The Temple of Mars

This project is an attempt to recreate depict the Temple of Mars depicted in The Knight's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer. This was done through reading various interpretations of the temple's descriptions as well as drawing from real Greek and Roman temples to construct something that wouldn't feel out of place in the story's settings and real life counterparts. The main focus I had was making sure that I captured key features that the Knight brings up in his description without going too far into the realm of tall tales and fantasy. The two main tools I used in the process of creating this were the video game Minecraft for the actual building of the temple and then Blender for rendering it nicely into a 3d model. In doing this, I hoped to go into two things. The first one would be to see how discourse regarding the temple's description have shaped our view of the tale as a whole and what goes into digitally constructing structures for archival purposes.

While the scope of this project specifically is small, focusing just on the Temple of Mars that Arcite prays in the night before his duel with Palamon, it may open up doors to continue work like this in the future.