Experiments in Teaching Medieval Women’s Writing
by Maggie Solberg
I wanted to try something new. In the winter of 2021, I was planning yet another round of remote courses for the spring semester of Zoom University (I teach at a small liberal arts college in Maine, so the phrase “spring semester” might be a bit of a stretch: from January until April in Maine, you’ve got winter and then you’ve got mud). It had started to feel like my courses on medieval language and literature were, very suddenly, only causing pain. How could I possibly ask my students to learn Old and Middle English when the world seemed to be ending?
Looking for answers, I came across an essay published in June of 2020 in response to the pandemic by Carolyn Dinshaw, a luminary in the field of Medieval Studies whose incandescence has converted many an undergraduate, myself included. In this essay, Dinshaw wrote about the need for experimentation in our classrooms, at our institutions, and in the public sphere: “resourceful, imaginative, original, inventive, responsive, yet uncertain, tentative, and prone to failure.” Dinshaw took up as an exemplar Saidiya Hartman’s 2019 book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals.
In this world-changing book, Hartman practices an experimental method of writing about history that confronts the challenge faced by, as she puts it, “every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved,” namely “the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor.” In response to this problem, Hartman “elaborates, augments, transposes, and breaks open archival documents,” thereby “reconstructing the experience of the unknown and retrieving minor lives from oblivion.” Dinshaw asked us to consider how we might, as medievalists, “draw inspiration” from Hartman’s experimentalism, and come up with something new to try.
So, I decided to offer a course on medieval women’s writings, something new for me. Feminism can feel cyclical, as each generation reexperiences the same-different circles in new-old ways. After many years of teaching Great Men, Geniuses, and Fathers, I was at the turning point, ready to come around to teaching the textual records of the voices of the women and non-binary folx retrieved from cupboards and championed in the classroom by my academic foremothers. I wanted to try to teach these texts in a new and experimental way.
I paired each medieval text with a sympathetic correspondent from the twentieth or twenty-first century: Marie de France’s Lanval with Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018) (plus, as an anti-romance counter-point, Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”); Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies with Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (2017) and The Combahee River Collective Statement edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2017); The Visions of Julian of Norwich with Jia Tolentino’s codeine-induced ecstatic visions from her essay collection, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion (2019); the twelfth-century love letters of Héloïse with those shared between Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark in I’m Very into You: Correspondence 1995–1996 (2015) and those compiled by Chris Krause in I Love Dick (1997); the autobiographical-ish writings of Margery Kempe and Michaela Coel, specifically her one-woman play, Chewing Gum Dreams (although I could also have indulged my strong personal feeling that Margery and Lena Dunham have quite a lot in common); and the trials of Joan of Arc and Eleanor Rykener with the trial of Chelsea Manning.
I came up with these pairings serendipitously, instinctually, experimentally. Each week, I asked my students to brainstorm pairings of their own to play with: Kyubin Kim (Class of 2022, English major) paired Marie’s Lais with The Bachelorette (2003–); Taran Sun (Class of 2021, English major) paired The Letters of Héloïse with Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016); and Lianna Harrington (Class of 2021, English major) paired The Book of Margery Kempe with Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings (2020). This is a game that medievalists play, if we are playful, in our heads and in conversations amongst ourselves. I find that it also happens, spontaneously and almost unavoidably, in the classroom — but I had never made it the focus of the course itself.
What came of this experiment? Since I had no idea what I was doing, I let my students lead. Each week, I would ask, “What’s similar and what’s different, based on these readings, between now and then?” And then we would switch it around and try to turn the differences to similarities and the similarities to differences. This trick always worked — it always worked both ways. I rotated through groups that led class discussion, meeting with me beforehand to brainstorm the key topics, questions, passages, and throughlines they wanted to discuss: their big ideas, first impressions, changes of heart, identifications and disidentifications.
At the end of the semester, we realized that so many of the texts we had read, medieval and modern, shared what felt to us like a coherent feminist poetics. Patterns repeated: we kept being struck by the qualities of rawness, realness, and powerful, unsettling vulnerability — we kept noticing that the first-person had fragmented into many selves speaking with distorted voices. Like many before us, we became enchanted, in Geraldine Heng’s words, by “the textual erotics of receiving another woman’s words,” by “fantasies of recognition,” but also inspired to rise to the challenge of undergoing, to quote Heng again, a complete “re-education in history and aesthetics.” The chemical reaction of mixing then and now inspired awakenings, visions, trips, break-ups, reconciliations, op-eds, collectives, and protests. I did not insist that students hand in close readings and research papers, but rather invited them to write responses to these texts in kind. They wrote manifestos back to Christine and Sara Ahmed, romances back to Marie and Sally Rooney, and autobiographies back to Margery and Michaela Coel.
In the second half of the semester, we took apart the keywords in the course’s title: “medieval,” “women” and “writing.” We questioned the utility of the category of “women,” guided by Dorothy Kim and M. W. Bychowski; Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Klosowska; and the contributors to the volume on Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography edited by Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt. We explored ongoing scholarly debates that call into question the authorship and authority of Marie de France and Héloïse and the authenticity of the hear-say voices of Joan of Arc and Eleanor Rykener. We disputed the tough question of what to include in the curriculum of “medieval women’s writing” when so much is anonymous, in pieces, compromised, or lost.
These controversies resonated with our contemporary pairings — in the infuriating catalog of thefts and erasures of women’s work compiled by Chris Kraus in I Love Dick; in the admission by the editor (and literary executor of Acker’s estate) in the introduction to I’m Very Into You that Acker would never have agreed to the publication of her private emails had she lived; in the messy public struggle between writer and character for authority over the meaning of “Cat Person.”
Alongside these readings, students worked on their independent research projects: documentary research into women’s writings in their own families, whether biological or chosen. I wanted the lessons we had learned about the history of the archive to get personal. I did the project too, and I read baby books going back generations — my mother’s baby book about me and her mother’s baby book about her. My grandmother’s account begins in 1950 with waking up from twilight sleep (“I was informed that she was born hungry”) and proceeds into references to formula, baptism, and sweet white dresses. “She is so easy to care for that we are scarcely aware of her presence.” My mother’s, a second-wave story, begins four months in, and is always in a hurry, recording the vicissitudes of breastfeeding, sleep training, and finding childcare.
Some of my students found their mothers’ college diaries and letters exchanged between sisters. Others found recipes — published in the local paper, scrawled on the back of a prescription pad, compiled as a wedding gift, or written on stationary with a Mrs. in front of a man’s name. Others found text messages, Hallmark cards, to-do lists, expense ledgers, and photographs. Others still found little to nothing at all. In many cases, illiteracy, migration, and disaster had left no written word behind. These students created their own archive — whether by transcribing Zoom interviews with living relatives or, guided by Saidiya Hartman, investigating the histories of where and when their foremothers would have been and then filling in the cracks with speculation deeply informed by research (A tip: Hartman’s “A Note on Method” from Wayward Lives, which is only three pages long, makes for an excellent roadmap for this kind of creative archival research project).
My favorite medieval metaphors for learning are all digestive: the student should collect the nectar of learning from a promiscuous variety of books, like a butterfly; eat words, like a bookworm; chew the cud of meaning, like a cow; and make honey from it, like a honeybee. In this course, I felt like we really went for it, and we got there. We experimented. In hard times, it felt good to bring these histories nearer, to hold them closer, and to make them a part of ourselves — by compiling, swallowing, ruminating, and refining something old to create something new.
This essay expands upon ideas that I first expressed in NCS: Pedagogy and Profession 2.2 in 2021 and then continued to develop for the session on “Present Negotiations with the Past” sponsored by the Middle English Forum at the Modern Language Association Convention in 2022.
Resources and Further Reading:
Before attempting to teach this course, I took a summer to refresh my feminist theory. Here’s my reading list, which I shared with my most enthusiastic students. (Well, really, my most enthusiastic student: yes, you, Victoria.) Here is what we read:
- Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya (Pluto, 2017)
- Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970)
- Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019)
- The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, edited by Roxane Gay (Norton, 2020)
- Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Penguin Random House, 2020)
Maggie Solberg is Associate Professor of English at Bowdoin College in Maine, where she teaches medieval literature. Her first monograph, Virgin Whore, was published by Cornell University Press in 2018. She has published recently in postmedieval, PMLA, and Exemplaria on bookworms, the bob and wheel, and the Black Madonna, and is currently at work on a second book about the strange survivals of medieval theater, including marionettes, the vaudevillian hook, and blackface. She is also the Vice President of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society, and wants you to submit your work on early drama for our annual prizes!
