Benjamin Zweig’s project, outlined in “Notes from the Field,” tracked the architecture and locations of religious structures in medieval Gotland. Zweig revealed an unequal number and type of structures across Gotland’s settlements, leading him to question the disparity’s cause. Are these structures representative of cultural traditions and geographic barriers between groups? Are we witnessing periods of architectural design spaced across Gotland? His project could change modern historians’ understanding of medieval Gotland’s cultures and practices, and it reminded me of another medieval digital humanist interested in mapping.
Dr. Nükhet Varlik of Rutgers University Newark presented her work on mapping the Black Death pandemic of the mid-14th century in a talk at OU last fall. Her book Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 responded to an overall lack of scholarship on plague in the Ottoman Empire before 1750. But, as she tracked the outbreak of plague spatially and temporally using historical records, she discovered trends of breakout and movement that reversed modern ideas about how and why the plague killed 30-50% of the Eurasian world. First, Dr. Varlik recognized that plague outbreaks up to 1517 spread from Europe to the East, not vice versa. She found that outbreaks consistently occurred about every ten years regardless of location. And, by mapping trade and communication routes onto these areas of plague outbreak, Dr. Varlik discovered that the growth of trade and urbanization contributed to more frequent and deadlier plagues in the Ottoman Empire, especially Istanbul. Her work demonstrates how essential spatial mapping techniques can be to humanist discoveries. Moreover, her book epitomizes the interconnection of disciplines, methods, and ideas that epitomizes the goals of medievalists and digital humanists.
There are more places to consider space and geography in the medieval world. Medieval O-T maps reveal that medieval peoples placed Jerusalem at the center of the world surrounded by Asia, Europe, and Africa. The boundaries of more complex maps are often adorned with suspicious-looking monsters, especially men with dog heads, and Christ looking down on the earth. Clearly, the way medieval peoples mapped revealed their beliefs about the world, including a fear of what happened at its borders. Though perhaps mapping is not the most effective technique to explore medieval concepts of geography, spatial research may certainly shed light on how conceptualizing space is one under-studied method of understanding culture.
Comments