The Global Middle Ages and Its Outcomes

Catalog description

The Middle Ages, as a conceptualized period, is often forced to fight battles of misinformation on two fronts. The first, that it was a time of significant insulation between cultures which (if they interacted at all) were mainly throwing as many swords at each other as possible or were otherwise comprised of a bunch of white people waiting around for the Enlightenment. The second, that the period has had a negligible impact on contemporary cultures and is something that should be swept under the nearest rug available. Our course will interrogate these views of the Middle Ages through the literature it produced, and the literature, film, and music which is produced about it. We will attempt to construct a more nuanced view of the medieval period. One which, while including a fair share of sword throwing, also acknowledges cross cultural interactions which were decidedly less sharp. We will also examine how the medieval informs the modern in negative and positive ways so that we can recognize why some people are still throwing swords, and why so many books have something to do with a dragon.