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Why Read That? Selling the Middle Ages

  • Diane Cady (author)
Chapter of: The Ballad of the Lone Medievalist(pp. 119–135)

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Metadata
TitleWhy Read That?
SubtitleSelling the Middle Ages
ContributorDiane Cady (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0205.1.11
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-ballad-of-the-lone-medievalist/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightCady, Diane
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2018-08-23
Long abstractAs medievalists, we often do our training in graduate programs with several medievalists on staff, only to find ourselves teach-ing in places where we are the lone medievalists. As a conse-quence, we may find ourselves fielding questions from students, colleagues, and administrators about the value — cultural, aes-thetic and economic — of studying the Middle Ages. I remem-ber one such question early in my career, during my first se-mester at Mills College, a small liberal arts college in Oakland, California, with a woman-identified, undergraduate popula-tion. How, a student asked, could I love Chaucer? Initially, her question surprised me: I not only love Chaucer, but also often wonder how anyone could not love Chaucer. Yet, I also under-stood the source of her question. We had just finished reading “The Reeve’s Tale,” a short and troubling story that, like many of the Canterbury Tales, presents women’s bodies as the terrain on which male rivalry is fought. Does teaching such stories per-petuate the idea that sexual violence is inevitable? Does it repro-duce misogyny and gender bias, she pressed? What value, if any, do texts like these hold for us as readers today?
Page rangepp. 119–135
Print length17 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Diane Cady

(author)