In keeping with the 2020 Annual Meeting’s innovative call for “a fuller array of approaches, methodologies, topics..and themes,” we propose an experimental session that would link a “formal session” of three conference presentations and scholarly commentary with a poster presentation to merge two strands in the study of medieval Mediterranean history: research on medieval Sicily and the contribution of digital humanities to the study of maritime violence. We believe that combining these approaches will contribute new insights to the appreciation of Sicily's critical role, through the centuries, as a site for geo-political struggle and inter-confessional exchange.

Our scholarly focus will be the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282-1302), a conflict which we will argue should be esteemed as equal in importance to the Hundred Years War (1336-1453) for its transformative impact upon maritime aggression; historical writing; and narrative imagination. In “The Continuum of Violence in the Mediterranean World: The Sicilian Vespers,” Kathryn Reyerson, Distinguished University Teaching Professor in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota, and John Manke, Doctoral Candidate in Western European Medieval History at the University of Minnesota, will trace the varying manifestations of maritime violence, from unbridled maritime theft (piracy) to rationalized, institutionalized maritime aggression, graphed through a series of “story maps” that will augment the findings of traditional textual and document research by applying ArcGIS mapping technology. “In Creating the 'Communitas Siciliae' in the Post-Vespers Years,” Clifford Backman, Associate Professor of History at Boston University, will consider the War of the Sicilian Vespers as a catalyst for a new understanding of Sicilian cultural identity as unique, crafted from a multi-confessional heritage and affirmed in an indigenous historical literature. In “Ghosts of Admiral Roger: Piracy and Political Fantasy in Tirant lo Blanc,” Emily Sohmer Tai, an Associate Professor of History at Queensborough Community College, CUNY, will discuss the way in which the historical experience of the War of the Sicilian Vespers became a lens through which the authors of the fifteenth-century Catalan epic novel Tirant lo Blanc understood the cross-confessional conflicts of their own day. The session will be chaired by Marie Kelleher, Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a distinguished historian of medieval Iberian culture and piracy. Comment will be offered by Dr. Keheller and Abigail Mullen, Research Assistant Professor of History at George Mason University's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media who will consider Reyerson and Manke’s story map in the context of an emerging methodology of digital mapping in the study of Mediterranean warfare. A follow-up poster session, which has been separately submitted, would make Reyerson and Manke’s “Story Map” available to faculty interested in applying ArcGIS mapping technology in their own teaching and research.