Teaching the Global Middle Ages
- Editor: Geraldine Heng
- Pages: 472
- Published: 2022
- ISBN: 9781603295178 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603295161 (Hardcover)
“[R]equired reading for any medievalist teaching in an English department who desires to take first steps toward a decolonized classroom. Its contributors offer an invaluable guide to primary texts, thematic possibilities and course design and preparation.”
—The Medieval Review
While globalization is a modern phenomenon, premodern people were also interconnected in early forms of globalism, sharing merchandise, technology, languages, and stories over long distances. Looking across civilizations, this volume takes a broad view of the Middle Ages in order to foster new habits of thinking and develop a multilayered, critical sense of the past.
The essays in this volume reach across disciplinary lines to bring insights from music, theater, religion, ecology, museums, and the history of disease into the literature classroom. The contributors provide guidance on texts such as the Thousand and One Nights, Sunjata, Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels, and the Malay Annals and on topics such as hotels, maps, and camels. They propose syllabus recommendations, present numerous digital resources, and offer engaging class activities and discussion questions. Ultimately, they provide tools that will help students evaluate popular representations of the Middle Ages and engage with the dynamics of past, present, and future world relationships.
Acknowledgments (xi)
Introduction: What Is the Global Middle Ages and Why and How Do We Teach It? (1)
Part I: Connectivities, Encounter, and Exchange
The Literatures of the Global Middle Ages (27)
Stories of the Silk Roads (48)
Teaching the Worlds of the Thousand and One Nights (66)
Teaching Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels and the Jewish Middle Ages (85)
Teaching the World through the Alexander Legend, a Global Story (99)
The Persian World: A Literary Language in Motion (114)
Teaching Prester John, a Global Legend (131)
Part II: Zones and Geographies of the Global
The Epic of Sunjata and the Changing Worlds of Trans-Saharan Africa (147)
Teaching the Mongols, Eurasia, and the World (163)
The Worlds of South Asia (177)
Chinese Literature and the World: The Tang, Song, and Yuan Dynasties (194)
Teaching the Malay Annals, or Southeast Asia in the World (207)
Jewish History or History of the Jews as Global History (218)
Part III: Habitus: Mapping, Environments, Disease, Animals
Mapping the Worlds of the Global Middle Ages (251)
Deserts, Cities, and Frozen Poles: Teaching Ecology in Early Texts (276)
The World Is an Inn: Habitus in the Global Middle Ages (289)
Disability, Disease, and a Global Middle Ages (302)
The Camel in Early Global Literatures (315)
Part IV: Modalities of Culture, Technologies of Culture
Soundscapes in the Global Middle Ages (343)
Teaching a Global Middle Ages through Manuscripts (361)
Medieval Drama, East and West (382)
Teaching the World through Digital Technology and Media (396)
Teaching the Global Middle Ages through Popular Culture (412)
Part V: Resources
Colleen C. Ho (431)
Notes on Contributors (449)
“This book delivers adept and ingenious pedagogical suggestions, some quite specific and some infinitely adaptable.”
—Thomas Hahn, University of Rochester
