Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxiv

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2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Karina F. Attar, Lynn Shutters

      Pages 1-17

3. Synchronic Cross-Cultural Encounters

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

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   2. Andalusian Iberias: From Spanish to Iberian Literature

      • Seth Kimmel

      Pages 21-35

   3. Using Feminist Pedagogy to Explore Connectivity in the Medieval Mediterranean

      • Megan Moore

      Pages 37-51

   4. A Journey through the Silk Road in a Cosmopolitan Classroom

      • Kyunghee Pyun

      Pages 53-70

   5. Teaching English Travel Writing from 1500 to the Present

      • Elizabeth Pentland

      Pages 71-85

   6. Stranger Than Fiction: Early Modern Travel Narratives and the Antiracist Classroom

      • Julia Schleck

      Pages 87-101

   7. Different Shakespeares: Thinking Globally in an Early Modern Literature Course

      • Barbara Sebek

      Pages 103-119

4. Synchronic and Diachronic Cross-Cultural Encounters

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 121-121

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   2. The Moor of America: Approaching the Crisis of Race and Religion in the Renaissance and the Twenty-First Century

      • Ambereen Dadabhoy

      Pages 123-140

   3. “Real” Bodies? Race, Corporality, and Contradiction in The Arabian Nights and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Fiore Delle Mille E Una Notte (1974)

      • Andrea Mirabile, Lynn Ramey

      Pages 141-158

   4. Encountering Saracens in Italian Chivalric Epic and Folk Performance Traditions

      • Jo Ann Cavallo

      Pages 159-178

   5. Beowulf as Hero of Empire

      • Janice Hawes

      Pages 179-196

5. Diachronic Cross-Cultural Encounters

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 197-197

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   2. Resurrecting Callimachus: Pop Music, Puppets, and the Necessity of Performance in Teaching Medieval Drama

      • Jenna Soleo-Shanks

      Pages 199-213

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

      • Tison Pugh

      Pages 215-228

6. Back Matter

   Pages 229-253

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Drawing from theatre, English studies, and art history, among others, these essays discuss the challenges and rewards of teaching medieval and early modern texts in the 21st-century university. Topics range from the intersections of race, religion, gender, and nation in cross-cultural encounters to the use of popular culture as pedagogical tools.

• Dada
• fiction
• Middle Ages
• Renaissance
• teaching
• university

“Attar and Shutters’s collection of essays offers resounding support for making our medieval and early modern courses relevant. … an invaluable tool for any instructor interested in crafting a more inclusive, relevant, and diverse medieval or early modern course.” (Thomas H. Blake, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART), Vol. 27 (1), 2020)

“The volume … aims to showcase pedagogical strategies employed by the authors in their classrooms in colleges across the United States and Canada. … it will serve as a tremendous resource for teachers of cross-cultural encounters … . A list of suggested readings at the end of the volume helps instructors explore some of the primary and secondary sources discussed in the articles. Anyone teaching courses on premodern multicultural Europe will find something of interest in the volume.” (Maya Soifer Irish, Speculum, A Journal of Medieval Studies, Vol. 91 (4), October, 2016)

“The twelve contributed essays offer cogent and straightforward case studies of graduate and undergraduate courses in literature, language and culture, and art history. … The audience for this volume – those who are seeking inspiration for new and more progressive ways to teach the medieval and early modern periods across disciplines – will not be disappointed.” (Diane K. Jakacki, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 69, 2014)

"In this volume, Attar and Shutters have given us an invaluable and remarkably rich resource for the teaching and study of cross-cultural encounter in the medieval and early modern worlds. As the global premodern asserts itself increasingly in scholarship and the classroom, this book will provide an indispensable starting point for those seeking to broaden and challenge their views of transcultural contact and transmission. A stellar collection." - Bruce Holsinger, Professor of English, University of Virginia, USA, and author of Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, andthe War on Terror

"The past is not what it used to be: a diverse, roiled, polyglot, globalized, culturally hybrid, and perpetually contested expanse unfolds where the simple origins of Europe used to be. The great strength of this well written, beautifully conceived volume is its emphasis on how to bring this temporally thick, cross-cultural past into the classroom. An exemplary work of pedagogy in action, this book should be read by anyone who cares about how the medieval and early modern periods are taught." - Jeffrey J. Cohen, Professor of English, George Washington University, USA and author of Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (forthcoming)

"This timely and innovative collection makes a strong argument for the relevance of the humanities' traditional core the study of medieval and early modern literature and culture as transformed and transmitted in the globalized classrooms of the twenty-first century. Rigorously and relevantly attending to a diverse range of texts, theories, and practices for teaching cross-cultural and -temporal encounters, its twelve original essays constitute an important intervention into critical, pedagogical, and policy debates across a range of disciplines and institutions. This collection is bound to become an indispensable resource for researchers, teachers, and students of medieval and early modern studies, as well as pedagogical, performance, and postcolonial studies more broadly." - Bernadette Andrea, Professor of English, University of Texas at San Antonio, USA

"This well-researched and timely collection encourages scholars, teachers, and students to reconsider the medieval and early modern worlds as multicultural, global, and culturally diverse milieux. Perhaps most excitingly, the collection also traces the paths of cultural appropriations historically and in particular political or imperial contexts. Its impressive range stretches from folk-tale to digital artefacts and its readings are 'presentist' in the best sense of that word." - Sujata Iyengar, Professor of English, University of Georgia, USA and author of Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin-Color in Early Modern England and Shakespeare's Medical Language, Co-editor and co-founder of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

• Department of European Languages and Literatures at Queens College, CUNY, USA

  Karina F. Attar

• Colorado State University, USA

  Lynn Shutters

Jo Ann Cavallo, Columbia University, USA Ambereen Dadabhoy, Harvey Mudd College, USA Janice Hawes, South Carolina State University, USA Seth Kimmel, Columbia University, USA Lisa Lampert-Weissig, University of California, San Diego, USA Andrea Mirabile, Vanderbilt University, USA Megan Moore, University of Missouri, USA Elizabeth Pentland, York University, Canada Tison Pugh, University of Central Florida, USA Kyunghee Pyun, The Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, USA Lynn Ramey, Vanderbilt University, USA Julia Schleck, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA Barbara Sebek, Colorado State University, USA Jenna Soleo-Shanks, University of Minnesota Duluth, USA

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