3. What are the Middle Ages?

Goals for this week (September 20th/22nd)

1. By Wednesday, all students need to have signed up for a day to submit classnotes. Sign up here if you have not already done so.

2. By the end of this week, students will get initial feedback about their profile. The professor will also distribute links to individualized spreadsheets for keeping track of work and receiving feedback.

3. We will discuss scholarly ideas of the Middle Ages as well as common myths about it; make students aware that many truths we take to be self-evident about the Middle Ages are actually ninteenth-century inventions.

Overview:

The class introduces you to the Middle Ages. The professor will discuss the different ways to define the period and how it has traditionally been defined.

• On Wednesday, the professor will lead a discussion to outline different ways of conceptualizing the period of the Middle Ages. We will begin with some creative and ludic exercises (a round of Prof. Noggins Medieval Times card game) to get us thinking.

  • I find children's books and games very useful to convey our popular understanding of the medieval period. They distill down our ideas which makes it easier for us to understand them analytically.

• On Friday, we will discuss the reading The Devil's Historians (see below) and consider the many myths of the Middle Ages that circulate in pop culture in our society.

Read/Watch/Listen

Read the introduction and chapter one of Kaufman, Amy S., and Paul B. Sturtevant. The Devil’s Historians : How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020 by 10am on September 19th.

The Devil’s Historians : How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past is posted on Peruall.

Practice

By 10am on Tuesday, September 25th, you will write up a literature note and a permanent describing the major myths of the Middle Ages suggested by Sturtevant and Kaufman's work. A detailed guide for completing this are available here.

Going Further

You are only expected to read the first chapter of Kaufman and Sturtevant's work but you can read more (each section of chapter one corresponds to a subsequent chapter). You can also check out the origin of some of their writing on the public blog: The Public Medievalist devoted to looking at representations of the Middle Ages in popular culture.

Another way to think about "myths" of the Middle Ages is to see them as cultural tropes. For pop culture ideas, I always recommend the site TV Tropes.