Introduction: Contexts and Chronotopes

This introduction to the volume explains the origin of these essays, which began as papers given at a workshop to support the development of the Virtual Reality Oracle, which created a virtual reality experience of visiting the ancient Greek oracle of Dodona. An ancient Greek oracular site comprised an encounter with ‘unknowing’: the sanctuary was a space to which visitors brought questions concerned with many different areas of their lives. In that respect, we also drew a parallel with the experience of those who ‘visit’, as researchers, an oracle about which little is certain. The essay then reflects on this process of research, to consider how in examining the way our historical subjects engage with the affordances of their environments, we, in turn, as historians, ourselves engage with the affordances of our historical evidence, using Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope.