This post is by Sarah B. Rude (PhD Baylor 2017), Armstrong Browning Library Teaching Fellow 2015.
One of the greatest blessings and cruelest curses of teaching a literature survey is the enormous span of history that these courses require. For instance, when I taught British Literature at Baylor University, I began the semester with Beowulf and finished with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Buried Giant (2015). Depending on one’s preferred dating of Beowulf (somewhere between 600-1000 AD), I was left with well over a thousand years’ worth of literature to choose from. The good news is that there are so many excellent pieces of poetry, prose, and drama to choose from. The bad news is that no matter what small sliver of literary history I chose to present to my students, I would have only the briefest moment of class time to spare for historical context, a crucial component for understanding authorial motives, audience responses, and the social/cultural movements that all help shape a literary text.
Confronted with this challenge, I chose one small facet of history that fundamentally influenced all the literature we read in the class: the history of writing technology and composing practices. I believed that if I could help my students experience concepts like manuscript culture, the printing press revolution, or the tight-knit communities of authors in later British history, I could create small windows into whole literary time periods. With this in mind, I designed several workshops and activities featuring materials from Baylor Libraries’ Special Collections that would put students in direct contact with items from the time periods we were studying. Throughout the semester, we took four field trips to the libraries so that students could engage with the primary materials and deepen their appreciation of the literature we read.
Medieval Manuscript Culture
The class took our first field trip a few weeks into the semester as we completed the unit on medieval literature. In this workshop, students were divided into three groups and equipped with worksheets that asked them to consider specific features of individual manuscripts and facsimiles from Central Libraries’ Special Collections. At two stations, students were asked to consider paleography (handwriting) and codicology (book construction); a third station provided carpenter pencils and some samples of medieval handwriting so that students could “be the scribe” and experience the difficulty and tedium of working in a scriptorium (at least for ten minutes!). In this workshop, the combination of exposure to original manuscripts (a few from as early as the twelfth century) and the hands-on activity of replicating medieval script immersed students in an aspect of medieval history they had not considered before.
In an informal follow-up survey regarding the workshop, several students expressed their delight in working with primary documents with comments like “I’ve never seen things this old before!” and “I had no idea Baylor had manuscripts, so it was cool to see the originals.” They also demonstrated an increased appreciation for the history of book-making and how manuscript culture would have affected the literature we were studying. Several students commented on “how much time and effort it takes to write a single manuscript.” Or, as another student succinctly put it, “[R]ealizing how someone actually wrote those with their own hands so long ago was really awesome.”
Classroom activity instructions: Medieval Book Production Stations (click to download)
Printing Press Revolution
A few weeks after the medieval manuscript workshop, the class took its second field trip, this time to the Armstrong Browning Library (ABL) for a workshop on the impact of the printing press. Students were divided into four groups and sent to four stations. Station One featured a beautiful, full-scale facsimile of the Gutenberg Bible (borrowed from Central Libraries) that students could page through and examine themselves. Station Two contained several original incunables (books printed before 1500, also borrowed from Central Libraries), and students were asked to investigate specific features of typeface and book construction. At Station Three, students explored several books printed between 1500-1700 (from ABL) and witnessed the development of textual features like tables of contents and pagination that were not standardized until well after the printing press’ invention. At the fourth and final station I set up my personal set of moveable type (purchased very cheaply on eBay.com), and students were tasked with arranging the moveable type into composing sticks to form their name. This ended up being a task more difficult than students expected since the type must be arranged in a mirror image in order to appear correctly on the page; several students commented on the difficulty of setting type in their survey responses. As in the manuscript workshop, students were excited by the opportunity to interact with historical documents. Also as in the manuscript workshop, the combination of experiencing the primary sources and attempting to set type manually, students gained a deeper understanding of how an advance in writing technology transformed the world.
Classroom activity instructions: Renaissance Book Production Stations (click to download)
Audience Reception of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
At the beginning of the unit on Romanticism, the class took a third field trip to the ABL, this time to experience the audience reception to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a poem that we also began to discuss during this class period. This activity was much simpler than the previous workshops: I simply used scans of the early editions of Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800) and Coleridge’s Works (1828) to show students how Coleridge had edited his poem in response to his critics. Students played a game of “spot the differences” for the first pages of the poem and the table of contents, and then we discussed as a class why Coleridge would have made those changes. In the last portion of class, students were invited to the front of the room to examine the texts themselves. Even this simplified activity had a similar effect on students, however. As one student wrote in the follow-up survey, “hearing about old prints is cool, but actually seeing them is special.”
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner” Presentation (PowerPoint) (click to download)
Victorian Correspondence
For our final field trip, we returned to the ABL and held class in the Elizabeth Barrett Browning Salon. Surrounded by Victorian furniture—some of it owned by EBB herself—we read aloud a few poems by the Brownings as rain tapped on the stained glass windows. Then we began an activity in which students explored a series of letters written by EBB to various correspondents. For this activity, I chose a small sample of EBB’s letters concerned with her love of medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer and her contribution to a collection titled Chaucer’s Poems Modernized, edited by Richard Hengist Horne. Many of the letters are held by other libraries, so the students worked from scans; however, the ABL’s special collections do hold one of the letters, which we exhibited on a table so students could appreciate miniscule size of Victorian letters. The ABL’s special collections also house several of the artifacts surrounding the project, like a copy of Chaucer’s Poems Modernized with the “vernally green back” that EBB describes in one letter, and the issue of the literary magazine The Athenæum in which a scathing review of the project appears (EBB describes the review in one of her letters as “tender-hearted people keep[ing] themselves warm [in] this cold weather by tomahawking their neighbours”). Perhaps due to the picturesque setting of the EBB Salon or due to the emotional rollercoaster that EBB felt for the Chaucer project, students were enthralled by the correspondence and learned to appreciate the communal, collaborative nature of many Victorian authors.
Classroom activity instructions: EBB’s Chaucer Letters Activity (click to download)
Conclusion
At the beginning of this project, I wanted my students to engage with primary sources in order to gain an appreciation for the literary texts we were reading in class and the historical contexts that made the texts what they are. In the four semesters during my doctoral program when I taught this class and employed these activities, my students did just that. Their responses to the informal follow-up survey confirm both intense student interest in working with primary documents, and a deeper understanding and appreciation of British (and hopefully all) literature. As one student wrote, “[Working with primary materials] reminds me that people really worked on these books and really cared about these stories. Before seeing the originals it was almost like the authors were made up characters themselves.” And even among those indifferent to the fields of history and literature, these activities sparked the curiosity that all teachers hope for among their students: “I used to hate history because it was just another collection of meaningless words, but understanding every aspect of how the writing was made and under what circumstances gives me a whole new sense of interest.” Teaching with the special collections was one of the highlights of my graduate career at Baylor, and I hope more instructors take advantage of the outstanding collections and excellent librarians in their future classes.
Dr. Sarah B. Rude is an assistant professor of medieval literature at Fairmont State University in Fairmont, WV. She received a fellowship at the ABL in the inaugural year of the Teaching Fellows Program (2015), and used the strategies described above in the final two years of teaching during her doctoral program in English literature at Baylor.