On graduating high school, many American students believe that the Middle Ages was full of knights, war, all-powerful popes, and, if their content went beyond Europe, potentially an incredibly wealthy man named Mansa Musa, and a Mesoamerican ballgame. In this version of the past, medieval people were backward, dirty, and all believed the earth was flat. While people who work within this chronological time period recognize its complexity, most students are not exposed to the history of the middle ages until they take upper level or graduate classes at universities, if they ever get that far. Given recent national and international events, it is evident that leaving this complicated and nuanced history for so late in a person’s educational journey is doing a social as well as educational disservice. In a quest to help teachers remediate this problem, several scholars of the global Middle Ages and Medievalisms have written lesson guides to be used by teachers of World and United States history for grades six through twelve. the goal is to create a collection that a teacher would be able to implement in their classroom with minimal additional work.
Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge is assistant professor of early childhood through secondary education/social studies, University of West Georgia. She is the founder and instructor of (Re-)Learning US History.
Introduction – Teaching Beyond the Standards (Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge)Overview 1 – Daily Life (Lucy Barnhouse)Chapter 1 – Monks in the Making: Simulating a Medieval Benedictine Monastery (Matthew Baker)Chapter 2 – Body Art and Tattoos in the Global Middle Ages (Esther Liberman Cuenca)Chapter 3 - “Help I’ve Been Stabbed!”: A Lesson on Policing in the Middle Ages (Samantha Sagui)Chapter 4 – Medieval Disability and the Malian Epic of Sundiata (Kisha Tracy)Chapter 5 – Did Women have Power and Rights in Medieval Europe (Caroline Dunn)Overview 2 – Religion (Lucy Barnhouse)Chapter 6 – Justinian, Orthodoxy, and Byzantium (Ruma Salhi)Chapter 7 – Medieval World Traders (Ruma Salhi)Chapter 8 – Faiths in Contact and Conflict: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Medieval Spain (Sarah Ifft Decker)Chapter 9 – All-Powerful Popes? Not so fast - political and religious negotiation in medieval Europe (Elizabeth Keohane-Burbridge)Chapter 10 – The Medieval Latin Church in China? A Report from a Missionary! (Joshua Hevert)Chapter 11 – Why did the First Crusade Succeed where Later Crusades Failed? (David Gyllenhaal)Overview 3 – Work, Exchange, and Encounter (Lucy Barnhouse)Chapter 12 – Between East and West: The Medieval Kyivan Rus and Its Legacy (Hilary Rhodes)Chapter 13 – Calicut as a Site of Encounter (Shannen Hutton)Chapter 14 – From Isolation to Modernity: Japan’s Tokugawa Transnational Era (Habib Al Badawi)Chapter 15 – Mapping the Materiality of Cathedrals in the Global Middle Ages (John Terry)Overview 4 – Medievalism in United States History (Lucy Barnhouse)Chapter 16 – Who Are the Indigenous Nations in Your State Since Time Immemorial? (Rachel Talbert)Chapter 17 – Contesting Confederate Chivalry in Civil War Era Newspapers (Kerry Boeye)Chapter 18 – Reconstructing Ring Tournaments: A Popular Medievalism with Political Implications (Whitney Leeson)
