Digital Medieval Studies—Practice and Preservation

In the last decade, the terms “digital scholarship” and “digital humanities” have become commonplace in academia, spurring the creation of fellowships, research centres, and scholarly journals. What, however, does this “digital turn” mean for how you do scholarship as a medievalist? While many of us would never describe ourselves as “DH people,” computer-based tools and resources are central to the work we do every day in offices, libraries, and classrooms. This volume highlights the exciting ways digital methods are expanding and re-defining how we understand, represent, and teach the Middle Ages, and provides a new model for how this work is catalogued and reused within the scholarly community. The work of its contributors offers valuable insights into how “the digital” continues to shape the questions medievalists ask and the ways they answer them, but also into how those questions and answers can lead to new tools, approaches, and points of reference within the field of digital humanities itself.

Laura Morreale is an Independent Scholar and teacher at Georgetown University. Her research considers the literary cultures of late medieval Italy and the Mediterranean. She was the 2020–2021 Chair of the Medieval Academy of America Committee on Digital Humanities and Multimedia Studies and is currently a member of the Digital Medievalist Executive Board.

Sean Gilsdorf is Lecturer on Medieval Studies and Administrative Director of the Committee on Medieval Studies at Harvard University. His research addresses the intellectual, religious, and political history of the early Middle Ages. He is also director (with Daniel Smail) of a forthcoming digital humanities resource for K-12 teachers, Medieval Object Lessons.