CONGRESS CANCELED Crises and Continuity: Teaching the End of the Middle Ages (A Roundtable)

CONGRESS CANCELED Crises and Continuity: Teaching the End of the Middle Ages (A Roundtable)

Bernhard Brown & Gold Room

The idea that the Middle Ages ended in a series of crises – including the Great Famine, the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt in England, and the massacres of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula – has shaped both our scholarship and our teaching. At the same time, there is a broad agreement that the Middle Ages did not have a fixed “end,” and many social, political, and cultural developments persisted into the Early Modern period and beyond. In our classrooms, how do we get the students to appreciate the gravity of the late medieval crises while acknowledging the continuities? Does the conventional periodization for the end of the Middle Ages work? What are the best practices in teaching the late medieval period? How does the way we teach it differ across disciplines? How does the concept of crisis speak to students living through modern challenges? For this roundtable we hope to bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines and teaching backgrounds. Maya Soifer Irish