ABSTRACT
Increasingly, students, scholars, and an educated global public demand digital representations of the past as well as an interactive relationship with history. However, as scholars of the European Middle Ages, we question how medieval notions of time, space, and human relationships can be integrated with modern desires for immediacy and connectivity. In this essay we look at two projects affiliated with the Global Middle Ages Project that deal with questions of medieval and modern uses of space. In the first project, Brendan’s Voyage, a fictional space is imbued with spiritual meaning. Users must understand possible differences between medieval and modern notions of place, space, and agency before they can complete the challenges presented in the game narrative. In Virtual Plasencia, the embodiment of the user in an historical avatar in a multi-user environment allows for understanding the complex relationships facilitated and necessitated by the sharing of space by citizens of different religious affiliations.
