Medieval Storytelling
Medieval Storytelling: Textual Transmission East and West
Many scholars remain skeptical of the idea that the Islamicate world played a foundational role in the medieval French literary tradition. Even as one can point to vectors of movement including pilgrimage, crusade, merchant caravans, and itinerant performers, it is impossible to identify specific moments and locations when stories were told. This lack of data has historically been the cause of heated debates about questions of influence. Medieval Storytelling: Textual Transmission East and West proposes using computer simulations to model the ways that texts and ideas could have moved across geographical spaces, political systems, and religious and linguistic divides.
Under the tab “Be the Storyteller!” you can experience the storytelling process using Twine. Twine is an open-source tool that allows users to compose interactive narratives in the “choose your own adventure” style.
Additionally, our team is working on 3D immersive environments using the Unity game engine to create embodied experiences.
We have published on our goals and processes:
Amer, Sahar, and Lynn Ramey. “Teaching the Global Middle Ages with Technology.” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, 2018, pp. 179–91.
Heng, Geraldine, and Lynn Ramey. Immersive Environments and the Global Middle Ages: An Interview with Geraldine Heng. 27 Sept. 2017, https://my.vanderbilt.edu/games2016/interview-with-geraldine-heng/.
Ramey, Lynn, et al. “Revisioning the Global Middle Ages: Immersive Environments for Teaching Medieval Languages and Culture.” Digital Philology, vol. 8, no. 1, 2019, pp. 86–104.
Ramey, Lynn, and Rebecca Panter. “Collaborative Storytelling in Unity3D: Creating Scalable Long-Term Projects for Humanists.” Interactive Storytelling, edited by H. Schoenau-Fog, et al., vol. 9445, Springer-Verlag, 2015, pp. 357–60.
Ramey, Lynn, and Steven Wenz. “Immersive Environments for Medieval Languages: Theory and Practice.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 81, no. 2, 2016, pp. 93–111.
Featured Works
Play this interactive game where you become the storyteller of The One Thousand and One Nights tale of “Prince Qamar al-Zaman and Princess Boudour.”
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