Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters

Abstract

This volume of essays explores the challenges and rewards of teaching medieval and early modern cross-cultural encounters in undergraduate and graduate classrooms. Medievalists and early modernists have increasingly focused their research on cross-cultural encounters, profoundly transforming stale, inaccurate portrayals of these eras as culturally homogeneous and European. These twelve essays bring this research to bear on our pedagogical practices. Contributors describe their selection and use of historical, literary, and artistic content in teaching cross-cultural encounters, and provide strategies for overcoming the practical and conceptual challenges this material presents. Collectively traversing disciplinary, periodic, geographic, and linguistic boundaries, essays address topics ranging from the intersections of race, religion, gender, and nation in cross-cultural encounters to the use of popular culture and new media as pedagogical tools. Crucially, contributors reflect on how medieval and early modern cross-cultural encounters travel through time, accrue new meanings, and continue to shape our actions and thoughts today. Prelims pages i–xii Figures pages xiii–xiv Foreword pages xv–xviii Acknowledgments pages xix–xx Contributors pages xxi–xxiv Introduction pages 1–18 Karina F. Attar and Lynn Shutters Part I. Synchronic Cross-Cultural Encounters pages 19–20 Chapter 1. Andalusian Iberias: From Spanish to Iberian Literature pages 21–36 Seth Kimmel Chapter 2. Using Feminist Pedagogy to Explore Connectivity in the Medieval Mediterranean pages 37–52 Megan Moore Chapter 3. A Journey through the Silk Road in a Cosmopolitan Classroom pages 53–70 Kyunghee Pyun Chapter 4. Teaching English Travel Writing from 1500 to the Present pages 71–86 Elizabeth Pentland Chapter 5. Stranger than Fiction: Early Modern Travel Narratives and the Antiracist Classroom pages 87–102 Julia Schleck Chapter 6. Different Shakespeares: Thinking Globally in an Early Modern Literature Course pages 103–120 Barbara Sebek Part II. Synchronic and Diachronic Cross-Cultural Encounters pages 121–122 Chapter 7. The Moor of America: Approaching the Crisis of Race and Religion in the Renaissance and the Twenty-First Century pages 123–140 Ambereen Dadabhoy Chapter 8. “Real” Bodies? Race, Corporality, and Contradiction in The Arabian Nights and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il fiore delle mille e una notte (1974) pages 141–158 Andrea Mirabile and Lynn Ramey Chapter 9. Encountering Saracens in Italian Chivalric Epic and Folk Performance Traditions pages 159–178 Jo Ann Cavallo Chapter 10. Beowulf as Hero of Empire pages 179–196 Janice Hawes Part III. Diachronic Cross-Cultural Encounters pages 197–198 Chapter 11. Resurrecting Callimachus: Pop Music, Puppets, and the Necessity of Performance in Teaching Medieval Drama pages 199–214 Jenna Soleo-Shanks Chapter 12. Teaching Chaucer through Convergence Culture: The New Media Middle Ages as Cross-Cultural Encounter pages 215–228 Tison Pugh Suggestions for Further Reading pages 229–240 Index pages 241–253