The New Middle Ages

In recent decades the concept of Mediterranean has been cited with increasing frequency in relation to the study of medieval literatures. And yet, in what sense would Dante’s Comedy be ‘Mediterranean’? Is it because of its Greek-Arabic and Islamic sources? Dante and the Mediterranean Comedy analyzes the ideological function of references to the sea in the study of the Comedy undertaken by Enrico Cerulli, a scholar of Somali-Ethiopian languages, and a colonial governor of ‘Italian East Africa.’ Then it presents novel lines of inquiry on the reception and appropriation of the poem, such as the presence of Islamic sources in early commentaries of the Comedy, and cross-cultural allusions to Dante’s Hell in some graffiti on the walls of the Spanish Inquisition prison in Palermo. The image of the Mediterranean that seeps through the poem and through the history of its circulation is vivid yet hardly idyllic.

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.