Visiting Religious Spaces in the Digital Realm: The MAVCOR Digital Spaces Project in Historical Context

Medieval and early modern Christians in Europe wishing to experience the holy sites in Palestine first-hand were presented with substantial barriers to their journeys: cost, family obligations, and distance made it difficult for many people—particularly for the poor, for cloistered religious, and for women—to make the long and arduous trip from their homes in Europe. In the fifteenth century real and perceived Ottoman hostility towards travelers traversing their territories rendered it even more challenging to reach the HolyLand.¹Although there were many popular pilgrimage shrines on European soil (for example, Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury Cathedral), no true substitute existed for travel to the holy sites of Palestine, both in terms of spiritual formation and in the plenary nature of the indulgences offered. Fifteenth-century Europeans responded to the challenges confronting them by developing “virtual” substitutes—mental pilgrimage using books and the imagination, and pilgrimage to artificial landscapes imitating the Holy Land in northern Italy. Today, religious practitioners and scholars of material religion have produced a wide range of digitalizations and virtual experiences of religious spaces that, similar to fifteenth-century virtual Holy Land pilgrimages, provide access to places that are otherwise inaccessible to their viewers.