Producing the Middle Ages in Multimedia: Quest for the Past Professor Mary Wack Honors 460, Spring 1996 Canterbury Pilgrims

Course Overviews

• About This Course
  
• Your Role
  
• But Where IS the Course?
  

About This Course

The course assumes, with most contemporary thought, that knowledge is constructed: it is not just "there," lying around with greater or lesser obviousness like nugget gold, but is actively produced out of materials by somebody for somebody. It is therefore shaped by its creator, its audience, the historial moment, the social context, and available possibilities. During the semester you will come to understand how knowledge of the Middle Ages has been produced, and how you yourself will produce it.

The course is designed to allow you to master some portion of medieval culture (what is "culture"?) through independent research (in print and electronic media), and to demonstrate your mastery by teaching your fellow students using a hypermedia module you have created over the semester. You no doubt have some ideas about how your teachers could have taught you more effectively. You can put your ideas into concrete form, and reach your classmates through word and image--maybe even music and video--as you would have liked to have been taught. You will be co-creators in the teaching and learning strategies of the next century.

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Your Role

Your role can be seen as a quest, but it can also be seen as creative play. As far as we know, no historical knight actually did search for the Holy Grail as a literal object (despite Indiana Jones!). The knightly quest was part of a complex storytelling game carried on over generations, and bearing powerful cultural significance.

Because the play impulse and various more or less elaborate games are at the roots of cultural patterns and behaviors ("the dating game"), and because they are powerful stimuli for creativity, I would like you to play around with play during the course--play with ideas, play with technology, consider play when you devise your teaching model.

To prime our imaginations for creative play, we will begin the semester with discussion of a storytelling game, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. They will form the central "node" for our collective investigations and initial point of departure because they touch nearly every aspect of late medieval life. Once we are underway, you are free to branch off in your own quests--what was it like to live as a peasant--or knight, or merchant? were women better or worse off than now? Was it, as a new CD says, a "rude, cruel, masculine world"--or any ruder, crueler, and more masculine than our own? How was university science related to technology? What were the major environmental problems, and how were they addressed?

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But Where IS the Course?

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