Were the Middle Ages a fun time to be alive? Perhaps more than you’d think—as students in a Fordham English class discover by performing dramatic plays from the medieval era.
The class is Medieval Drama in Performance, and every two years it culminates in a free public performance on the grounds of the Met Cloisters, the museum of the Middle Ages in upper Manhattan. Students manage the entire production—preparing the script, directing, running rehearsals, designing costumes, and handling publicity.
“It’s like a semester-long creative project that you’re working on, not just with a group of four people, but with your entire class. And that poses a lot of really fun challenges,” said one of the students, Seamus Dougherty, who graduated on May 16—shortly after the class’s May 3 performance at the Cloisters.
Playing Theater ‘Games’
The students performed the medieval fable The Fox and the Wolf. And they did so in the medieval style, stepping back in time to an era when stories were typically shared out loud before an audience rather than quietly read in solitude.
“The only way to really understand medieval drama is to perform it,” said the instructor, Andrew Albin, PhD. “We discover so many things” when putting the texts “on their feet,” he said, noting that dramatic performances back then were called “games” and “plays” rather than “theater” or “drama,” terms that didn’t exist yet.
And fun improvisations could happen when audience members became part of the plays, which was easy when plays were performed out in public, before the invention of a building called a theater, Albin said. Medieval plays “blended into all the other stuff” happening around them and had to earn their audience’s attention like modern-day street theater, he said.
Busting Medieval Stereotypes
In addition to this fun and festivity, medieval studies at Fordham brings out other surprising aspects of medieval society, he said.
“We tend to think of the Middle Ages as being pretty oppressive and pretty dull, especially for the common man. And the more you dig into the history, you realize … there are liberties available to medieval people that we actually have lost,” Albin said.
In an era of decentralized power and policing, there was actually “a lot more room for doing what you want” and exploring beyond “a certain set of social norms… and identity expectations,” he said.
Albin noted Fordham’s strong reputation in medieval studies, based on its Jesuit commitment to “thinking historically and theologically and philosophically” to capture the complexity of the historical past. The medieval studies program draws on multiple disciplines at Fordham, as well as strong relationships with New York City institutions, including the Cloisters, Albin said.
‘Amazing Rapport’ Among Students
To help gather their audience, the students distributed free tickets inside the museum before going outside to perform. After the morning appearance at the Cloisters, they performed at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in the afternoon.
In the 10 years or so that the course has been offered, Albin has seen students relish the sense of community that develops—which also harkens back to the Middle Ages, a time that predates modern-day hyper-individualism.
The students build an “amazing rapport” and “grow to care about one another in a really deep and meaningful way,” he said. “We need to keep practicing what it feels like to build community face-to-face with one another. And this is a space to practice that.”
