Steve Raulston, Department of Spanish
I am teaching this semester a course, titled The Middle Ages in Spanish Culture. Its focus on culture means that we are exploring more than the literary cannon and the historical record—material covered in other courses—and trying to approach the ways in which people, over a period of a thousand years, spoke, made their living, ate, saw their world and expressed their place in it verbally, through ritual and custom, and through art, architecture and song. It’s all very Humanities. It’s engaging, varied, and a lot of fun. But a few weeks ago, I hit a snag common to many teachers of the European Middle Ages: This is a Spanish class whose students read, write, and speak decent Castilian; but for most of the period we’re exploring, written culture was produced in Latin by a tiny, literate minority that constituted perhaps two percent of the population. And what was built, composed, painted, and sung was commissioned by and in the service of that same two percent. A Latin text, of course, I can teach in translation. But whose culture was I teaching here? How ethical is it to hold up as culture the achievements of so tiny a fraction of a society?
The illiterate ninety eight percent certainly had a culture. They knew intimately the natural world, the sky, the seasons. They told masterful stories, passed their wisdom along to their children, turned their hopes and failures and broken hearts into verse and song just as Latinate folk did; but all without benefit of writing, all in a context in which the human voice and memory were the only means of keeping important ideas alive. How does one teach that culture?
I turned for material to medieval epic poetry and ballads, both of which were originally the products of oral tradition, and to Walter Ong’s seminal Orality and Literacy as a theoretical lens through which to read them. Ong’s ideas were a revelation to me when I first encountered them. He argues that people in oral societies think and remember in ways fundamentally different from those of people who write, and I hoped that by studying the hallmarks of oral thought and expression our group might be able to identify them in the written versions of originally oral material that have come down to us. This fell completely flat in the classroom. The students found Ong’s writing and ideas clinical, uninspiring, and somehow removed from the material; and to imagine deeply a society whose poems and stories could exist without writing turned out to be a far greater leap for the group than I had appreciated.
I woke the morning of the next class meeting without a clue how to proceed. Over coffee, though I had a flashback about a scoutmaster who taught me to tie a knot with a length of rope and little ditty about a rabbit and a tree. If theory didn’t open any windows onto the past, maybe practice would. No better ideas presented themselves; so, I went to class with a length of cord for each student and did my best scoutmaster demonstration, making the motions with my own cord while reciting, “Up through the rabbit hole, round the big tree; down through the rabbit hole and off goes he.” The students, bemused but tolerant, then individually held their cord the same way, and made the same motions chanting the same verses. Each tied a perfect bowline, then repeated it. And when we talked about why that was such an easy way to learn a new skill, things started to come together a little and Ong’s ideas started to make practical sense. Physical movement paired with a simple narrative in a rhythmic and rhyming form made for a memorable experience that could be recalled and repeated—and for a tiny window onto the patterns and character of oral thought.
We followed up by brainstorming old sayings that we had heard all our lives but rarely read. I wasn’t sure this would work with this wired generation, but it didn’t take them long to achieve some momentum and to produce a long list of adages about old dogs, sleeping dogs, hens’ teeth, sow’s ears, pearls and swine, slippery slopes, counting chickens, eggs and baskets… And when we stopped to analyze what these bits of wisdom had in common, the comments really began to flow. One student expressed astonishment that she had internalized and often used without reflection so much of this material. Others focused on alliteration or rhythm or animals or rhyme. And when we considered all of those observations alongside Ong, it became pretty clear that what the group had dredged up was the residue of our own society’s largely oral past, one full of references to the natural, agricultural, or domestic world—each a little poem, really, an abstract idea in a memorable, familiar wrapper.
When we finally got to the epic poem in a subsequent meeting, it was not hard to see, even though it is a weird text in old Spanish, that its patterns, visual references, repetitions, and cadences were drawn from the same kind of world and the same patterns of thought as our adages, and that, like them, the epic, both a poem and a song, strove to perpetuate ideas its culture considered essential. We spent the final class on our epic in the narthex of All Saints comparing the structure of the Cid poem to that of Sewanee’s own epic narrative in stained glass: the birth, near death, and determined struggle for survival and excellence of the University in its first 100 years. Like the medieval epic, the narthex windows represent a community’s significant investment in giving its defining story an aesthetic, narrative form, the visual song of a community that tells us where we came from, offers virtuous exemplars for emulation, articulates our common values and the ideals to which we aspire.
This was all often clumsy, occasionally desperate grappling on my part. It wasn’t a perfect exploration or even maybe a very good one. But it’s the furthest I’ve made it in getting undergraduates to engage imaginatively with a thing as distant and alien as the culture of medieval northern Spain. And I came away from the experience with three affirmations: 1) For me, the best teaching moments are often physical, simple, and grounded in students’ personal experience. 2) Analogy is a powerful teaching tool. My students responded flatly to the grad-school-like proposal of learning a set of theoretical ideas and applying them to an old text. But when they could see those ideas living inside their own linguistic heritage, or when they could approach an ancient legend through the structure and ideas of the sanctioned tale of a place they love, they were inclined to engage actively and imaginatively with an unfamiliar and daunting medieval artifact. 3) Sometimes the most useful teaching tools are what’s simple and lying about: a length of cord, our common culture, the spaces we pass every day.