texts, from material culture, and from geography and environmental data.