From Parchment to Pixels: Building a Digital Research Resource for the study of Medieval Lived Religion in Sweden and Finland

This paper introduces and discusses the new research and educational resource Mapping Saints, built by the cultural heritage research and digitization project, Mapping Lived Religion: The Medieval Cults of Saints in Sweden and Finland (MLR), launched in November 2024. The goal of the project was to create a digital resource to enable new, interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the cults of saints, applying research-driven digitalization with a theoretical focus on “lived religion”. The project was also tasked with the digitization of two cultural heritage collections: the analogue card catalogue, Iconographical Index of Ecclesiastical Art in Sweden (Ikonografiska registret) at the Swedish National Heritage Board; and the collection of photographs of ecclesiastical art taken by Lennart Karlsson, held by the Swedish History Museum, and previously available as low-resolution images in the database The Medieval World of Images (Medeltidens bildvärld). The paper critically reflects on the creation of bespoke tools for research projects in the digital humanities in its discussion of the digital methods applied in the project, which are of importance to medieval religious studies, a long-established field. These include the foundation of the resource itself: the place register and spatial analysis of past phenomena, as well as the application of the principles of linked open data to ensure sustainability. The paper concludes by providing two concrete cases which show the usefulness of Mapping Saints for research into lived religion: the inclusion of altars as unique places and the analytical possibilities of identifying and mapping previously unknown medieval individuals.