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

Video

Early modern Orientalism

Dadabhoy's course asks students to read  premodern texts to deconstruct enduring fictions about Islam and Muslims across time and place.

Ambereen Dadabhoy
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
Reading list

Language, race, and Chaucer adaptations

A reading list for teaching Chaucer through modern adaptations. This list focuses on scholarship for reading and understanding Chaucer from a premodern critical race studies lens, including global Chaucer adaptations to help students explore how medieval texts continue to inform questions of identity, power, and belonging.

Jonathan Hsy

Selected annotated bibliography