Reconstructing Early Medieval Churches in Schools
Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Panel 3 Reconstructing the Past
Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES) is a project developing a digital platform with a database, online exhibition and teaching materials on churches in Great Britain and Ireland before 1100 A.D. It is part of the larger Corpus Architecturae Religiosae Europae (CARE)-initiative. Thomas Pickles (Chester) examined in his paper the opportunities and challenges of digital reconstructions in the classroom, presented the web resource and the teaching materials developed from it and reflected on the relationship between the historical past and its digital recreation in the school context. With a clear mission of engaging educational stakeholders the researchers in this project co-created together with school teachers model course syllabi and study materials for schools. The research questions relied on textual, physical and onomastic evidence to allow the project members to get a clearer picture of how many types of churches existed, what their defining characteristics were, what chronology of church building and what regional patterns existed and whether these are genuine patterns or a result of a bias produced by the surviving evidence. Offering answers and bringing new source corpora of buildings, sculptures and names to the classrooms ECCLES makes the past accessible to pupils and is engaged on the crossroads of open education and open science.
Resources & Tools
- Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES)
- Corpus Architecturae Religiosae Europae (CARE)
Elisabeth Anna Tangerner, Tagungsbericht: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Perspectives and Challenges, in: H-Soz-Kult, 07.01.2025, https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/fdkn-152044. (conference report)
Karoline Döring: Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage. Perspectives and Challenges. Projekttagung über den Einsatz digitaler Methoden zur Erschließung von europäischem Kulturerbe, 19.–20. September 2024 in Innsbruck, in: Mittelalter. Interdisziplinäre Forschung und Rezeptionsgeschichte, https://doi.org/10.58079/13fn7 (general review).
For further information see the conference website.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Karoline Döring (June 19, 2025). Thomas Pickles, Early Christian Churches and Landscapes (ECCLES). VIRMA. Retrieved September 10, 2026 from https://virma.hypotheses.org/1466