Teaching the Global Middle Ages

The essays in this volume reach across disciplinary lines to bring insights from music, theatre, religion, ecology, museums, and the history of medicine into the literature classroom. The contributors provide guidance on a range of texts and on topics such as hotels, maps, and camels.

Although globalism may seem like a modern phenomenon, people of the premodern world were also interconnected, 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 medicine into the literature classroom. The contributors provide guidance on texts such as the Thousand and One Nights, Sunjata, 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.