Hicks-Bartlett, Alani. “Redefining the 'foreign' in medieval and early modern texts.” Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/Redefining-the-foreign-in-medieval-and-early-modern-texts. [date accessed].

Redefining the “foreign” in medieval and early modern texts

Breaking temporal and linguistic boundaries

Download the transcript
Alani Hicks-Bartlett
Brown University

Students often perceive premodern texts, especially those with origins beyond the English language, as inscrutable or “foreign.” To help bridge students’ relationship between their present and the cultures and histories of the premodern, Hicks-Bartlett assigns texts across temporal and linguistic ranges. Putting premodern texts in conversation with contemporary critical theory and scholarship guides students to deeper understandings of the reverberations of race, gender, and class across time.

Further learning

Recommended

RaceB4Race Highlight

Performing diversity work in medieval studies

Sierra Lomuto examines the field of medieval studies and how it privileges whiteness in knowledge production. The Global Medieval/Early Globalities as a methodology can open up current structures and create a spacetime beyond Europe.

Sierra Lomuto
Video

Where were the Black people in the Middle Ages?

Records and texts from the period offer insight into a rich and cosmopolitan medieval Europe, where there were not only Black people, but they held positions of power and prestige.

Cord J. Whitaker
Video

How to talk about race in the classroom

Ayanna Thompson discusses how PCRS in the classroom starts with students and teachers being comfortable talking frankly about the reality of race in their lives as well as in the texts they encounter.

Ayanna Thompson

Selected annotated bibliography