Remappings: Christians and Jews in Early England

Kathy Lavezzo (English, University of Iowa) and Lisa Lampert-Weissig (English, UCSD) are collaborating on a digital project entitled Remappings: Christians and Jews in Early England and an associated blog. As part of their Digital Bridges collaboration, Timothy Arner (English, Grinnell College) served as a pedagogical specialist and consultant, developing teaching materials that build upon the project. This project retells the story of Jewish-Christian interaction in medieval and renaissance England via maps, text, video and other media. Maps are a key part of the website, which seeks to combine the accuracy of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with the beauty of early cartography. Two undergraduate fellows, Katie Hitchcock and Alex Bradbury, researched a particular English city, Bury St. Edmunds. While Hitchcock investigated attitudes toward Jews in medieval Bury, Bradbury visualized Jewish habitation via mapping. Meeting with staff at the University of Iowa Library Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio produced a work plan that details future iterations of the project.

Timothy Arner was a participant in the 2015 Digital Bridges Summer Institute. Arner and Lavezzo’s work on this project with University of Iowa undergraduates Katie Hitchcock and Alex Bradbury was supported by a Digital Bridges Summer Collaborative Grant, in collaboration with Hannah Scates Kettler and Robert Shepard of the University of Iowa’s Digital Publishing & Scholarship Studio. During the summer of 2018, two Grinnell undergraduates, Joseph Robertson and Madeleine Brand-LaBarge, completed Digital Bridges-sponsored Mentored Advanced Projects in which they  researched and catalogued Middle English manuscripts that narrate stories of ‘virtual Jews.’ A third Grinnell undergraduate, Amaris Bates, also contributed to this research.