By Thomas Maurer

History Department, Ave Maria University, Florida

Introduction

This VR tour helps you imagine what life would be like in a castle in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. The tour highlights various aspects of life in a castle: it is not just a place to hide in, to attack or to attack from, but is both a private dwelling and the center of a community. The tour utilizes a digital model of Kilcolman Castle, County Cork, Ireland, an Anglo-Norman castle built in the early fifteenth century CE. Kilcolman is most famous for being inhabited in the early modern period by the English colonial poet and administrator Edmund Spenser (1554?-1599), who occupied it in the 1590s as part of the so-called “Munster Plantation.” For more on Spenser, colonial settlement at Kilcolman Castle and the digital model used here, see the website Centering Spenser: a digital model of Kilcolman Castle. Additional teaching modules in VR based on the castle model have been developed as part of the Castle to Classrooms project, found here.

The Castle, Reimagined (access in WondaVR “Spaces” application)

Instructions

This module can be run on your VR headset or on your computer. The module is navigated using hand-controllers with your VR headset. If on the program on your computer, click-and-drag using the mouse/touch pad. Visitors can explore the various rooms of the castle compound sequentially, station by station, or they can use the Index to go directly to different station locations. Use the Plan of Buildings link for plans and cross-sections of the castle compound. Click here to view detailed diagrams of Kilcolman castle.

Credits

The narrative of this module was written by Thomas Maurer in 2022. It was subsequently produced by Doug Barnum with the assistance of Anna Bradley at East Carolina University with the help of Castle to Classrooms, a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities (2020-2022), Castles to Classrooms. All rights to the digital castle model are copyright East Carolina University.