Tara Andrews

© Barbara Mair

In her ERC project, RELEVEN, Tara Andrews will examine how digital methods and datasets can reflect the ambiguity, multiplicity of interpretation, and difference of conclusion that are characteristic of historical sources, and help us to understand different narratives of what was "actually" happening in the decades leading up to the First Crusade. The project team will create digital models for expressing historical evidence that can accommodate not only the different types of evidence we have - textual, material, even logical or deductive - but also differences of opinion between scholars about what this evidence is telling us. The ultimate aim is to apply those models to get a better view of contacts and communication across the wider Christian world—and not just the medieval West—in the eleventh century, and in so doing to seek a re-balancing of our understanding of political, cultural and social trends that were "in the air" when the Crusades were launched.