from Medieval Academy News

Medieval Outreach
by Ronald Herzman

Surely one of the more interesting and possibly one of the more important questions we need to ask ourselves as medievalists from time to time is “Who is our audience?” What follows are some reflections on ways that I and friends and students of mine have attempted to expand that audience by doing what I am calling “medieval outreach”: what we do outside the boundaries of the academy.

I’ll start with my punch line and then give a few anecdotes to illustrate. My punch line is obvious: we should all be doing more outreach. I think there is an audience out there in all kinds of places that badly wants (and I am inclined to say badly needs) to hear what we have to say because what we have to say is really good. Equally important, I think outreach is one of the best ways to check up on ourselves and to remind ourselves of what turned us on about medieval studies in the first place.

Anecdote one: In the Belly of the Beast. One of my students went to graduate school to study medieval literature a couple of years ago, but for a variety of reasons she left after completing her M.A. She may or may not go back. But, a very bright woman, she was recruited by Microsoft and has now happily relocated to Seattle. Apparently, new recruits there are asked to post a brief autobiography and send it around. Images of a virtual dating game flashed through my mind when she told me this story: “I like surfing and climbing Mt. Everest, and taking long walks in the sand.” Her posting mentioned, rather, that one of her passions is Dante. Within a few days e-mails started coming in from across the Microsoft community from other workers saying that they, too, had always wanted to read Dante, but didn’t quite know how to get started. She is now running a Dante reading and discussion group there.

Two: In the Schools. What I have discovered in a decade and a half of directing NEH Seminars for School Teachers in the summer on Dante and on Chaucer is that there is an enormous amount of creativity going on in teaching the Middle Ages at the pre-collegiate level that many of us know little about. To give just one example:

“Who could have known that Circle Eight contained a bolgia where the Jazz Fraud Artists were punished, Kenny G. the chief sinner? Assigning the writing of their own canto one year to my regular college-bound students, I suggested possible topics, among them crimes against fashion. One student eagerly volunteered that she hated ‘cross dressers.’ ‘A teaching moment,’ I thought, ‘of tolerance.’ Hadn’t we placed the mosques of Dis or the sodomites in historical context? How was I to know that cross dressers, God forbid, mix brands of sports clothing? ‘Like, you know, wearing an Adidas cap with a Nike shirt.’ Seriously, the winged goddess of teaching provided us all with an opportunity to gain knowledge that day.”

One of the applicants to the Dante seminar that Bill Stephany and I directed last summer in Italy wrote this as part of his application. Needless to say, he got in. I have been giving similar assignments to the students who read Dante with me in our required humanities class at Geneseo, and I don’t think I have come up with anything quite so enlightening from my own students. We need to take a look at how teaching and learning are done at other levels and for other audiences than our own.

Three: Summer Classics. One of the members of a great books Summer Classics Seminar on the Paradiso that I directed at St. John’s College in New Mexico a couple of summers ago had a foot problem. Despondent that she wouldn’t be able to make it back to Santa Fe for the next summer’s program, she started her own version in Toronto. She got St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto to run it, where it has been a huge success for three summers, complete with long write-ups in the Toronto papers. I visited there to watch a seminar on Paradiso, directed by Mary Watt, a Dantista who herself had been a lawyer before getting her Ph.D. It’s instructive to listen to what a Canadian High Court Justice, a Manhattan psychotherapist, and a retired school teacher into local politics, among others, have to say about Dante.

Four: The Teaching Company. The Teaching Company, which markets a series of video and audio tapes called “The Great Courses on Tape,” has tapped into the Middle Ages to the tune of full courses on Dante, Chaucer, Arthurian Literature, the History of the English Language, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, Byzantium, various historical surveys of the Middle Ages, and chunks of courses on Great Authors of the Western Tradition, Comedy through the Ages, and Philosophy and Religion in the West, among others. The audience for these courses includes, but is by no means limited to, commuters, retired folks, academics way out of their disciplines, successful professionals who were in a non-liberal arts track in college, successful professionals who were in a liberal arts track in college but who never got around to the really good stuff, and successful professionals who were too busy with less academic pursuits in college to notice. A very interesting aspect of what is an exceedingly successful venture—a friend told me recently that the only catalogues that come to his home more frequently than the Teaching Company’s are those from Land’s End—is that the subjects for these courses have been determined by customer preference surveys. If these surveys are at all accurate, what people want is unadulterated Middle Ages, and this should be very heartening to us.

These are not totally random examples in that I am obviously drawing from my own experiences and those of my friends and students, and that is the somewhat slim thread that holds them all together, but because I have been actively participating in these and other outreach adventures for many years now, it seems appropriate to stand back and ask what the point of them all is. It’s amazing what we can learn when what we teach and study and write about is refracted back to us without footnotes. Learning to do it without footnotes can by a very cleansing and purifying ritual.

I learned this most poignantly in the eighties when my Geneseo colleague Bill Cook and I taught a four-credit course on Dante at Attica Correctional Facility. Dante’s issues were starkly real to our inmate students. It wasn’t simply that they lived in an Inferno of their own, or that they could relate to Dante’s exile through their own “exile,” or even that Dante’s system of justice forced them to confront their own sense of justice or to ask questions about how they got where they were, important as all those connections to the poem were for them. They were even more interested in the possibilities for transformation and redemption offered them by the Purgatorio (their favorite part of the poem) and the Paradiso. At the end of the course, while we were giving the final exam, one of the students caught me at the water fountain and said, “You know, when I read this stuff, it’s like I’m out of here.” For most of our regular teaching, we try to convince our students that what we teach really matters. What Attica taught Bill Cook and me above all is that what we teach matters in ways we would never have imagined.

In Attica, the vocabulary to discuss these issues sometimes had to be transposed from the key of scholar-speak to inmate-speak. The process was by no means a dumbing down. Indeed, it may have been the opposite. The transposition taught us at least as much as it taught them. And that is exactly the point. I urge you to participate in this ritual for your own sakes.

Missionary activity is, of course, also part of the point, and I hope I don’t have to convince anyone of the importance of that activity, especially when we are not as visible as most of the competing claims on people’s attention. I also ponder the fact that in some ways the academy is less hospitable than it used to be, to the extent that the academy is more plugged into the technocracy than it used to be. This is the subject for another reflection, one that I certainly have not figured out yet. I don’t mean to sound too apocalyptic.

I’m not trying to suggest that the day we will be marginalized out of existence is right around the corner. But I'm just not sure that the university community is the only place we can do what we were trained to do any more nor that it is wise to work only within the university community. I think of the way that students currently coming out of graduate school, or coming out of college, have to confront the question of what to do with their lives without the kind of institutional support that I had. They have responded by becoming entrepreneurial in a way that is very different from my generation’s choices. I think some of us more senior types might be able to learn from them.

Editor’s note. Ronald Herzman, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the State University of New York, Geneseo, was the NEH program officer who founded Summer Seminars for School Teachers in 1983. He gave this talk in May 2001 for a session on Where We Are Now: Professional Issues, at the Thirty-Sixth Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University.