FYSM 1405D: The Making of the Middle Ages

Introduction to the course, "The Making of the Middle Ages" taught by Marc Saurette, Associate Professor of Medieval History at Carleton University (Ottawa, Ontario).

If you’ve ever walked past Parliament in Ottawa, been to a nineteenth-century church, watched a King Arthur movie or played a hack-and-slash videogame, you already know that the Middle Ages has a life of its own in modern society. In this course, we will explore what it means to be “medieval”, we will learn how our understanding of this time period was formed, and we will explode many of today’s pervasive myths about the Middle Ages. Our goal is not only to understand what the Middle Ages were, but also to explain how and why we understand it the way that we do.

This course does not expect students to have any knowledge of the medieval world, though any background you might have would be great. Instead it is designed to introduce you to the Middle Ages and to other key skills for succeeding at university. We will start from fundamentals and develop on your growing skills (in the period and as historians) over the year. Over the course of the year, we will work on developing a game (boardgame, card game, role-playing-game) that communicates your developing knowledge of the Middle Ages.

Do not expect this course to be abstract and theoretical – we will be reading medieval documents, touring (digitally) medieval sites and playing with the digitized materials now freely online from the British Museum or the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. While our topic is medieval, our approach will be quite modern. We will be using digital tools to communicate with one another, to share your work, and to try to understand why medieval people left the evidence they did.

The course is divided into three major areas of exploration:

1. Evidence:

• working on newly developed digital platforms for manuscript studies, we will look at and understand real medieval manuscripts (at least on your screen).

• we will read medieval texts in translation: for example, the story of Saint Guinefort (the holy greyhound), Crusade chronicles, or the original account of King Arthur by Geoffrey of Monmouth

• In the future (non-pandemic time) I hope to tinker with the Discovery Centre’s 3D printer to reproduce, for example, medieval book clasps or the Lewes Chessmen from open source 3D printing files.

2. Historians:

• Reading articles or extracts from studies written by historians, we will explore how different historians have influenced how we read and understand evidence. Key for studying any topic from a historical perspective is to recognize that interpretations of the past can change significantly over time and place.

• We will explore how nineteenth-century nationalism, in particular, is very influential in forming our ideas of the Middle Ages. We still all know about King Arthur because medieval and early modern people were so good at making him a symbol of English (and later North American) nationhood. Spoiler: King Arthur was made up in the twelfth-century, but the lie was so good people believe it today…

3. Popular Representations:

• Your (and my) feelings about the medieval past are often built more by non-academic things than by reading historians. Novels, movies, commercials and videogames all influence our understanding of the Middle Ages and can be more persuasive than real evidence. But they rarely offer a truthful representation of the past. We will explore the Middle Ages that “feels” right (but might not be historically accurate) and figure out why myths of the Middle Ages are so common.

After addressing some fundamentals, our seminar will spend much of the first term exploring and thinking about representations, before moving back to the medieval evidence for the "real" Middle Ages.