{"title":"Collaborative Teaching and Creative Assignments Using Contemporary Adaptation","authors":"Brendan O'Connell, Alexandra Colby","doi":"10.5070/nc34262326","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/nc34262326","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we share our perspectives (as teacher and student) on the role of modern adaptations of Chaucer in teaching and assessment, with a particular focus on the role such adaptations play in supporting the use of creative writing-based assignments in a medieval literature course. We describe our experience of an assessment composed of a creative exercise combined with a critical commentary, and discuss how the incorporation of modern adaptations of medieval texts into the medieval literature curriculum underpins and supports this assessment type. Our account demonstrates that the process by which the meaning of literary texts is generated is iterative and collaborative, a point we hope to underscore through our collaboration on this piece. We hope the experience we describe will foreground the value of dialogue in the processes of teaching, assessment, and feedback, and also highlight the role of modern adaptations in supporting students to recognise and articulate the value of their own creative and critical work within a longer tradition of literary and scholarly responses to medieval literature.","PeriodicalId":478652,"journal":{"name":"New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135883710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Refugee Tales (UK) Meets Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: An Australian’s Historical Perspective","authors":"Andrew Lynch","doi":"10.5070/nc34262335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/nc34262335","url":null,"abstract":"There are and have been Australian voices strongly raised against the now long-running mandatory detention of refugee boat arrivals to Australian waters. Yet just as Indigenous Australians exist as part of an impersonal category for most Settler Australians, the absence of any widespread community protest against the brutal treatment of boat arrivals has in part fed off the lack of a broader cultural and historical frame within which to tell and hear individual refugee stories. These victims occupy a narrative space whose moral dimensions are blanked out, as an integral part of their maltreatment. For those who want change, pressing questions arise. What kind of stories could let these refugees be admitted to the category ‘Australian,’ in a more inclusive version of our actual and potential inhabitants? In this context, might Australia find a version of the model of national community that England has long drawn from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales?","PeriodicalId":478652,"journal":{"name":"New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession","volume":"121 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135883712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Not Wasting Time","authors":"Marion Turner","doi":"10.5070/nc34262333","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/nc34262333","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers the value of thinking about the strangeness of the medieval past. It explores how varied human subjectivity can be across time and thinks about how accessing radically alien subjectivities from the medieval past can have a value for us in our present. It takes three examples of attitudes to particular concepts––genius, technology, and love––that demonstrate both the difference of the medieval past and how our social norms and values have their roots in that historical period. Reading medieval literature requires us, at times, to make imaginative leaps––where do they take us?","PeriodicalId":478652,"journal":{"name":"New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession","volume":"76 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135882991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Choice of Chaucers: Teaching Kate Heartfield’s Interactive Novel The Road to Canterbury","authors":"Timothy S. Miller","doi":"10.5070/nc34262324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/nc34262324","url":null,"abstract":"Kate Heartfield’s 2018 interactive novel invites a contemporary audience to join Chaucer and his fellow pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. This text-based game—or game-like text—enables the reader to make choices about the direction of the narrative in the fashion of earlier hypertext literature and the old Choose Your Own Adventure novels for young readers and other so-called ‘gamebooks.’ Based primarily on my experiences teaching The Road to Canterbury in an upper-level English course at a large public university, this essay reflects on how one might teach Heartfield’sinteractive fiction alongside Chaucer in mutually illuminating ways and in a variety of course settings.","PeriodicalId":478652,"journal":{"name":"New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135883998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction Special Cluster: Retellings of Medieval Literature in the Classroom","authors":"Eva Von Contzen, Sophia Philomena Wolf","doi":"10.5070/nc34262321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/nc34262321","url":null,"abstract":"This special cluster focuses on the role of contemporary retellings of medieval literature in classroom contexts, thereby providing a platform for a largely neglected topic of research. It features articles on a diverse range of retellings—including, for example, fanfiction and an interactive novel—and displays the various re-reading adventures students embark upon as they engage with contemporary adaptations or pen their own personal version of a medieval tale. Retellings consequently prove useful and democratic educational tools that allow for a more expansive student engagement with medieval material.","PeriodicalId":478652,"journal":{"name":"New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession","volume":"94 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135882994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Cluster on the Social Value of Medieval Studies","authors":"Gregory M. Sadlek","doi":"10.5070/nc34262331","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/nc34262331","url":null,"abstract":"The Introduction sets up the professional context, the extremely difficult job market for new medievalists, that motivated the creation of this cluster of articles. It then reflects on the typical position allocation process and underscores the importance of adding qualitative arguments, especially those highlighting the social value of Medieval Studies, to the quantitative data usually required in official position requests. The cluster, then, seeks to help individual faculty members, chairpersons, and deans to articulate those qualitative arguments. It includes six essays offering six different approaches to defining or illustrating the social value of Medieval Studies. The Introduction concludes with a summary of the contributors’ major insights.","PeriodicalId":478652,"journal":{"name":"New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135884007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is There a Source Text in This Class? Teaching Medieval Literature through Contemporary Retellings","authors":"Sophia Philomena Wolf, Eva Von Contzen","doi":"10.5070/nc34262328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/nc34262328","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, we outline the lesson plan and pedagogical approach underlying a seminar we taught in the summer term of 2023 at the University of Freiburg titled “Retelling, Rereading, Rethinking—The Afterlife of Medieval Texts in Contemporary Literature.” Using Stanley Fish’s essay “Is There a Text in This Class?” as its springboard, this essay discusses how the absence of the source material affects students’ engagement with medieval literature. We decided to make the absent source the catalyst for discussing how the meaning of the source text is filtered through and inextricably linked with reception, i.e. translations, retellings, and the readers/students themselves. Taking into special consideration the particular knowledge our students brought with them into the class and how this influenced their reading of medieval literature, we argue that the instability and absence of the source can make for a better learning outcome and a more profound understanding of medieval literature, (medieval) literary practices, and the role of reception.","PeriodicalId":478652,"journal":{"name":"New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135884491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creating Interior Mayhem in The Castle of Perseverance","authors":"Sheila Coursey","doi":"10.5070/nc34262327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/nc34262327","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the fifteenth-century morality play The Castle of Perseverance in conversation with the 2015 Disney/Pixar film Inside Out. The film certainly serves as a contemporary afterlife of the psychomachia, externalizing the turmoil of a young girl into the epic journey and struggle of her embodied emotions like Joy, Sadness, and Disgust. I discuss how I teach Inside Out and The Castle of Perseverance together to undergraduate students and argue that the film also offers an entry-point into potential immersive performance practices of The Castle of Perseverance; audiences may have followed both a central linear arc (the journey of Mankind) while exploring the narrative tools of the playing-space on their own.","PeriodicalId":478652,"journal":{"name":"New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135885081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Archives and the Middle Ages: Materials for History","authors":"Claude Fagnen","doi":"10.5070/nc34262337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/nc34262337","url":null,"abstract":"Archivists and rare-book librarians, necessarily well trained in Medieval Studies, work every day to preserve critical historical documents. They make these documents freely available to scholar researchers and to the general public, whom they assist by reading old manuscripts, explaining the medieval languages, and sharing historical information. But they are also careful to collect new documents, even ones that were undiscovered, and to restore them when necessary. By means of their publications or the exhibitions they create, they contribute deeply to the general knowledge of the past. They are the custodians of the memory of humanity.","PeriodicalId":478652,"journal":{"name":"New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession","volume":"9 2-3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135882992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thoughts on the Social Value of Cross-Cultural Medieval Studies","authors":"David Raybin, Susanna Fein","doi":"10.5070/nc34262334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5070/nc34262334","url":null,"abstract":"Medieval studies offers insights into the human condition that are distinct to the period yet crucial to comprehending our twenty-first-century moment. As the dissemination of medieval studies and modern ‘medievalisms’ widens, we gain new insight into the extent to which ideas about literature and the arts, science and the environment, racial and cultural difference, and cross-cultural interaction are grounded in the thinking of past centuries. This article highlights four new books that expand the traditional setting of medieval European studies: Geraldine Heng’s Teaching the Global Middle Ages, a handbook for teachers; Peter Haidu’s The Philomena of Chrétien the Jew, a radically new assessment of a canonical author; Andrew D. Turner’s Códice Maya de México, a pictorial, forensic, and literary presentation of the oldest surviving book of the Americas; and Larisa Grollemond and Bryan C. Keene’s The Fantasy of the Middle Ages, a lavishly illustrated survey of medievalism.","PeriodicalId":478652,"journal":{"name":"New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135885067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}