Editors’ Choice: Virtual Paul’s Cross Project

A Digital Re-Creation of John Donne’s Gunpowder Day Sermon

The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project helps us to explore public preaching in early modern London, enabling us to experience a Paul’s Cross sermon as a performance, as an event unfolding in real time in the context of an interactive and collaborative occasion. This Project uses architectural modeling software and acoustic simulation software to give us access experientially to a particular event from the past – the Paul’s Cross sermon John Donne delivered on Tuesday, November 5th, 1622.

These digital tools, customarily used by architects and designers to anticipate the visual and acoustic properties of spaces that are not yet constructed, are here used to recreate the visual and acoustic properties of spaces that have not existed for hundreds of years.

Explore the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project

This content was selected for Digital Humanities Now by Editor-in-Chief Jeri Wieringa based on nominations by Editors-at-Large: Anu Paul, Christa Vogelius, Guinevere Barlow, Heather Froehlich, Paige Morgan, Sarah Canfield Fuller, Sarah Ketchley, Subhasis Chattopadhyay, and Ted Underwood