This digital humanities project will be an interactive online experience where the audience can view original manuscripts, transcripts, translations, contextual essays, and artistic representative, allowing for a more complex and complete vision of the medieval past. By focusing on a set of crime narratives from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France, the website will approach medieval legal documents as microhistories, understood in depth as individual narratives and related to wider themes in medieval history. It will explore the wider context of these narratives, the physical spaces and the material culture represented. What did medieval marriage practices entail? How was a typical medieval urban home laid out? When a person reached for the knife carried to cut bread or the stick used to trim the vines, what would that object look like?
A team of students from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas developed their skills in Computer Science, Historical Research, and Art through creating this website.