3. What do I think about the Middle Ages?

Due 10pm, Sunday October 11th

Before beginning this assignment, I would recommend that you take some time to look through the Profile pages of your fellow students to get a sense of how others are using cuPortfolio.

For this assignment, you are asked to reflect on what knowledge you bring to the study of the Middle Ages. From a young age, we all are exposed to representations of the Middle Ages both in popular culture and in school. At this stage, some of you have more formal academic training in the Middle Ages, while others come to the field from another path (video games anyone?). Neither is better or worse preparation – what is key, however, is to be open about the dominant tropes of the Middle Ages that you believe/ think to be definitive of the period. Questions to guide your reflection might include:

• What does “Medieval” or “Middle Ages” mean to you?

• What do you know about the Middle Ages?

• What experience have you had with the Middle Ages?

• What do you hope to learn by the conclusion of this class?

• Where do you get your Middle Ages from?

The reflection should be written in suitably formal academic/ journalistic style, roughly 500 words in length. Please ensure spelling mistakes, syntactical errors, capitalization problems are eliminated before you submit officially (You could ask a fellow student to give your refection a quick read!).

If you make references to books, works of art and other media, they should be properly referenced in Chicago style. If you make reference to the commodified Middle Ages (toys, products, advertisements), please offer links or embed videos in your page (part of your reflection could simply be a sidebar list of links)

A guide to proper Chicago style can be found here: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org.proxy.library.carleton.ca/home.html). Please note that cuPortfolio does not have a “footnote” button, but if you cut and paste from Word (etc.) footnote formatting is retained. Or let Zotero do it for you.