Brendan’s Voyage

Brendan’s Voyage: An Immersive Environment for Medieval Language and Culture is an immersive environment designed to allow the user to see, hear, and speak the medieval French dialect of Anglo-Norman while moving through the story of Saint Brendan the Navigator. The project emphasizes the link between the spoken and written elements of medieval French in a virtual, interactive, immersive learning environment based on a foundational literary text. Informed by empirical research, modern language pedagogy offers immersive learning experiences through study abroad programs or exclusive target-language use in the classroom. These techniques are not readily available for the teaching of medieval languages. Our project addresses this problem through the creation of a virtual immersive environment that allows the user to learn medieval languages as if they were inhabiting an authentic context. Critically, medieval languages were almost exclusively oral, given the extremely low literacy rates, and many of the literary works were rhymed, making pronunciation and orality an important part of understanding medieval written texts.

Please follow our project here:

While working on “Brendan’s Voyage,” we teamed up with Vanderbilt’s Data Science Institute to create an AI application to help translate back and forth from English and medieval French. Here is a link to the application we designed together (wake it up if necessary):

https://medieval-french.streamlit.app/

API key (temporary– please supply your own if inactive): AIzaSyBAq2lNA5uIC9Kn3bZJ8yPPZlQuSJVbyZ8

Please email feedback to Lynn Ramey. We’d love to hear about how you are using the game or translation app for your class or work.