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Introduction:
Sheila Bonde’s research brings together the approaches of archaeology, history, architectural history and spatial analysis. Her work has since 1982 involved the ongoing excavation of the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes in Soissons, France, and broader comparative work on the medieval monasteries of Ourscamp and Bourgfontaine. Her research considers not only the buildings of these monasteries, but also their landed domains, hydraulic resources and interactions with the larger urban and rural landscape. She has also published on the role of the individual within the monastic corporation, with early modern monasticism, and on the interactions between liturgy and architecture. She has worked extensively with computer graphic solutions for archaeological recording and architectural reconstructions, and with text encoding of monastic texts to create searchable databases for research. A new project, Mapping Monasticism, uses Geographic Information Systems to plot the landscape of medieval monasticism, by mapping the micro-landscape of one monastery, situating its lands, parishes and other dependencies. and placing this monastic "eco-system" into the larger regional and European context.
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