Teaching Chaucer through Convergence Culture: The New Media Middle Ages as Cross-Cultural Encounter

Abstract

Teaching the cross-cultural encounters of the Middle Ages opens various avenues for exploration and discovery: the conflicts of yesteryear spark contemporary insights, creating possibilities of understanding as students grapple with the ways in which societies have interacted violently or peacefully, with weapons or through dialogue. As the previous essays of this volume indicate, cross-cultural encounters ask students to interpret issues from multiple perspectives, to analyze texts for contradictions and inconsistencies, and to theorize the meaning of cultural self-constructions vis-à-vis other communities. At the same time, as instructors of the medieval and early modern past, we must also confront the ways in which medievalism is itself a cross-cultural encounter through time, one that merits reflection for the ways in which it influences our teaching, and thus for the ways in which our teaching influences students’ learning. Too often attempts to discuss cross-cultural encounters in the historical record devolve into a collective sense of relief that the horrors of the past have been surpassed in our ostensibly enlightened present. Yes, students nod sincerely, the many wars of the past founded upon ethnic and religious intolerance were deplorable, and let us condemn the Crusades from the comfortable position of being chronologically removed from them. Such a perspective also, if tacitly, sees contemporary Western culture as inherently superior to the past during which such hostilities were fostered, with students potentially remaining oblivious to the similarities of yesterday and today.