ARMA -The Art of Reading in the Middle Ages was a Europeana Generic Services project co-funded by the European Union under the Connecting Europe Facility Programme. Running from 1 October 2020 to 31 August 2022, the project aimed to support European cultural heritage institutions by giving digital access to new medieval objects through Europeana. It also explored how these digitised items could be used in the classroom to demonstrate how reading culture in the Middle Ages became a fundamental part of European heritage.
A trove of manuscripts… and more
The project had to face challenges brought about by the global COVID-19 pandemic, including limited access to digitisation rooms and the need to shift to online collaboration. Despite the limitations brought by the pandemic, the project exceeded its goals for digitising new medieval manuscripts, as well as for creating editorials and curatorial activities.
Seven cultural heritage institutions provided over 34,000 new digital versions of medieval manuscripts, printed books and coins to Europeana and updated and enriched another 31,000 items already available through the Europeana website. These new collections fed into 40 published pieces of editorial, double the 20 originally planned.
The centrepiece of that work is ‘The art of reading in the Middle Ages’, an online exhibition published in October 2021, which was one of the most popular exhibitions launched on Europeana website last year. Through six chapters, the exhibition told the stories of reading in monasteries, courts, cities, language, bookpaths and universities of medieval Europe. The exhibition is available in English, Dutch, French, German, Czech and Slovenian.
Project partners also curated a feature page about the Middle Ages on the Europeana website. This space consists of themed galleries, blog posts and digital content which correspond to the focuses of the main exhibition. The page also highlights educational material (videos, learning scenarios) and encourages the audience to browse manuscripts based on the century. It serves as an entry point for Europeana’s audiences to all of the editorial which explores the Middle Ages and hopefully will be used by future projects exploring similar topics.
Project partners recognised the importance of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF): a set of open standards for delivering high-quality, attributed digital objects online at scale. It is an important protocol to share and use digitised images in high quality, and particularly valuable for analysing manuscripts. Still, it is not yet widely implemented across cultural heritage institutions in Europe. The project provided recommendations to other institutions on how to enrich or optimise their digital services with tools that make use of the IIIF protocol.
Bringing the Middle Ages into education
The ARMA project worked with curators and educators to design inspiring and innovative learning materials using digitised medieval manuscripts. The project targeted primary and secondary and post secondary students with age-appropriate materials, contributing an impressive suite of educational resources in different formats (learning scenarios, videos, blogs and interactive games) to enable the usage of the digitised medieval items in the classroom.
The learning activities aim to engage students and educators by bringing together the most relevant collections of manuscripts and objects and allow for interpretation and understanding of medieval reading culture. You can see one of the games the project developed for primary school students below; it encourages them to learn about medieval coins through an interactive online activity. They then create their own coins, imagine and map their own land, and use their coins to trade resources with their classmates.
The project also facilitated the creation of an expert group, consisting of curators and educators from the partner countries. The group discussed best practices in the use of web resources for teaching with medieval manuscripts, and collecting and communicating educational resources available on the internet. This resulted in a series of recommendations for heritage institutions and curators, as well as for educators. This knowledge exchange will be continued and the working group hopes to expand its network to strengthen the position of medieval cultural heritage in an educational context.
Additionally, project partners produced a four-part video series, to share information about the ARMA project and show more sophisticated ways to find the medieval items, editorials and learning scenarios that were created in the course of this project. The first video introduces the ARMA project, outlines what has been done, and demonstrates where you can find the editorials. The second shows educators how to browse for medieval manuscripts in Europeana and shares tips and tricks for searching medieval manuscripts in detail. The third video offers a short introduction to the resources that were made for primary education and shows how they can be used in the classroom. The fourth and last video provides more information on the educational resources developed for secondary education.