My version of the capstone course for advanced English majors, “Performing the Middle Ages,” always features an experiential component.
For example, when the Actors from the London Stage come to town, as they did with Romeo and Juliet in Spring 2022 and King Lear in Spring 2019, students were able to meet with actors in class to compare approaches to literature and then to watch them perform Shakespeare’s dramatizations of narratives stolen from medieval history.
When McCain does not bring the company to campus, we analyze screen versions of the Middle Ages, including season 1 of Game of Thrones in 2014, The Reckoning, a film that follows an acting troupe forced to tour by a plague outbreak, in 2017, and the beloved Heath Ledger film A Knight’s Tale this term.
Every semester includes a feast where students taste recipes from the time period and share creative projects inspired by our study, drawing on skills not usually prioritized in English classes. To list just a few of many memorable projects, students have taught classmates medieval-inspired choreography, animated action from the Battle of Agincourt, created a Dungeons and Dragons campaign based on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and embroidered and knit scenes from the Lais of Marie de France.
This spring, students also got to go on a field trip, traveling to the University of Kansas to view the Kenneth Spencer Research Library exhibit on “Marvelous Medieval Marginalia: Drawings, Doodles, and Notes on the Edges of Readers’ Imaginations.”
They then completed a hands-on workshop about manuscripts and early printed books with Special Collections Curator Elspeth Healey.
The visit culminated in Alex Myers’s presentation, “Out of Silence: Using Fiction to Find History,” at the Hall Center for the Humanities as part of the Medieval and Early Modern Seminar and the Gender Studies Seminar. Myers is the author of one of our course texts, The Story of Silence, a 2021 novel that adapts the 13th-century French romance Silence about a girl raised as a boy so that she can inherit Cornwall.
Leaving the seminar, students described the trip as “amazing,” “inspiring,” and “worth the drive to Lawrence.”
— Wendy Matlock, Professor
K-State English 