Conversations with the Dean
Featuring Professor Susie Phillips
Professor of English Susie Phillips and Dean Adrian Randolph discuss why teaching matters, how asking bold questions can open entire worlds of “speculative possibility” in scholarship, and the power of gossip.
Susie Phillips is the Alumnae of Northwestern Teaching Professor of English at Northwestern University. She is a medievalist with Early Modern leanings and teaches courses on late medieval and Early Modern literature and culture, drama, poetry, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Her second book, Learning to Talk Shop: Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England (forthcoming from UPenn) examines best-selling multilingual textbooks that opened a virtual classroom to students who did not have access to formal education, offering instruction in the practical, and murky, ethics of the premodern marketplace. Phillips has also published essays on Chaucer, gossip theory, late medieval pastoral practice, Renaissance dictionaries, medieval multilingualism, and pre-modern pedagogy. |
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Adrian Randolph is dean of the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Henry Wade Rogers Professor of the Humanities. Dean Randolph's research focuses on the art and architecture of the medieval Renaissance Italy. He joined Northwestern in 2015 from Dartmouth College. There, he served as the associate dean of the faculty for the Arts and Humanities, chair of the Department of Art History, and director of the college’s Leslie Center for the Humanities. |
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Conversation Transcript
Adrian Randolph: Welcome to Weinberg College's “Conversations with the Dean,” and today we're extraordinarily lucky to be joined by my colleague and friend, Professor Susie Phillips. Susie is the Alumnae of Northwestern Teaching Professor of English at Northwestern University. She's a medievalist with early modern leanings and teaches courses on late medieval and early modern literature and culture, drama, poetry, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. And she's currently teaching a course on Chaucer and on that author's Canterbury Tales. Her second book, Learning to Talk Shop: Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England, is forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press. It examines bestselling, multilingual textbooks that opened a virtual classroom to students who did not have access to formal education, offering instruction in the practical and murky ethics of the pre-modern marketplace. And when we say pre-modern, for those of you who aren't in our world, we're really trying to join together, let's say medieval, in this case, Europe, and I don't know, Susie, where you end up, but something like the 17th, 18th century. But we can refine that in our conversation. Susie has also published essays on Chaucer, gossip theory, late medieval pastoral practice, Renaissance dictionaries, medieval multilingualism, and pre-modern pedagogy. Susie, thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you're going to enjoy this as much as I know I will.
Susie Phillips: I'm really looking forward to it, Adrian, and thank you so much for having me, and welcome everyone. I can't see you, but I'll wave.
Randolph: Yeah, we know you're out there, there's at least 40 plus of you out there in cyberspace. So, Susie, there are so many different ways we could begin this conversation. I wanted to know, to start off, with a very general question, what attracted you to studying Chaucer? Geoffrey Chaucer, this, you know, major figure of European literature, of course, but what is it that resonated with his works in your mind, and potentially with your students in the classroom? And I suppose more broadly, but I'm assuming not everyone joining us today is a medievalist, is there anything about medieval literature that you think is especially relevant today, rather than, let's say, I assume many people would say, "Why? You know, what's so special about that? Why are we studying that still?"
Phillips: So, I often start my Canterbury Tales class with the confession that I began my life as a math major. And when I was a sophomore math major, I took a course on The Canterbury Tales, and my life has never been the same since. And so, I warned the students that this could be a life-changing experience for them. For me, it was that Chaucer was incredibly funny about really serious things as a way of getting students, and readers to think about the big questions of their day, right? How do we think about the church that's structuring our every day? How do we think about the fact that there is an aristocratic hierarchy who owns all the land and helps to make the laws and governs the country, when the vast majority of people are kind of working on those manors? Those large estates that knights, earls, dukes owned… And for me, the humor as a teaching tool, and the question as a teaching tool to ask, well, you know, why are things this way? Do we believe that virtue resides in those who claim it as their birthright? Or do we think it comes from your actions? And so, Chaucer for me as a reader and as a teacher is someone who's like constantly messing with me. You think you know where you stand, you think you know what he's arguing, and then you realize actually, things might be a little more complicated than that. So, for those of you who've never read Chaucer, one of the things that people love about The Canterbury Tales is his irony, the way in which he takes a kind of wry stance on the conventions of his day. But that irony is kind of constantly shifting. And so sometimes you're just not really sure what the object of it is. And it's a great tool for kind of refining your thinking and refining your interpretive skills. And the other thing I would say is that, as a math major coming to it, I wasn't trained in literary studies, but Chaucer gave me a way in because nobody was trained in middle English, right? And today, in this moment, in 2024, when we have students coming from all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of educational training, all kinds of countries and regions and places, The Canterbury Tales is a great leveler for students, because everyone comes to it with the same level of skill and expertise.
Randolph: That's fascinating, because in some ways, I think we probably think this is so arcane, you know, I mean all the old English and trying to understand Chaucer. And I think that feels almost esoteric, as if it's separating, but what you are saying is, actually, it's a leveler, because everyone starts out from really the ground that actually the students come in and it’s sort of an equalizer for students coming from a variety of, let's say, different schools.
Phillips: Absolutely. I mean, it sounds counterintuitive. But the thing is that when you come to university, everyone assumes that they know how to read, right? The thing is, reading at a university level is a skill that you acquire and hone. You get sharper and sharper in your reading skills the same way that you do with your ability to work with and manipulate and analyze numbers, right? And when you give a student a 20th-century or 21st-century novel, struggling with that novel feels more dangerous, more stressful, more existential. We're struggling with the middle English, we're all struggling with middle English, but it's teaching the same skills, right? And so, at the beginning of the Canterbury Tales class, we sort of go around the room and do reading workshops, and everybody reads a couplet and translates. And so, there's then this sense of, what does this say? And we're all figuring that out. And then there's the, but what does it say though? And then we get to have a really interesting conversation about that, without the anxiety about looking stupid or not knowing something you should already know.
Randolph: Yeah, and I mean, I don't know Chaucer that well, but it always strikes me that it's both a completely different culture, but then some of the issues burst through into the present and feel very familiar to us. And it's an interesting bridge there because not every, let's say not everything you read from the 14th century feels that way, whereas Chaucer has this sort of bridge to the present in a way, through humor and stuff like that, which feels very easy to grasp as an individual in the 21st century.
Phillips: And those links are about asking, in some ways, basic questions about how the world works. Who gets to tell the stories? Who gets to define what behavior is appropriate? Who sets limits on who can go where and do what and imagine what? Yeah? And so, students suddenly realize, Chaucer's asking the same questions that they're asking. And one of the wonderful things about that is that the difficult questions set in the 14th century, mean that students can tackle the question, rather than their own implication in those questions in the present moment. And so, you can tackle questions, we can tackle questions about the representation of women and of gender politics, but also race, other religions, cross-cultural contact, without it being our present. And so, students can really grapple with the questions.
Randolph: Tough issues. You may have answered this question, because, in some ways, we've roamed a little bit, for those of you there, we've roamed a little bit off what we plan to speak on, but I wanted to get to teaching more specifically, and give you an opportunity to reflect on it. You start your most recent book with the bold declaration that teaching matters and the book is about teaching and pedagogy, you know, and you belong to one of our very highest cohorts of teachers at Weinberg College. Students love what you do, but you are also very rigorous. I wonder if you could say something about this bold sort of declaration, why does teaching matter and how does it matter? And how does that statement show up in your work as a researcher and educator?
Phillips: So, one of the things I'm really interested in my book is telling the story of education, early education, medieval and early modern, from a humbler, less elite perspective. There's a lot of wonderful scholarship on the Latin grammar schools. Yeah? And humanist erudition. And the humanists did an amazing thing that kind of opened up, they created the largest kind of expansion of education that Europe had seen. And it wasn't bested again for two centuries, right? But the story of those Latin grammar schools and the schoolmaster sovereign authoritarian ruler of the classroom space is a story that's been told a lot. And I am interested in teachers who are teaching those students who couldn't go to those schools, who couldn't afford to go to those schools, for whom Latin was possibly not the pathway to economic thriving, and I'm interested in the ways that the rules of these other classrooms, these humbler, less elite classrooms, are different. And I'm interested in the ways teachers, this is then and now, in my scholarship and in my teaching, the way teachers get students to ask questions rather than to make assumptions. For me, teachers enable thinking around the problem rather than giving students a doctrine to espouse and repeat. And a lot of the stories about the humanist grammar schools are about a set of rules that we all follow, the virtues of Latin and Latin learning, the virtues of the virtuous schoolmaster whose gestures and language we all emulate. What if there are teachers out there suggesting that maybe we emulate the apprentice in the shop, or the chambermaid who's navigating a system that's not really working for her, or a black stable boy who's dealing with a traveler coming from another European city? What does it mean to think about education from that humbler perspective? And so, for me, teaching matters in the sense that it's equipping students with the skills to thrive in their current socioeconomic moment. And you know, there are sort of universal truths that we hold onto sometimes as teachers, these are the things we should teach. And every once in a while, we have to question whether those are the things. The pandemic upended everything, what really matters? What is it that we're invested in here? What is it that we have to do? What do we need to equip students with? And I know that 14th-century literature might not seem like one of the survival skills, but it actually is. How do you think round a problem? How do you think about bias? How do you think about who's telling a story? How do you think about perspectives other than your own? And adopting multi... Sorry, yeah, go ahead.
Randolph: Actually, there's a question in the Q&A here, which I think is touching on one of the issues that you're doing. There's a couple, so I'll try and get to them. But there's a question here, would it have seemed radical during Chaucer's time that people from humble stations were given a say or a stage to tell their story? And let me just add to that, for those of you who don't know, I mean The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's probably best-known work, and certainly towards the end of his life, this very important text is predicated on different people telling stories. So, Chaucer is, I don't know if it's ventriloquizing his characters, but something like that, there's many different perspectives. So, you know, would this have been a radical choice in his own period, I guess?
Phillips: And so that representation across a whole range of social standings, absolutely radical, right? In the sense of giving them a voice to speak their own perspective, and not denigrating that perspective as not worthy of respect. So there are lots of other texts in the Middle Ages that have characters from lots of different social stations, but the characters who have virtue, the characters who have respect, the characters who the readers should emulate, are clerics or knights, ladies, aristocrats. The Canterbury Tales is really interested in a kind of mercantile middle, and raising questions about the virtue of that chivalric order, raising questions about, are all clerics virtuous? We know they're not. There's lots of corruption in the institutional church in Chaucer's day. And so, letting the Wife of Bath, a merchant class widow who's a cloth exporter, deals in the cloth trade, wool, she's like the poster child for the British national, the English national product at that moment. She defends the position of wives, but she also has a character in the middle of her story who says to a knight, "Look, you think you're virtuous because you're a knight,” but we've already just proven that you're not virtuous. And also, virtue doesn't come from birthright, it comes from what you do. And that is a different statement coming from a merchant class wife, than it is from a monk, right? A theological scholar or a knight. So yes, it would've been radical to do this.
Randolph: There's a little follow-up and then I'll get to another question. The follow-up is, you know, does the identity, I think I intuited from the question, change the nature of the story related dramatically? And I think the answer is yes, but you know, in other words, how, you know, that sort of, almost a triangulation between the identity of the person and then the stories, and they all have slightly different moral inflections, right?
Phillips: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, Chaucer is really interested in how the teller matters, how the teller changes the tale. And he's got three pilgrims whose prologues, where they introduce themselves are, for The Wife of Bath, double the length of the tale itself, right? And their prologues are confessional. So, they're saying, "Here I am, this is what I do, this is what I care about.” The partner says, "Trust me, I'm a liar. I rip everyone off, I'm interested in making money. I will take a widow's last penny. But you know, I do sometimes turn people away from sin," and then he delivers a sermon that's a really great anti avarice sermon, pretty arresting, the moral is very clear. And so, it absolutely matters who's telling it, and Chaucer's really interested in the ways in which someone's social position influences the details they highlight.
Randolph: So, this shines a light, there's another question on Chaucer's own identity, the question, the explicit question is, was Chaucer widely read while he was alive or semi-famous? Or is it only now that he's become so highly regarded? Well, I'll leave it at that. What about the reception of Chaucer?
Phillips: So, he was highly regarded in his day, and we know this for a couple of reasons. Well, one, he wrote his kind of magnum opus was a poem called “Troilus and Criseyde,” as sort of stories set in the Trojan War, and it garnered him a great deal of poetic respect. And so, he was already established as a kind of English poet laureate, and then he writes The Canterbury Tales, his experimental poem, right? He was connected to, and had roles in the court, and was also connected to other poets in kind of civil circles. But the real evidence we have is that there are 83 medieval manuscripts that contain part or whole, all of The Canterbury Tales. It's an extraordinary number to survive. It's the second most popular middle English text. There's a devotional text called “The Prick of Conscience,” that's more popular, then there's Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. If you've ever heard of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” it's a kind of famous English poem. It survives in one manuscript, The Book of Margery Kempe, the first English autobiography, one manuscript. Chaucer, 83, lots of copies.
Randolph: Interesting. So, I've referred, or we've referred now, a few times to your forthcoming book, Learning to Talk Shop: Mercantile Mischief and Popular Pedagogy in Premodern England. Do you want to share a little bit more about the nature of that research, and provide insights into the teaching methods employed, and the multilingual textbooks you analyzed there? I think adumbrated this a bit, but you know, maybe unpack it.
Phillips: So, one of the things I was interested in is, there's a whole bunch of these little books. They fit in your pocket, you could carry them around, and they teach people how to bargain in the marketplace, how to get out of paying their debts. So, they're not like virtuous dialogues in doing what you're supposed to do, right? They're like, how to cheat someone else in the marketplace and avoid getting cheated. How to say, you know what? I know I owe you money, but I'm not going to give it to you right now. And there are also kind of, you have scenes in inns in foreign cities where a wealthy traveler will try to chat up a chambermaid, and the chambermaid gets out of the situation and outmaneuvers him. And so, I'm interested in like practical advice on how to work in the marketplace, how not to be cheated and taken advantage of by those who have more power than you, and more money. And then also the ways in which someone like Chaucer or someone like Shakespeare is playing with those same tactics. So, lots of scholars have written about Chaucer and Shakespeare as sort of virtuous schoolboys who absorbed a kind of humanist education, even if they didn't go to the humanist grammar schools. Who deployed the rules they learned in the school and showed their erudition. I'm interested in the two of them as mischievous schoolmasters, who are teaching readers how to question those rules, yeah? So, in a play like Shakespeare's Henry V, you have a language-learning scene, where Catherine, the French princess is learning French from her chambermaid. And the scene echoes, mirrors the language from these textbooks. And you also have a boy character who is showing up all of the aristocrats and the knights, through his ability to work back and forth between French and English, the French knight, the English robe, he shows both of them as problematic because he has this sort of practical, multilingual skill, that can show up the falseness of both of their assumptions and activities.
Randolph: Could you maybe, because I'm now thinking, could you characterize, and this is a big question, the linguistic culture within which, just say Chaucer for a moment, operated, because you know, it's quite telling that he's writing in English, but where was French at this time after the Norman Conquest, you know, three centuries before or something?
Phillips: Yeah, no, that's a great question. So, Chaucer is one of the first poets to write in English, most of the other writers in his moment, there are of course Beowulf, there's an English tradition, there's a long English tradition. But in the 14th century, most people are writing in French or Latin. Latin is the language of the clergy, French is the language of the court, and also the language of the legal courts, but English is the language of 90% of the population. And it's also the language of the court as well. We started to discover that more and more people are having to learn French. It was assumed that they knew it, but more and more of the, there are records of more and more people who had to in the aristocracy, who had to learn French. So, it's a multilingual world that he works in, and there's a hierarchy of languages with Latin at the top, and then French is a kind of prestige, and English as having no prestige. And Chaucer actually makes a couple of claims for English as a real literary language, right? And that, you know, that continues on thereafter. For someone living in 14th century London, it's a multilingual city, where not just because there's Latin and French in people in higher social stations, but because there are merchants from Germany and from France and from Italy. And when you go to the market, you're kind of bargaining with all of them. And so, these little textbooks that I'm talking about, most of them coming out in the late 15th and 16th century, they're acknowledging the fact that if you had a shop in Antwerp or Paris or Venice or London, you needed to know what the other guy was saying when they were speaking French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, German. And there's a lot of, you know, trade across the channel. So, it's a kind of multilingual world, in which having a bit of facility can make all the difference, right?
Randolph: So, I'm going to remind the group that we're going to start going to Q&A a bit more formally in a moment, but if you have questions, start thinking of them and putting them in the Q&A function so we have some exchange. It's meant to be a conversation with you all out there. So, another question, you are, you are a medievalist, which is one way of summing up your research and scholarship, putting some limits on it, but your work touches on vast interconnected material. You just mentioned language, but also commerce you mentioned, right? Because the two are connected? Translation and teaching, this is sort of the intellectual vector you live within. Could you share a bit more about the interdisciplinary connections you've discovered or uncovered in your research?
Phillips: Sure, yeah. And this will bring me back to the book in a bit, but to something I didn't say. Which is, I think that what some of these teachers outside the grammar school are teaching is a set of interdisciplinary skills, and I think the lessons are actually, they look a lot like what we might now call an integrated curriculum, where students study math and literature and language, and have kind of units that connect. So, these lessons are teaching multiple languages, but they're also teaching math word problems because you need to know some not-so-basic math to have a way of outmaneuvering the other person. Well, I'll sell you the whole piece for X amount, we're buying in bulk, right? And so, knowing a little bit of math, knowing languages, having a sense of the discourses that are out there, they're offering a kind of pragmatic, multidisciplinary conversation. As a medievalist in the 14th century, working on the 14th century, I need to know religion, economics, history, literature, and sometimes a little bit of science, because every text is... Not every text, but many texts are doing all of that at once. Chaucer, weirdly, because the text is funny and a little ironic, is known as an expert in alchemy in the 15th century, because of a tale he tells. And so, he's playing around with all sorts of things. For me, where the research takes me determines then what I need to learn. So, for this book, I had to do a lot of work on what does 16th century the economic world look like? How did loans work? How did international negotiations and transfers work, right? What about exchange rates? What about interest? Because you know, the authorities say, we weren't allowed to charge interest, nobody's doing it. They were all doing it all the time, right? And how they did that. And then also, you know, how did people teach math in the Renaissance?
Randolph: Yes, and I know from my own sort of period, math was transforming under their feet, because it was certainly in Italy, it was going very quickly, the innovations. Now we've suddenly got lots of questions, but I have one more formal question, which is, you referred to this before about the reception of Chaucer, and I was thinking in the back of my mind, were people reading Chaucer? Were they reading Chaucer out loud? Is there an orality to how Chaucer was received at the time? You know, those 80-plus manuscripts, how are people using them? And I wanted to link that to a question we had about gossip, because you've worked on gossip and a different form of orality, and people talking about things. It's two slightly different questions, but you know, we tend to think of gossip in contemporary times, I think, as a little negative. But you've written about its power, and could you maybe go from the orality question to the gossip question?
Phillps: Yeah, no, absolutely. So, I think that for different "readers," and I'll put readers in quotation marks, some might have read Chaucer in manuscript, and some would've learned about Chaucer because someone in the household read aloud dinner. So, at a big household there would be readings in the evening, and the servants and the children, as well as the adults in the household, would listen to that, right? So, all you needed in the Middle Ages was, or in the Renaissance for that matter, was one person that you knew to have a text and be able to read, to have access to texts, right? And Chaucer, 'cause he takes up everything, takes this up with the Wife of Bath, who was illiterate, but who knows lots of scripture and lots of texts. I'm interested in that kind of, so I think of gossip as an unofficial talk, idle talk, that is thought of as trivial, as not accomplishing anything, as sinful in the Middle Ages, right? But actually is depicted in a number of places, including Chaucer, as generative. So, you get all kinds of descriptions of gossip as a sin of the tongue, right? But it's also the way stories begin. "Did you hear the one about..." And even priests say, you know, “I know a story. It happened just down the street the other day, about a priest who saw some women gossiping in church, and he could see that there was a devil sitting on their shoulder, writing down what they said.” And it seems like you know that the devil is keeping track of all the words that you gossip. But the thing is, the story he told is like 300 years old, and from another. It didn't happen just down the road. So even the priests who are preaching against gossip, are using it to deliver a message. Sermon stories, tales with lessons, they're called exemplum, were one of the big vehicles for teaching ethics and morality. And priests and preachers realize that you've gotta make those stories engaging and immediate. And the kind of frame of letting you in on a secret, gossiping about what's going on, is a fabulous framework for that. It allows narrative transformation; it also allows you to teach. So yes, that orality was a huge part of how stories were told and how people had access to them.
Randolph: Yeah, I wish I knew more about this, but I'm sure there's lots of work about the intersection between let's say the exemplum tradition, and then the novella, you know, these sort of, because they're quite similar when you read them. So, there's a few questions. So, I'm going to try and lump them together a little bit to get there. So, this is one question, in the marketplaces you were describing a moment ago, you were describing currency in terms of local currency, or did the merchants have to accommodate exchange rates at the time? Now that could be a 16th-century question or a 14th-century question. It can be both, but what do you think?
Phillips: So, in both places, they had to accommodate the exchange rates and coins also, they had to accommodate the dates of coins. Coins went out of date, monarchs reprinted them, people clipped them. So, some of my favorite scenes in these books are when it comes to paying, after we've bargained over the price, it comes to paying, and the customer gives a coin and the shopkeeper says, "What's this?" And he says, you know, "You are a professional, you should know it's this coin and it's worth this." And she says, "I've never seen that before." And she forces him to give her a gold coin whose value she knows. So, the readers had to learn both, all the coins that were in circulation, all the exchange rates that were constantly shifting, and how to navigate between them. And also, it's clear that they built into the price of things taking false coins or coins that were out of currency, and there are really hilarious disputes about that.
Randolph: If any of you happen to be in New York, there's a really interesting exhibition I just saw recently at the Morgan Library about money in the Middle Ages. And there's lots of examples of this type of thing. How do you deal with different forms of coins? 'Cause every municipality, big municipality, and some emerging nations are distributing their own coins. And it's very difficult to actually understand how they relate to one another at any one time. So, it's a great question. There's another very general question, then I'm going to get to some things about today's students. This question was about the Middle Ages because we're talking about the Middle Ages. It says here it spanned about a thousand years roughly. So how do you define the specific period of Chaucer's time? Maybe I'll put a little spin on this, is there anything distinctive about, you know, let's say Chaucer's time of activity in the late 14th century?
Phillips: Yeah, so we tend to call it the late medieval. In England, the late medieval is 14th century, you know, on the continent, 14th century's Renaissance already. And so, I tend to work from 14th through the 16th century. That's where I live. So late medieval and early modern.
Randolph: I was just going to say, these names are incredibly vexed. I mean there's a whole, there's reams written about, you know, should we even call this thing the Middle Ages or should we call it the Renaissance or Renaissance, or early modern? So, I think some of us just tend to like to focus on 14th, 15th, or whatever, you know, it's called, the centuries as opposed to the labels.
Phillips: That's right, that's right. So, for me it's 14th century, late 14th century England and Chaucer. And how that's different from earlier moments is because you're starting, so literacy is increasing, the marketplace is expanding. You've got some social mobility because the plague has come through and you know, a third of the population of Europe has died. And so, this changes the way that social dynamics work, but it also changes the flows of people, because people move out from the country into the cities, urban areas expand. There's possibility for some social movement because people further down the social ladder can create a bit of money and go into, you know become artisans, and in the city, earn a bit more at the level of wages, acquire land, acquire influence. You know, they have to issue laws called the statute of laborers that says, "Actually, you guys stay where you are, you don't get to move around. And also, you can't ask for more than X as your wages." And that only partially works, but it's a law that's clearly responding to the changing social patterns that are going on. And it's also a moment when there's a kind of religious upheaval. There are a fair few heretical movements as people start to ask, Really? Latin? Shouldn't the Bible be in the vernacular so that more people have direct access to it? And aren't some of these priests corrupt, and so shouldn't faith be a more direct engagement with God? And so, you have a number of religious upheaval. So, it's a moment of questioning, and a moment of, I would say expansion, and also an expansion of global and international circuits of information travel, texts traveling, but also people and products. I'll also say at the level of technology, you have the increasing professionalization of scribes, parchment makers, bookmakers. And so, books can be created quicker. They're made by hand still when Chaucer is writing, but it's now not one monk, one book, but a whole group of people or team, working in a scriptorium, producing books at a, kind of, much faster rate. So, there are more texts, more access, and that of course accelerates with the printing press, 1450.
Randolph: Yeah, and I mean I'm sure I don't know anything about this in the northern European context, but you know, paper production is going to start kicking off in Italy at least, and I'm sure that has a transformative effect about transmission of various things through prints, et cetera.
Phillips: Yeah, books become cheaper.
Randolph: Yes, things are getting cheaper. And I feel I should mention there's also this very odd thing called the Hundred Years War going on, you know it leads to upheaval, you know, upheaval and changes and you know, sometimes I don't, we don't love war, but it led to a lot of changes, socially, technologically, et cetera. Here are a couple of questions that touch on today's students. One question is what kind of students are attracted to medieval studies? And I have some thoughts on that, how you and I ended up in this world. This is another question, it's a bit tougher. How many students typically are there in courses you teach, does that represent a reduction from prior years as we sort of, are we witnessing the results of the attack or the feeling the humanities are under attack in the academy? So, what kind of students and how are the numbers?
Phillips: Yeah, so let me take the second question first, and it might actually get at the first question. So right now, I have 35 students in my Canterbury Tales course, which is a great size. There's often, when I run it as a smaller class, say 20, there's often a waiting list. So, we wanted to expand it and let more students in. In some ways, I think there hasn't been a change in enrollment in that course in my time here, we're definitely, the humanities are suffering nationwide as fewer students are taking classes. I think one of the places where you see those numbers is in people who choose to be majors in a subject. So, students will take a Shakespeare class or a Chaucer class, but they won't necessarily choose to be English majors. And this comes back to the, you know, who chooses to study. So, in my Canterbury Tales class right now, I've got two computer science majors, math and English, you know, people who work on film, people who do creative writing, students in history, the whole kind of Weinberg range, as well as in some ways, the Northwestern Range, engineers. And those students may not go on to be English majors, but they found the course interesting and bring a new perspective to it, and that's great for me. Where I see the biggest kind of enrollment drops are in larger lecture courses. It used to be when I first started, Introduction to Shakespeare had 200, 250 students, and now it's more like a hundred, and some of that is the decline in the humanities, and some of it is that students want a more intimate classroom experience. They don't want to sit in a lecture hall and have a lecture, though they do that in many places. They want a class where they get to engage and grapple with and discuss. And so, some students are electing to take say, a more advanced course in Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Faulkner or Joyce, instead of taking a big lecture course. You know, and we're all trying to think of ways to convey to students how vital and important it is to learn how to read well. To learn how to think well. And I haven't addressed the who becomes a medievalist, but I'll let Adrian take that in a second. One of the things I believe about universities in the 21st century is that students need to learn how to manipulate, analyze, and understand and deploy language and numbers, and images. A student who can do those things, both of them well, can rule the world. And there's nothing like an English class for teaching you how to think about how language works. Not just what it says, but the effect it has on you and how it does that. What we say and how we say it matters, and so part of it is trying to get that message out to students, to parents, to alumni, like to remind, we used to take it for granted, and now we have to explain it. But that's useful too as a teacher, right? Signposting what you're doing. Who becomes a medievalist? People who like weird stuff. Weird, funny, wacky, what is going on here, stuff.
Randolph: I was going to say something similar. I do think there is something. Like you do actually, I didn't realize we were so close, because I think probably I'm considered more of a renaissance person, because that's how it breaks down in my particular world, but there's something that is enduringly attractive, it seems, to young people about the medieval period, and I'm not quite sure why. It has something to do with the weirdness of it. If you just think of the word, how the word goth has, you know, transformed and changed within our society, but I think there's something about it which remains attractive to students, and something about its familiarity and distance, which I think, let's say in the 15th, 16th century, is a little tougher sell in some ways. Although big names like Shakespeare always attract the students too, which is another irony. You know, the names you mentioned, you know, the major writer figures, despite so many critiques in our world about focusing on, let's say, the major authors, it still remains something very, very powerful for students, which is an interesting tension we live within. We have to end. I'm going to end with this sentence from one of the participants. "This isn't a question, but I want to share that I have used my English degree every day of my life and I'm 66." Excellent, we love that, to hear that. So, to all of you tuned in, we hope you found this to be a valuable way to spend 45 minutes, it felt like 10 minutes to me. Thank you to our alumni leadership circle supporters of Weinberg College, whose investments make research like this, and great faculty like Professor Susie Phillips, and her work possible. So, thank you again, Susie. From all of us at Weinberg College and Northwestern University, have a great day.
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