A student exercise using erasure poetry to interrogate Chaucer's text. By redacting Chaucer's poem, students can reimagine their relationship to premodern literature.

“Merciless Beauty” is a poem written in a late 14th-century English that may or may not be Chaucer’s but is highly comparable to Chaucer’s usage. Reading the poem alongside the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes, students are asked to make connections between the poem and the film and their formal examinations of time, incarceration, and repetition.

The history of racial construction is long and non-linear. Unpacking Blackness within medieval epics, and examining how Black characters are treated in these stories allow us to see how medieval Europe used Blackness as a rhetorical tool.