If you’ve been following this blog from the outset (thank you!), you’ll likely know there things about me: (a) I like second-person asides; (b) I have an irrational attachment to colons and semicolons; and (c) I never stop talking about my time spent this year working as a lecteur d’anglais at the ENS de Lyon. Today, I’d like to continue in all three of these noble pursuits, as I tackle the course that readers of this blog will most likely find most interesting: the much-hinted-at medievalism unit.[1]
As I mentioned in my previous blog post on the Britain Today unit, the ENS de Lyon gave those of us teaching in the Centre de Langues a fairly unique opportunity: we were able to devise and teach an English language course based around pretty much whatever we wanted, subject to approval from the relevant individuals. My mind, of course, immediately jumped to all things medieval, but was swiftly brought back to earth by the realization that, in teaching to non-specialists who would be from subjects as diverse as biology and sociology, a course on medieval English literature, with all the linguistic challenge it would entail, was unlikely to attract that many participants. More pressingly, I didn’t (and still don’t) have the expertise to teach medieval English literature properly: my experience has almost exclusively been in medieval French, with a short swing sideways into eighteenth-century Franco-British relations in my final year as an undergraduate (fun, but phenomenally difficult without any prior knowledge).
It was at this point that something clicked in my brain, as I realised that there was a way to marry medieval studies with a ‘modern’ English class: medievalism, a concept aptly summarized by Ute Berns as ‘the investigation into the different ways in which the Middle Ages have been perceived and constructed by later periods.’[2] Medievalism, to (over-)simplify, would allow the course to marry both ‘modern’ and ‘medieval’ elements, and would give the course a chronological element as we studied how the stories of medieval legends, to be studied first in their own right, evolved over time.
At this stage, in summer 2015, I was of course aware that medievalism was A Thing, but I had relatively little knowledge of the key currents in critical thought surrounding it (the Cambridge Companion to the topic not having been published at that point). Thankfully, the content for the first two ‘units’ was so obvious and ripe with material that parts of them almost wrote themselves: the legends of Robin Hood and King Arthur were duly placed in Weeks 2 – 7 of the course. Much of the secondary literature that I perused frantically in the Bodleian over that summer readily acknowledged just how incontournables these traditions were:
‘Contemporary culture has an enormous and continued fascination with the highly pleasurable myths of King Arthur and Robin Hood, with heroes, quests, magic, and identities; with nostalgic pasts, dreamscapes, utopian imaginings …’
Gail Ashton and Daniel T. Kline, ‘Introduction: Now and Then’, in Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 4
The ‘obvious’ texts took their places first: Malory in the Arthur unit, followed swiftly by Idylls of the King and an early Robin Hood text, Robin Hood and the Monk.[3] The third and final unit was much trickier, but after much hesitation, I decided on the tale of Hereward the Wake. Far less well-known than its much-retold counterparts, I reasoned that this text would allow the students to see the process of medievalism from a different angle: that of a legend that, in textual reproduction alone, didn’t quite live up to its potential.
Students’ expectations: why (medieval) literature?
My texts were coming together, and the framework was starting to take shape, but there was still one niggling question that I couldn’t escape from. Would this course be what my students had expected, or what they had wanted? They had, after all, signed up for an English language class. Even though many of these students would have been interested in learning to read English literature ‘for the fun of it’, without any explicit language content, I felt that I owed it to them (and certainly to myself) to justify the inclusion of literature (especially medieval literature), were it to become necessary. One of the most influential scholars of language teaching, Claire Kramsch, has written on the value of literary texts in the language classroom: in particular, she notes, they offer an insight into what she calls the ‘individual voice and the creative utterance’. If a student wants to become a member of a given ‘speech community’, they need to experience these individual voices in order to find their own. Literature, then, offers a privileged example of the language in use, and remains, to a extent, the example of an ‘authentic’ text: that is, as Little and Singleton have defined it, a text that was not originally intended to be used in language teaching, and which is all the more valuable for avoiding the somewhat-hackneyed and familiar language that many of us will be familiar with. Integrating literature as part of a language course provides an opportunity for students to see the language in use, and to find their own voices through discovering those of others.
Of course, there are reasons why literature is not always appropriate in a language classroom, and why, in the European Languages Framework, literature appears at the B2, ‘upper-intermediate’, level. Jean Peytard, among others, has attempted to cover these issues systematically: he’s paid particular attention to the challenges of placing the text in its intertext, and the appropriate context, as well as to the ‘réseaux connotatifs’ of the text — the network of characters, narratives, and worlds that usually require an advanced knowledge of the language to unpick. To this, it’s important to add one important (and obvious) distinction that is arguably specific to medieval literature: its linguistic ‘otherness’. After all, I’d be fighting a losing battle if I tried to convince the students that medieval English represented an ‘authentic text’ à la Little and Singleton.
As things stood, my content was coming together, but there were still a few kinks to work out. How could I best engage my student, and persuade these non-specialists of the usefulness of medieval studies? More broadly, how could I face up to these problems of ‘relevance’, making sure that my course remained above all a language course? And, of course, what would I call it? That’s a story for next week.
1 I’m very grateful to the University of Cambridge’s postgraduate medieval reading group, ‘Approaching the Medieval’, for allowing me to develop some of the ideas in today’s blog post at their first conference, ‘LIMITS’.For more information about the reading group, click here; for a full Storify curation of the Twitter activity surrounding the conference, see this link.
2 A valid criticism at this point (made at this point in the conference by the wonderful Matt Lampitt) is that these texts are all very ‘canonical’: note the appearances of Malory, Tennyson … I readily acknowledge this point, and will talk more about it next week, but I do hope that the overall structure of the course, which puts these texts into their contexts, goes some way towards warding off any excessive focus on these texts.
Header image: Paris, BnF, MS français 13342 (fol. 1r). Apologies for the low resolution!
Edward Mills 
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