We finished last week’s blog, in time-honoured fashion, with a classic French-style problématique. As the start of the academic year drew nearer, I was facing the tricky question of how to engage students who were taking my medievalism course, as well as asking myself whether it was even possible to teach modern English using medieval texts. Neither of these seemed to have a particularly obvious solution, and the process of resolving these questions will be the subject of today’s post (penned, or rather typed, on the X40 bus back to Reading after seven hours of teaching, so apologies for any typos!).
I began the course with high hopes, but soon found myself knocked down a peg as I realised that modelling it on my own undergraduate experiences would not work. While my students were certainly capable and interested in what might have seemed like a niche subject, my overly-optimistic lesson plans (‘class discussion on images of the medieval in Robin Hood and the Monk‘) were soon scrapped in favour of slightly more structured fare. The first term was something of a learning experience, as I realised quickly that I would need either to adapt my teaching to suit the needs of the students or else have no takers at all for the course’s second semester.[1] It was this experience, above all else, that really convinced me of the need to emphasise the course’s modern English language component: a pure literary history course, regardless of period, would be doomed to disappoint.
Of course, certain elements of the course had worked well over the first term: the impromptu rap battle based on Malory’s Morte Darthur was a particular highlight. In reorganising the course over the Christmas holidays, however, I had to say goodbye to quite a few elements that, looking back, had no real place in a language course like mine. The most significant of these was the research topic: while the students’ 1,000-word essays on the forest in Robin Hood ballads and Monty Python and the Holy Grail were truly fascinating, they were creating far too much work for the students and were taking valuable class time away from linguistic progress. In its place I accentuated the contribution of the two essays (400 words each) produced between classes, and in the process I awoke something of a sleeping giant that my course had previously been ignoring.
Robin Hood on Twitter: medieval creative writing
Those of you with better memories than myself will recall Ute Berns’ definition of medievalism from last week, and the onus it places on ‘constructing’ the Middle Ages. For the second term, I formalised and made compulsory an option that had always been open to the students: the production of a piece of creative writing that built on one of the three ‘themes’ (Robin Hood, King Arthur, Hereward the Wake) studied as part of the course. In this respect, I was following the lead of Beate Langenbruch, a medievalist at the ENS de Lyon who had begun integrating creative writing into her medieval French seminars several years previously.[2]
As Beate Langenbruch herself had found, this strategy bore fruit remarkably easily. The benefits of such a technique are fairly apparent: in producing creative writing, students were free to function in the mode of their choice, moulding language as they saw fit to create their own personal voices. The exercise demanded an intimate knowledge both of the tradition within which they were placing themselves and the form in which they were writing. There were some astonishing submissions, including a retelling of Robin Hood and the Monk achieved entirely using (genuinely-created) Twitter accounts, classical sonnets, and a glorious mashup of Robin Hood and Monty Python in which the ‘constitutional peasant’ found himself transposed into thirteenth-century England and taking issue with a certain man in Lincoln green. The exercise was a very liberating one for my students, and allowed them to look on these traditions, and the English language that transmitted these traditions, in a very different way. The English language was, in a way, something to which they themselves could contribute.
Modern, medieval English: a case study
The medieval element of the course ‘proper’ got a similar revamp. In redrafting the syllabus for what was to become Manuscripts to Movies: The Modern Middle Ages, I began to look at the medieval texts through a linguistic lens, asking how they might assist a modern learner of English. It was in this vein that, in Week 5 of the ‘new’ course, I was able to give my students a task that none of them had ever experienced before: English-to-English translation. The task was simple: translate a section of the Morte Darthur (15 lines) into modern English for the Penguin Classics series, with a reasonable degree of faithfulness but taking liberties where appropriate. The result, more often than not, was something like this:
So in the myddys of the blast enterde a sonnebeame, more clere by seven tymys than ever they saw a day, and all they were alyghted of by the grace of the Holy Goste. Than began every knyght to beholde other; and eyther saw other, by their semyng, fayrer than ever they were before.[3]
Then in the midst of the blast there entered a beam of light, seven times clearer than they had ever seen before; and they were all visited by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Then the knights all began to behold each other, and each one seemed to the others to be more beautiful than they had ever been before.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but a (semi-)competent translation into modern English required a great deal of grammatical and lexical nuance that an upper-intermediate learner could subsequently apply in all sorts of contexts. Immediately visible is the consistent shift in tenses, from the Middle English (ME) past simple to the modern English (ModE) pluperfect: ever they saw a day and ever they were before become ‘they had ever seen before’ and ‘they had ever been before’. This nuance, while not necessarily new to a French speaker, provided a concrete takeaway from the rather more abstract exercise of translation. Similarly, the lexical manipulation that I suggested, from ME sonnebeame to ‘ray of light’, provided ample scope for expanding students’ vocabulary in less common scenarios (as with the attendant ‘ray of …’ structure).
But … why?
But surely it would have been more effective to teach these ideas as discrete grammar points? Why bother delving deep into Malory to pluck out obscure examples, when otiose options openly offer themselves to you? The answer to this question takes us back to where I started: the original name of the course, (Re)Thinking the Medieval. It’s true that in a sense, the Middle Ages are fundamentally ‘other’, as Paul Zumthor put it in 1972; these cultural differences, quite honestly, can alienate students, and can make the text we’re studying seem even further away. Anticlericalism in Robin Hood stories or, for French students, the Norman Conquest can feel irrelevant. But the Middle Ages has an ace up its sleeve: its cultural persistence. Even if the medieval period itself is ‘other’, memories of it persist. Not all of my students had the reading skills to pick apart the web of characters in a Robin Hood story, but they all had a certain amount of background knowledge. Sherwood Forest was familiar to them, as was, of course, Arthurian romance. This residual knowledge — the ‘background radiation’ of medieval studies — worked very effectively in overcoming the dreaded ‘silent room’ that any language teacher will be more than familiar with, and in getting them to see the benefit of the language exercises that we were undertaking. Zumthor might be right when he says that the Middle Ages are ‘other’, but to steal a phrase from Umberto Eco, ‘it seems people like the Middle Ages’. My students certainly appeared to.
To be clear, I definitely don’t want to claiming that medieval studies is a ‘silver bullet’ to the very tricky problem of how to engage EFL learners, nor do I want to suggest that a dose of Robin Hood will cure the malaise of every student who has sat bored in English class for the last twenty years. What I hope I have shown, though, is that medieval studies and English as a Foreign Language are far from irreconcileable, and that a passion for one does not necessarily preclude a desire to develop the other.
Next week I’ll be moving away from lecteur reflections (ref-lecteur-ions?) with the first part of a three-part series. I certainly intend to come back to this topic – there’s a lot more than remains to be said, especially with respect to which texts we choose to use – but for now, I’m looking forward to beginning with a new venture for this blog: a book review.
1 The ENS de Lyon operates a two-term year in which, at the Centre de Langues, each English module is self-contained within one semester. The class therefore ran twice, giving me a much-appreciated opportunity to fine-tune aspects of it during the Christmas break. [↵]
2 Beate Langenbruch, ‘Le Moyen Âge par la réécriture : apprendre en métamorphosant. Retour critique sur une expérience de l’enseignement de la littérature médiévale’, Perspectives médiévales : Revue d’épistémologie des langues et littératures du Moyen Âge, 36 (2015), <http://peme.revues.org/8358> (accessed 11th July 2016) [↵]
3 Adapted from Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, ed Stephen H. A. Shepherd, Norton Critical Editions (London: Norton, 2004), pp. 502-03. My translation. [↵]
Header image: ‘Young Robin goes to the shooting-match’, from Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire (New York: Scribner’s, 1883), p. 1.
Edward Mills 
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