What is one major difference you noticed in their writing styles?

Quiz #1: Thinking and Reading Historically

For this take-home “quiz,” you should download this Word document, type your answers below each question, and upload your completed quiz to Quercus. Please answer in complete sentences. This quiz is open book and open note; you should feel free to refer to lectures and lecture notes, but should not need to consult any websites to answer the questions below. Note that your goal should be not to parrot answers back exactly (to copy and paste from lecture notes), but to demonstrate your understanding of some of the larger ideas and concepts by putting ideas into your own words. The questions will also ask you to take ideas we’ve covered in lectures and discussions and apply them push them slightly further. The quiz is out of ten points.

For most questions 1-2 sentences should suffice to answer – these are designed to be short-answer questions, not essay questions!

1. Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth both narrate different understandings of the origins of the British and English people, although the stories they tell differ in interesting ways. Based on your readings of the text and class conversations, what are their different goals? What is the purpose of each author’s argument, based on the parts of the texts you read?

2. Lecture discussed how Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth have different understandings of history, and in particular of the histories of their people. But how do their historiographies, their methods for writing history, differ? What is one major difference you noticed in their writing styles? Use a concrete example from each to illustrate your point.

3. Although we read Gerald of Wales alongside Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald is not writing a history of a people, but describing the present state of Ireland. Why do you think we read Gerald alongside these two authors? How does he complicate the stories both Bede and Geoffrey tell us? What does he add?

4. In your own words, what is synchronic analysis? What is diachronic analysis?

[The next two questions are about a specific passage.] In Mandeville’s Travels, Mandeville writes of a man who successfully circumnavigated the globe, and writes:

even […] men of limited understanding do not believe that men can travel on the underside of the globe without falling off into the firmament [the sky]. For just as it seems to us that those men there are under us, so it seems to them that we are under them. For if it were possible for a man to fall off the earth to the firmament, all the more reason for the earth and the sea, which are very heavy, to fall thither too. But that cannot happen, as God Himself witnesses, when He says, […] ‘Have no fear of me, who have hanged the earth from nothing.’

5. Summarize roughly (no need to do an uber-careful translation like in the MLTs) what this passage from Mandeville is saying, in your own words. Make clear that you both clarify what he is trying to argue, and that you show the steps of the argument.

6. In this one short passage, Sir John Mandeville, a medieval author, both appeals to what we might now call scientific reasoning about gravity, and the word of God, to support his point. How do you analyze these two different kinds of argumentative supports? What might it indicate to you about the medieval period? [There is no one right answer – this is a chance for you to practice your reading skills, and flex your interpretive muscles!]

7. The Second Shepherd’s Play seems to be set in two different time periods: it simultaneously takes place in the year 0 AD / 0 CE, and in ~1500 AD (when the play was written). If you were doing a synchronic analysis of this play, how would you choose which synchronic slice of time, or moment in time (0 AD or 1500 AD), to use as context? In other words, how would it change your reading to see this as a medieval play v. as a play set in Biblical times?

8. We moved into a bit of theater history in our discussion of the Second Shepherd’s Play. Please define “locus” and “platea” in your own words.

9. If you were doing a modern version of the Second Shepherd’s Play, either on stage or for Netflix (specify if you are imagining a theater or a film), what would you do to try to recreate the effect of its locus and platea staging methods for a modern audience? [This is asking you to propose a creative solution and provide a modern adaptation of a historical method.]

10. For this question I’d like to practice thinking about what it means to interpret a literary text given a bit of historical context. So: in lecture I provided examples from other medieval historiography (beyond Bede and Geoffrey) of the belief in other realms intersecting our own: descriptions of doors in hills leading to alternate worlds; strange, alien children appearing in fields; and so on. This tells us that we know that medieval writers believed these stories enough to include them in their chronicles. How does this knowledge change the way you might read Sir Orfeo, given that we learn in the poem that access to the fairy world is likewise through a “rock” or hill? [There is no right answer – this is a chance for you to practice your reading skills, and flex your interpretive muscles!]

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