We’re halfway through the semester, and we’ve reached the Malory portion of King Arthur. We’ve covered chronicle, romance, and now we’re working our way through The Other. Funnily enough, the Other is a little absent in the Arthurian canon. We have Sir Morien, Palomides and his brothers (Safir and Segwarides).  Next week, we read King Artus, the only extant Hebrew Arthurian romance, which reconfigures Arthurian romance tradition to be more accessible for a Hebrew audience.

We’ve established that learning, education, science, and medicine as we know it basically moved from the civilized Middle East and Asia into the barbaric west. We’ve situated Britain as the ass-end of the Roman Empire and the flyover zone of the early Middle Ages in Europe. We’re working our way through the idea that a potentially backwater Celtic/Welsh/Romano-Briton warlord could become the exemplar and basis for the fantasy of knights in shining armor. And I still feel like I’m struggling as a font of knowledge to try and educate students on the ‘reality’ of the Middle Ages.

We always begin with a caveat: there is no universal experience for women/people of color/lower classes/minorities in the Middle Ages of Western Europe. Then I post resources on the board: MedievalPOC on Twitter and Tumblr, the story of Buddha that was translated and adapted into Old Norse, and any websites I’ve come across lately that help push and prove the idea of a Global Middle Ages. I’m going to troll the list of Medieval YA novels to find the especially diverse ones (several promising ones under “The Crusades” and “Medieval Europe, the Continent, and Byzantium”). What else can I do?

I don’t know. Prepare for a better answer when a student asks me, “Wait, weren’t all the knights white?” Do a better job of trying to educate myself, my students, and the world at large. Or, when all else fails, sing lots of “True Colors” at the top of my lungs and take Cyndi Lauper’s words to heart as I try to reclaim, in my own way, medieval history and literature for diverse voices.

And if that fails, I’ll go back to Tumblr and read more “I lik the bred” variations.

Resources I’m currently reading;

BLACK AND LIMINAL IN CAMELOT by Kris Swank, Pima Community College, Tucson, Arizona

Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages: Tearing down the “whites only” medieval world