Creating Playful First Encounters with the Pre-Modern Past

Helen Brookman is Professor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Education at King’s College London and Vice-Dean (Education) in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities. Her interests lie in creative and interdisciplinary pedagogies and feminist critical and historical studies of the Humanities. Olivia (Liv) Robinson is Lecturer in Late Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Contest, Translation and the Chaucerian Text, and publishes on the theatre of medieval nuns.

In a climate where universities are shuttering or reorganizing humanities programs and administrators are insisting that course outcomes prioritize job training, reading a book that focuses on play in the classroom feels like a joyful rebellion. The chapter authors of Creating Playful First Encounters with the Pre-Modern Past, edited by Helen Brookman and Olivia Robinson, remind us that while medieval and Early Modern literature does teach us about humanity, morality, and history, among other things, that does not mean it cannot be fun; in truth many texts were intended to be playful.[...] [M]any of the[se] playful activities could be incorporated into classrooms with fewer available resources. Thanks to the diverse ways the authors interpreted the idea of “play” in their work, a reader finds modeled here a wide range of creative methods from which to choose.Just as play in general does for learning children, the activities discussed in Creating Playful First Encounters allow participants to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for the literature they worked with. Thanks to the safety of Huizinga’s “magic circle,” students can step out of their comfort zones and take the texts with them, transforming them into something both familiar and alien. While reading the book for this review, I imagined many ways I could incorporate aspects of the authors’ creative examples of play in my own classes, and I believe that is a high compliment to the authors.

• Prologue: “Juniper and Mare’s Cheese,” by Mark HaddonIntroduction, by Helen Brookman and Liv RobinsonPart 1: Play through PerformanceChapter 1: “Gamifying the Canterbury Tales 1: Adopt-a-Pilgrim, Harry Bailley’s Game, and an RPG Canterbury Tales”, by Daniel T. KlineChapter 2. “Swiss Shakespeare: Creative Translation as Research and Appropriation”, by Elisabeth DuttonChapter 3. “Creating Medieval Drama: Student Actors, Public Audiences and Middle English Plays”, by Olivia RobinsonChapter 4. “Playing Shakespeare in the Elementary Classroom”, by Clayton StrombergerPart 2: Play through ProductionChapter 5. “‘Arthurian Transformations’: Undergraduate Students Curating a Digital Exhibition in an Interdisciplinary Medievalism Module,” by Helen BrookmanChapter 6. “‘Create the Rest”: Learning through Doing in Shakespearean Education”, by Sheila CavanaghChapter 7. “Formation from ‘Fragments’: Learning about Twelfth-Century Liturgy through Creative Engagement with Evidence”, by Matthew Cheung SalisburyChapter 8. “Redesigning the Medieval Book”, by Daniel WakelinAfterword: “No Limits”, by David Clark