MAFE was founded in early April 2020 by Sara McDougall, Laura Morreale, and Merle Eisenberg, three scholars of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The initial impetus behind MAFE was the widespread and urgent need for freely-available, quality resources that emerged as Covid-19 forced the great mass of the US’s students into remote learning; the response to MAFE was enthusiastic—over 25,000 people from around the world made use of the site in its first few months of existence alone.
In the summer of 2020, MAFE’s founders began conversations about a potential collaboration with Princeton’s Program in Medieval Studies and Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity. Subsequently, with the support of Princeton’s Humanities Council, MAFE’s entire website was re-designed and moved to university servers. Spearheading this effort were Jill Moraca and Robert Ivan and their team from Princeton Web Development Services.
The new MAFE website contains expanded offerings—course syllabi, resources, videos, tools, podcasts on late antique and medieval histories from East Asia over the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the North Atlantic, and more. Based on the tremendous impact and outreach of MAFE’s first incarnation, we anticipate that the new, expanded site will reach an even wider audience and hope that it will be useful to specialists and non-specialists alike.
Moving forward, we plan to continue working on MAFE, adding new materials and features. We hope that MAFE will become a one-stop shop for anyone—student, teacher, or interested non-specialist—who is curious about the rich human societies of the late antique and medieval worlds. We have some exciting ideas for new material we would like to add to MAFE and we welcome any ideas, projects, presentations, podcasts, videos, maps, resources, tools (or anything else!), that students, teachers, or other users of MAFE would like to suggest or add to the website.
For any questions or suggestions, please contact:
Laura Morreale: lmorreale3@gmail.com
Sara McDougall: sara.ann.mcdougall@gmail.com
Merle Eisenberg: merlee@princeton.edu
Jack Tannous: jtannous@princeton.edu
Helmut Reimitz: hreimitz@princeton.edu
We hope you enjoy MAFE!
