Matthew Greene
palmettoreport@gmail.com

(Rock Hill, S.C.) – Winthrop University hosted a number of medieval themed events over the past school year, which were intended to introduce students to European history from the Middle Ages.

Last month, the English Department hosted an event entitled “Interpreting, Not Just Processing: Medieval Maps, Multispectral Imaging, and the Future of the Humanities in Digital Humanities.”

The event, April 23, featured a guest lecture from Dr. Helen Davies, an English professor from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who uses multispectral imaging to recover lost history in old documents.

“We have images of medieval manuscripts that look like these books. In a dream world, as an English professor, I want to be in the library surrounded by these books. However, that’s not what most of our lives look like,” Davies told the group, in a video shared on social media. “Because time happened, a lot of the manuscripts have been dismembered.”

Thus, Davies, who works at the intersection of the humanities and technology, said using advanced imaging techniques can reveal hidden text or details in medieval maps and manuscripts, which can’t be seen by human eyes.

Last semester, faculty from the Medieval Studies minor hosted a Halloween-themed presentation called “Things That Go Bump In The Night,” which covered the supernatural in medieval culture.

The event came three years after the success of a Dracula-themed cultural event in the fall of 2022.

The presentation, in Kinard Auditorium Oct. 29, featured presentations from professors Kyle Sweeney, Jo Koster and Gregory Bell that took the audience back in time to medieval Europe.

“We wanted to do a Halloween theme and we weren’t bringing someone in outside of Winthrop University. So, we decided that we each would do part of the talk. We’ve done that before in the past,” said Bell, the coordinator for the Medieval Studies minor.

The presentations included portrayals of the devil in medieval art, ghost literature, and violence and cannibalism during the First Crusade.

“You can find demons at work torturing souls who were condemned to Hell and you would find them using tools and objects that were very much like you would see if you were a medieval person in a city,” said Sweeney, an art history professor.

The event was set and ready after announcements and promotions from the event organizers and their departments.

“We’ve done a lot of work on social media to promote (the event) and we’ve had 3,500 engagements with the reel, the animated Instagram reel, and we’ve sent out lot of individuals apparently,” said Koster, a Winthrop English professor who co-hosted the event.

* Editor’s note: Some of this reporting was originally done during the fall 2025 semester.