Sheila Bonde

The Virtual Monastery: Re‐Presenting Time, Human Movement, and Uncertainty at Saint‐Jean‐des‐Vignes, Soissons

The Wesleyan‐Brown Monastic Archaeology project (MonArch) integrates research results from standing remains, excavated material culture, and texts from the Augustinian abbey of Saint‐Jean‐des‐Vignes in northern France. The digital dimension of the MonArch project re‐presents the site through three‐dimensional reconstructions of its architecture, inventories of its material culture, and searchable encoded texts. The site employs a variety of strategies to engage the viewer/user in critiques of our knowledge representations. In this paper, we explore the ethical and analytic aspects of archaeological recording and present preliminary results of our work on representing time, human movement, and uncertainty.

Ground Penetrating Radar prospection at the charterhouse of Bourgfontaine

The charterhouse of Bourgfontaine was a major foundation, with approximately 24 brothers living in separate cells. An early modern birds-eye view of the monastery gives us a sense of its scale, but no details. Two GPR surveys (225 and 250 MHz) were carried out: the first, in the area of the chapel behind the church, the second, in a rectangular zone of 30 m × 50 m in the great cloister. All the data were processed as a 3D cube and the time slices corresponding to a depth varying between 0.7 m and 1.35 m give surprisingly clear evidence of regular structures. The superposition of the surveyed zone with a plan extrapolated from the engraved view is stunning, allowing for interpretation as three monastic cells and foundations of part of the great cloister. This is an excellent example of the ways in which geophysical prospection and archaeology can complement one another.

Centrality and Community: Liturgy and Gothic Chapter Room Design at the Augustinian Abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, Soissons

Square chapter rooms divided internally by four piers into nine bays are recognized here as centrally planned. The type seems to have been introduced in the mid-twelfth century, and to have predominated among the reform orders. A newly excavated chapter room of the nine-bay type at the Augustinian abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes in Soissons provides evidence of centralized decoration, as well as a central plan. The abbeys unpublished customary permits the analysis of rituals that exploited this central focus.

Construction–Deconstruction–Reconstruction: The Digital Representation of Architectural Process at the Abbey of Notre-Dame d’Ourscamp

Virtual reconstructions have a number of aims. The first is to model existing structures and to provide a visualization—often for public consumption—that allows viewers to experience movement in and around the building. The second—and quite different—aim is a three-dimensional examination of a structure, frequently one that has been destroyed. The reconstructions of the late Manfred Koob and his team at the Technisches Universität at Darmstadt, for example, have been one of the models for our work. They have produced analytic reinterpretations of the medieval church of Cluny III and have digitally reconstructed several partially-destroyed synagogues, like the one in Cologne (Figs. 1 and 2). The synagogue reconstructions harness information technology in the service of cultural memory. In this second approach, the researcher is literally “rebuilding” the structure anew. Despite their contributions, the two marvelous examples of 3D reconstruction in Figs. 1 and 2 present only single phases of Cluny and Cologne, and this is typical of much digital reconstruction work. Buildings, however, usually have multiple phases—what we might call “extended cultural biographies.” Our work in archaeology and architectural history has focused upon the aspects of a building that change through construction, deconstruction, and rebuilding. Information on the evolving nature of buildings is usually conveyed through phased plans like those that we have published for the abbey of Saint-Jean-des Vignes in Soissons (Fig. 3). A plan, however, flattens the kinds of information

The Digital Middle Ages: An Introduction

Our aims in this supplement of Speculum are frankly immodest. In organizing a series of sessions devoted to the digital for the Medieval Academy annual meeting in 2016, we hoped, by bringing together a diversity of projects, to showcase for the Academy membership the wide range of exciting possibilities afforded by digital humanities (DH). The papers gathered here are drawn largely from those sessions, with several additions. We want to acknowledge the contributions of Sarah Spence and William Stoneman, coorganizers of the sessions, for their inspiration and help. This supplement is the first issue of Speculum devoted to digital medieval projects, and it is offered in an online, open-access format that reinforces the openness to which the digital aspires and which it encourages.

Ecclesiastical Lordship, Seigneurial Power, and the Commercialization of Milling in Medieval England by Adam Lucas (review)

The study of medieval mills has long occupied the attention of medieval economic historians, archaeologists, and historians of technology. Adam Lucas builds on this long research tradition in his new study. He provides an extended historiography of the subject and yet is unafraid to challenge established opinion. He argues that the dominant explanatory models that cast the monastery as a cradle of beneficent technological innovation, or the mill as the tool of seigneurial oppression, can no longer be fully supported by the evidence. His work builds on that of his mentors, Richard Holt and John Langdon, but is not tied to their conclusions. By examining a wider range of monastic houses, and looking at a broader geographical area, he is able to ask fuller questions of the material than have his predecessors. Ecclesiastical Lordship focuses on the role of the mill in England from the eleventh through the mid-fourteenth centuries. Lucas reminds us that milling is one of the earliest forms of work to be mechanized and partially automated. Mills were used in England from the tenth century for a variety of purposes including grinding grain, fulling cloth, forging iron, and sharpening tools. Lucas wisely devotes a full three chapters to the necessary “background” to his study, and provides useful summaries of monastic foundation and land management strategies, feudal land tenure arrangements, and the evolving structure and profitability of English milling practices. The heart of the book (chapters 4 through 8) is devoted to case study examples, examining, in turn, episcopal mills and those of the monastic orders: the Benedictines, Augustinians, Cistercians, and the so-called “minor orders.” Two concluding chapters summarize the results of his research, examining legal procedures: disputes, tithes, and of course the “suit of mill” procedures that ensured seigneurial profits, and a comparative assessment of milling practices of houses of differing orders.

Making Choices: Ethical Decisions in a Global Context

Abstract The changing milieu of research—increasingly global, interdisciplinary and collaborative—prompts greater emphasis on cultural context and upon partnership with international scholars and diverse community groups. Ethics training, however, tends to ignore the cross-cultural challenges of making ethical choices. This paper confronts those challenges by presenting a new curricular model developed by an international team. It examines ethics across a very broad range of situations, using case studies and employing the perspectives of social science, humanities and the sciences. The course has been developed and taught in a highly collaborative way, involving researchers and students at Zhejiang University, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Brown University. The article presents the curricular modules of the course, learning outcomes, an assessment framework developed for the project, and a discussion of evaluation findings.

An evaluation of three methods for visualizing uncertainty in architecture and archaeology

This project explores the representation of uncertainty in visualizations for archaeological research and provides insights obtained from user feedback. Our 3D models brought together information from standing architecture and excavated remains, surveyed plans, ground penetrating radar (GPR) data from the Carthusian monastery of Bourgfontaine in northern France. We also included information from comparative Carthusian sites and a birds eye representation of the site in an early modern painting. Each source was assigned a certainty value which was then mapped to a color or texture for the model. Certainty values between one and zero were assigned by one subject matter expert and should be considered qualitative. Students and faculty from the fields of architectural history and archaeology at two institutions interacted with the models and answered a short survey with four questions about each. We discovered equal preference for color and transparency and a strong dislike for the texture model. Discoveries during model building also led to changes of the excavation plans for summer 2015.