TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

• In my teens, I was privileged to study with brilliant teachers who were determined that I learn to read, enjoy, and puzzle in detail with them over what they took to be the classics of English literature until I had the skill and confidence do so on my own. Drawn at university towards the mysterious Middle Ages, an era my teachers had neglected, I initially seemed to be left mainly with the puzzling. The first scholarly medievalists I studied with were committed to what was coming to be called alterity and treated enjoyment and the intuitions that come from close reading as temptations to anachronism. Years later, after my teaching method had matured, I saw that it had been shaped by the desire to make medieval literature as exciting and accessible as my early teachers made Milton and Austen while also sharing the fascinating difficulty that is part of any close encounter with the historical past.
• All my medieval teaching, whether undergraduate or graduate, classroom, seminar, or one-on-one, is thus based on the same four stepped axioms. 1) Any moment in the past was once its own present and as such was dynamic, uncertain, and not about us. This means that 2) the past is often best approached less as a precursor than as what Tolkien called a “secondary world,” an alternative present that can be imagined, heuristically, as alive. It additionally means both that 3) our collective experience of being alive in our own present is crucial to perceptions of the past and that 4) the continued life of the past in the present, for both better and worse, is at once essential and peripheral to our discussions.
• As a historian, I emphasize that the present partly issues from the past; that the reception of the past has its own history; and that the legacy of both the past and its reception are deeply vexed. I take care to read literary texts through as well as across time, by tracing literary traditions and the values, motifs, assumptions, and prejudices for which they acted as carriers, to tease out the cultural work carried out by the past in the present. As a close reader, I also seek to inculcate puzzled appreciation, especially when this is hard or brings special benefits. But I share my university professors’ insistence that past moments had their own logics and illogics, despite repudiating the belief that we cannot engage directly with the past, bring our own concerns to it, or otherwise isolate the then from the now. Whether in teaching or research, to understand the past can only be to enter a metaphorical dialogue with it that aspires to keep both parties in balance, listening but also speaking. This same balance must also be sustained with students, denizens of the present who once they have even a basic grasp of our course materials already have as much to teach me via their own speaking and listening as I do them.