Published nearly seventy years ago, Richard Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages (1953) continues to inspire medievalists of all stripes. In the spring semester of 2022, students in Davidson College’s historical methods course HIS 207: Digital Medieval History read and studied this classic work using both traditional and digital methods. We began by reading and situating Southern’s work in the nearly century-old historiographical conversation over the “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century,” grappling with the views of Jacob Burckhardt, C. H. Haskins, R. I. Moore, Paul Freedman & Gabrielle Spiegel, and others. Taking our cue from Southern, who had synthesized the many changes sweeping Europe in the twelfth century as a movement “from epic to romance,” we next immersed ourselves in the worlds of the early tweflth-century epic poem, The Song of Roland, and in the late twelfth-century romances of Chrétien de Troyes. In a series of digital workshops, students then entered the Mathematica programming environment and used the Wolfram Language in order to study these texts with modern, computational methods of text mining, sentiment analysis, network analysis, and other practices of digital and distant reading. Working in teams, students finally developed their own original pieces of historical research about some aspect of the European twelfth century that interested them. We are proud to present the fruits of our work and research here.
A hat tip to Prof. Timothy Kircher at Guilford College, who at a 2017 workshop on digital text analysis at Guilford wondered out-loud what plotting sentiment curves of Arthurian legends would look like. That idea has stayed with and inspired me since then. Hopefully this webpage is the start of an answer!
– Jakub Kabala
jakabala at davidson dot edu
(updated Dec 22, 2022)
