Abstract
This introduction defines crumpling the timeline as a classroom practice in which instructors and students explore medieval texts alongside twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century works. In this special issue, some contributors describe teaching strategies that pair premodern literature with overtly “medievalist” contemporary works. Other contributors engage students in analyzing themes, questions, and rhetorical strategies found both in medieval texts and in more recent works that do not explicitly invoke the Middle Ages. Developments within medieval studies as a field necessitate new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between the present and the past. Often surprised by the common ground between medieval preoccupations and our own, students embrace the opportunity to incorporate their own cultural expertise into classroom conversations.
Crumpling is an undignified and potentially destructive act. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the obsolete verb crump denoted the relatively sedate act of bending or curving. But its diminutive, crumple, connotes a bit of a mess: it can mean to “ruffle,” “to wrinkle the smooth surface of” or “to crush in an irregularly folded state.”1
Perhaps, though, it can be productive sometimes to get rid of smooth surfaces? A crumpled piece of paper can be tossed up in the air or batted around in a game; it can be unfolded and colored over, with the wrinkles adding texture and interest.
Accordingly, this special issue reflects our desire to rumple, squash, and generally play around with the boundaries separating the medieval from the “modern,” and students’ expertise from our own. The results of this process can be slightly messy and extremely productive. Our contributors demonstrate this by describing creative textual pairings and teaching methods that take medieval texts out of their conventional time frame (roughly 500 – 1500 CE) and place them in direct dialogue with more recent works. Generated during an exceptionally lively and informative panel at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in May 2022, these pedagogical strategies represent important new directions for medieval studies pedagogy and humanities instruction generally. Our contributors propose ways to make medieval works less intimidating to students; to generate discussion about genres, tropes, and poetic form; and to tap into the knowledge and experiences that students bring to our classrooms.
Some contributors engage with “medievalism” per se: that is, new presentations of material directly associated in the contemporary imagination with the medieval period. Exploring games, films, social media, and literary texts across a wide range of genres, “medievalism” studies have accumulated a long history of insightful analysis. Simply keeping up with the sheer volume of medieval-themed material being generated by contemporary creators poses a pressing challenge to the field.2
Many of the strategies described in this special issue, however, address slightly different questions: What happens if we crumple things a bit? What if we (at least temporarily) stop thinking about the medieval-ness of a text from the premodern period? What might happen if we explore the common ground between a premodern text and a contemporary work that does not invoke the medieval period in any obvious way? As we shall see, our contributors engage students in considering themes, visual representations, and rhetorical moves shared by works drawn from different times and places. In this way, they broaden the range of questions and practices we bring to our work in the field and help our students think about the medieval period in terms of continuity, not just difference.3 In short, they crumple.
Taken together, our contributors’ ideas represent a teaching-centric response to an important development in medieval studies: many scholars challenge traditional views of the period as a “stable spatiotemporal realm” (Davis and Altschul 2009: 7) existing at a comfortably far-off distance from our own time.4 A particularly influential clarion call was sounded by Carolyn Dinshaw's (2012) How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time, which encourages readers to embrace strange and intriguing connections between our era and the past, in the interest of generating a “more just and more attached nonmodernity” (39) and creating ties between the work of scholars and those outside the academy.
The need for such community building and reframing of scholarly work has only grown more urgent in the subsequent decade. In the wake of the global pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent civic responses, attacks on trans rights, and increasingly blatant far-right violence, many students are acutely aware that the passage of time does not necessarily bring positive change. We seek to connect students’ own insights with important work that notes the cross-chronological impact of racialist, colonialist, and ableist ideas. Geraldine Heng (2018) sketches out a methodology for this work in her groundbreaking study The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Instead of focusing on generalities about a particular time period or practice, her work explores “particular moments and instances of how race is made, to indicate the exemplary, dynamic, and resourceful character of race-making under conditions of possibility, not to extract repetitions without difference” (33). According to Heng, these race-making moments emerge “nonidentically and unevenly, in different places and at different times” (33). A crumpled timeline serves as one metaphor for thinking about racialized ideas and practices that recur in repetitive, forceful, irregular ways. These include conflicts within medieval studies itself, such as the controversy and backlash attending BIPOC scholars’ efforts to steer the field away from using the term Anglo-Saxon, given its past and ongoing use within white supremacist discourse (Rambaran-Olm and Wade 2022). In addition, many of our contributors describe crafting their teaching strategies in response to the disruption, isolation, and loss wrought by the pandemic. Which of those triage-era methods are worth retaining into the future? We should investigate the traces of these recurrent and unresolved questions alongside our students, rather than hastily smoothing them over in the name of content coverage or simplicity.
Guidance from educational theorists can be helpful in developing a crumpled approach to teaching medieval studies. Gloria Ladson-Billings (2021), for example, provides a powerful argument for not rushing to reestablish “normalcy” in the post-2020 era: “Normal is where the problems reside” for many students in our educational system (68). Instead, she advocates for “culturally relevant pedagogy,” which values three main objectives: demonstrable academic growth in students, not simply the coverage of material; cultural competence, in which “students are secure in their knowledge and understanding of their own culture—language, traditions, histories, culture and so forth, AND are developing fluency and facility in at least one other culture” (71); and sociopolitical and critical consciousness, in which instructors work alongside students to “read both the word and the world” (72). While Ladson-Billings focuses primarily on school-age children, her ideas also provide a blueprint for a more crumpled dynamic in higher-ed classrooms. If we regard medieval works not as a stable fund of cultural capital that we need to deposit in students’ minds, but as a set of questions and ideas that might be placed in dialogue with other traditions, then we are working on cultural competency. If we encourage students to question the assumptions and biases that have shaped a Western-centric narrative of progress toward modernity, then we are developing their—and our—critical consciousness.
Of course, these practices challenge not just our definitions of medieval, but also our assumptions about what it means to be a medievalist. Our professional training has great value, but we cannot position ourselves as the only experts in our classrooms. Paulo Freire's (2017: 80) invocation of a classroom including “a teacher-student with students-teachers” has been a touchstone for decades, but there remains a tendency to lament students’ ignorance or, at best, to downplay strategies that respond to students’ own knowledge and habits. We should regard students’ nonacademic pursuits—their social media use, entertainment preferences, extracurricular activities, and so on—as important gateways to conversation and critical reflection in our classrooms. In taking our students seriously as “human beings/citizens” (Ladson-Billings 2021: 72), we need to regard them as coshapers of our society and communities and remain attuned to what we can learn from them.
As demonstrated in this issue, there is a wide variety of ways to tap into the knowledge of our “student-teachers.” Sonja Mayrhofer's essay, “Medieval-ish Worlds in Pop Culture: Making the Middle Ages Accessible to First-Year Students,” describes a course she teaches that gives students opportunities to think about medieval studies through modern adaptations of the medieval too often denigrated or dismissed in medieval studies classrooms. By putting these stories into conversation with archival sources, students gain new perspectives on history and texts that might have initially intimidated them.
In “Creating a Modern Bestiary,” Natalie Grinnell offers a detailed description and explanation of a single assignment of her own design, the creation of a class bestiary. Grinnell shows how students’ engagement with what some may consider an esoteric medieval genre allows them to consider and critique not only (or even most importantly) medieval notions of classification, difference, and danger, but modern ones as well.
Tom Blake's essay “The Bottom Line: Homophobic Discourses from Ergi Vikings to Lil Nas X,” describes how he engages his students in a comparison of early medieval homophobia and modern homophobia using Old Norse poetry and the music of queer rapper / country singer Lil Nas X. Blake shows that the comparison disproves the far-right fantasy that there were no queer people in the Middle Ages—and allows his queer students to see reflections of their own identities in the distant past.
In “Translating the Past and Imagining the Future(s): Lessons in Ecological Awareness from Middle English Poetry,” Rachel Shields demonstrates how medieval English poetry can be harnessed to provide students with opportunities to consider modern environmental crises. By assigning modern science fiction alongside medieval texts as well as translation and adaptation assignments that compel students to really dig into the older readings, Shields enables students to realize that modern ecological problems have deep roots indeed.
In “Writing Before and Beyond Monolingualism: Vernacular Defenses in the First-Year Composition Classroom,” Megan Behrend outlines her experiment to help students recognize the linguistic richness of the Middle Ages and connect it with modern reactions against the tyranny of Standardized English. By assigning readings and assignments focused on not just modern but also medieval writers’ and scholars’ resistance to language hierarchies, she gives her students a chance to recognize “that the medieval past has a valuable role to play in students’ inquiry into the relationship between language and power, community, and identity.”
Courtney E. Rydel's essay “Pedagogy of Power: She-Ra and Medieval Arthurian Literature” explains how her students’ analysis of individual episodes from the 2018 animated series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power alongside Chretien de Troyes's Perceval not only empowers students to identify the Arthurian influences in She-Ra and other modern texts, but also builds a bridge between past and present that provides students with an “accessible, inclusive, diverse vision of female-centered heroism” inspired by a medieval story.
In her essay “Exploring and Teaching the Medieval in Afro/Africanfuturism,” Kisha G. Tracy offers us a peek inside The Global Middle Ages, her literary survey course that pairs medieval African texts with Afro- and Africanfuturist texts, providing students with opportunities to realize that the Middle Ages was not an era unique to Europe, nor was it homogeneous.
As widely as they range, all of these approaches have important elements in common, as made clear by Laura Morreale in her response essay, “Crumpling the Timeline, Online.” In their attention to hybrid forms of teaching, to experiences of space and place, to multiple forms of connection, and to user response and creativity, this issue's essays reflect the evolution and influence of digital exchanges. This is a promising development, Morreale argues, given that cross-chronological conversations need to happen outside the classroom, as well as within it. Bringing humanities pedagogies to the public sphere represents another opportunity for constructive crumpling.
All of our contributors prove willing not just to try out innovative ideas, but also to consider the possibility that medieval studies should function less as an end in itself than as a means for our classrooms to be a space of critical thinking and creative connection. Their work aligns with Dinshaw's (2012: 38) goal of creating “conditions in which further attachments can be made, between and among people, times, and worlds.” Given the evolving changes to communication and knowledge in our newly emergent AI era, these kinds of human connections may be more significant than ever before. Knowledge itself is changing rapidly and unpredictably. If responding to all this makes you feel a bit discomfited or tentative, then perhaps congratulations and a welcome are in order: you have joined our crumpled compaignye.
The editors would like to thank contributors to this volume as well as other presenters and participants at our panel at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in May 2022. They are also grateful to Jennifer L. Holberg and Marcy Taylor for their editorial guidance, and to Merle Eisenberg, Sara McDougall, and Laura Morreale of the Middle Ages for Educators project for their initial support of these ideas.
Notes
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “crump,” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/4413458574; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “crumple,” July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7150796152.
The International Society for the Study of Medievalism and its journal, Studies in Medievalism, have led the way in this process, alongside initiatives that focus on specific forms of adaptation, such as the Medieval Comics Project sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture.
We launched our exploration of pedagogical practices related to these issues with Medieval Meets Modern, a video series hosted on the Middle Ages for Educators project site (eds. Merle Eisenberg, Sara McDougall, and Laura Morreale). In addition to our own videos, Medieval Meets Modern features contributions from Rachel Linn Shields, Richard Sévère, Magda Teter, and Michelle C. Wang. Other projects provide important reminders of the way adaptors, translators, and commentators have made and remade medieval texts, and our understanding of them, over time. Examples include the Global Chaucers project (eds. Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington); the Robbins Library Digital Projects covering Arthurian literature, the Crusades, Robin Hood, Cinderella stories, and Chaucer; and the COMMode Project: Canonicity, Obscenity, and the Making of the Modern Chaucer, 1700 – 2020 (eds. Mary Flannery, Amy Brown, and Kristen Haas Curtis).
For example, since its founding in 2010 the journal postmedieval has provided an important venue for scholarship exploring cross-chronological questions and issues.