Mapping the Global Middle Ages, 1000—1400 CE, a collaborative digital mapping project created by students in Prof. Kopta’s course Art of the Global Middle Ages in the Art History Department at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, is now live!
Explore the project here: https://arcg.is/19DW1e1
Framed as “A Modern Pilgrimage of the Middle Ages,” the project works to challenge fantasy-driven images of premodern culture and instead foregrounds movement, encounter, devotion, and exchange across a genuinely global world. By expanding the concept of pilgrimage beyond a Western Christian framework, the students reimagined how premodern viewers and modern audiences might navigate networks of trade, belief, and intellectual life spanning continents.
Through digital mapping, the exhibition shows how objects that appear unrelated in isolation come into focus as part of interconnected global systems. The result is a compelling model for teaching and visualizing an inclusive art history, and for using digital tools to rethink periodization and geography.
This project was developed by TJ Bowers, Mia Garay, James Harbison, Henry Lawrence Hess, Audrey Esty Howerin, Arianna Jordan, Said Manuel Nunez Lopez, Ilse Smith, Emma Vanderbilt, Emma Julia Wahlers, Clay Whelan, and Ashley Yeboah. Works draw from collections including the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania Libraries, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and beyond.
