Through a multidisciplinary collection of case studies, this book explores the effects of the digital age on medieval and early modern studies. Divided into five parts, the book examines how people, medieval and modern, engage with medieval media and technology through an exploration of the theory underpinning audience interactions with historical materials in the past and the real-world engagement of a twenty-first century audience with medieval and early modern studies through the multimodal lens of a vast digital landscape. Each case study reveals the diversity of medieval media and technology and challenges readers to consider new types of literacy competencies as scholarly, rigorous methods of engaging in pre-modern investigations of materiality. Essays in the first section engage in the examination of medieval media, mediation, and technology from a theoretical framework, while the second section explores how digitization, smart technologies, digital mapping, and the internet have shaped medieval and early modern studies today. The book will be of interest to students in undergraduate or graduate intermediate or advanced courses as well as scholars, in medieval studies, art history, architectural history, medieval history, literary history, and religious history.

The essays collected in this volume address the digital humanities’ core tensions: fast and slow; surficial and nuanced; quantitative and qualitative. Scholars design algorithms and projects to process, aggregate, encode, and regularize historical texts and artifacts in order to position them for new and further interpretations. Every essay in this book is concerned with the human-machine dynamic, as it bears on early modern research objects and methods. The interpretive work in these pages and in the online projects discussed orients us toward the extensible future of early modern scholarship after the digital turn.

"Digital Pedagogy in Early Modern Studies: Method and Praxis is a collection of essays that focus on teaching at the intersection of early modern literature, book history, and digital media. The essays in this volume consider how teaching different fields and methods of study can be enhanced and facilitated by digital technologies. This volume provides a snapshot of current thinking on digital pedagogy as practiced by leading scholars in the field and offers a series of models that may be adapted, personalized and repurposed by future teachers"--

Digital technologies are changing the way in which we can understand and analyse history and its associated artefacts. The aim of this book is to encapsulate the potential that digital technologies pose for medieval material culture, providing examples of leading projects worldwide which are enabling new forms of research in this area. The text aims to provide a broad overview of the type of tools now used by historians--such as text encoding, digitization, and visualization--and juxtaposing these with core concerns from historians investigating particular research questions. It draws together a key body of research in this area, demonstrating how digital tools and techniques can aid in changing our understanding of the past.

Examining the history of altar decorations, this study of the visual liturgy grapples with many of the previous theoretical frameworks to reveal the evolution and function of these ritual objects. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book uses traditional art-historical methodologies and media technology theory to reexamine ritual objects. Previous analysis has not considered the in-between nature of these objects as deliberate and virtual conduits to the divine. The liturgy, the altarpiece, the altar environment, relics, and their reliquaries are media. In a series of case studies, several objects tell a different story about culture and society in medieval Europe. In essence, they reveal that media and media technologies generate and modulate the individual and collective structure of feelings of sacredness among assemblages of humans and nonhumans. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, early modern studies, and architectural history.