At “Singing Truth to Power,” a medieval concert and roundtable discussion held on Oct. 5 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, performers and scholars used medieval songs to connect the music of the middle ages to present day issues. They also reflected on how music can inspire people to take action.

The event was co-presented by Fordham’s Department of Art History and Music, Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies, New York State’s Council on the Arts, and Alkemie, a medieval music ensemble group.

Some of the connections between today’s issues and medieval songs were made quite literally. As Alkemie performed medieval chants, Niccolo Seligmann, a performer with the group, inserted poems that added present-day commentary to the themes expressed in the songs.

“They tell us that their greed is good, tweeting atop the tower/They say, ‘work harder and you could join us and wield our power,” Seligmann recited between medieval songs, which were performed primarily in Old English and Old French. “They tell us their prosperity is earned through God’s just grace/They show the press their charity and warn us to pick up the pace. But those of us out on the streets engaged in mutual aid/can often barely make ends meet and expect no press parade.”

In the panel discussion that followed, Sian Ricketts, a performer with Alkemie, said the group has been trying to figure out how to best convey the messages, both past and current, in their work.

“Are we supposed to be making a political message as we engage with these materials of the past that are so overtly political? And we have to process what that means to project it into the world,” Ricketts said. “All the music on this program is all written by clerics, essentially people who are working in the system—they don’t have a lot of power; they had an education. And that’s the position we can really identify with, so I find it fascinating to grapple with that.”

Reflecting on Activism

For others, the concert made them reflect on their own activism and work in their daily lives.

“When I got the invitation to be a part of this panel, my initial reaction was to ask myself, ‘Am I an activist?’” Natalie Reynoso, a Ph.D. candidate studying the history of Christianity at Fordham said. “But I think for me, and maybe for many of us, the image of someone outside protesting is the image that often comes to mind. And it is not the way my activism looks in my work.”

Reynoso said the performance helped her reflect on how her work studying gendered violence in early Christianity can be considered activism.

“The questions that I ask are really where my activism comes in—who gets to be human in the ancient world and who doesn’t? Who gets left out? And my interest is in those who get left out and telling those stories,” she said.

Patrick DeBrosse, a Ph.D. candidate at Fordham currently studying the political culture of Latin Europe during the Middle Ages, said that the performance reminded him of one of his biggest sources for his dissertation—the music of troubadours from that time period.

“It’s full of protests essentially,” he said. “It’s one of the few places that you can really get perspectives on power, you can get critiques of power… I think this performance was a great way for me to sort of reflect back on the relationship between my sources and protest in general—who gets to protest? What’s the purpose of it?”

DeBrosse also said that the concert made him think back to how music was used in history to bring attention to an issue and “draw a crowd” around a performance.

“Sometimes I think we in the modern world forget that music does this so powerfully because we consume it through headphones,” he said. “In a pre modern society, all of the things we just heard are intended to be consumed, with a much bigger crowd of people who have chosen to … listen to and then go on to presumably comment on whatever message has been given to them by the singer.”

Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., an associate professor of history and the director of the Center for Medieval Studies, said that the “lasting partnership” between the center, Fordham, and Alkemie has been very beneficial and has led to many “great events.”.

“It’s a great joy to be able to see that continuing, to be able to benefit from that partnership by being able to have events like this evening where we premiere new work,” he said.

“Many people don’t believe the Middle Ages are interesting. They only learn about that period through books, TV shows, and popular culture. But there’s so much influence on our world today that we don’t really see,” said Campagna, a master’s student in Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who is studying medieval studies. “Transcribing records—even property records, as boring as that may sound—is part of understanding how our modern world came to be.” 

Campagna grew up on a farm in Nebraska, where she loved reading historical novels with her father. But she said she never considered history as a legitimate career path until college. 

“My history classes opened my eyes to a different way of seeing the world,” said Campagna, who earned her bachelor’s degree in history from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2020. “And Fordham has one of the best centers for medieval studies in the country. I met some incredible faculty and got involved with the community, and things took off from there.”

Signs of the Medieval Period at Rose Hill 

Campagna is a project manager for Medieval New York, a Fordham-based website that identifies how the medieval period has influenced modern-day New York City. Since last summer, Fordham students have been developing itineraries that highlight parts of the city that are inspired by the European Middle Ages, including dozens of Gothic churches, as well as remnants from the pre-colonial period that are still visible today. When complete, the itineraries will feature audio guides and augmented reality recreations of New York City during what we commonly view as the “medieval period” on the website, said Campagna. 

“A good example is the Met Cloisters, a medieval art museum in Manhattan that’s partially composed of old structures from Europe. So you have this combination of the Middle Ages and medievalism sitting in an old-growth forest in the middle of present-day New York City,” said Campagna. 

The medieval period also reveals itself on Fordham’s campus, she added. 

“Keating Hall is an example of medieval-inspired architecture. Fordham, Columbia, and City College of New York all have this super Gothic style with buildings meant to remind us of castles,” Campagna said, adding that Gothic style is characteristic of the Middle Ages. “A lot of people associate the Middle Ages with the birth of the university as we know it, like Oxford and Cambridge, but also with a certain kind of scholarship and history that we see as legitimate. We still pull from that architectural style in order to call back to that time and project a certain image of authority.” 

Surprising Findings on Women in Medieval London

Campagna is also involved with Medieval Londoners, an online catalog of all identifiable people who lived in London during the Middle Ages. She collects and organizes data and then uploads it to the main website, which is accessible to the general public. 

“It’s a collective biography. This is pretty popular in medieval studies because you often don’t have a lot of information about one individual. But if you have a little bit of information about a lot of people within a certain social group, you can learn about what their lives might have been like by looking at all of them in aggregate,” Campagna said.    

The Medieval Londoners project inspired her undergraduate thesis, for which she studied the lives of elite women who lived in medieval London. 

“Through archival records, I saw that when a wealthy husband died, his wife often took over their business. If she married again, her new husband could take over that business. But he needed her input because of her experience and skills,” Campagna said. “It was exciting to me that women were so involved in the economic system during this time.” 

Her current master’s thesis also draws from life in medieval London. For part of her thesis, she is creating a crowdsourcing project called Get to Know Medieval Londoners, where she will train volunteers to transcribe medieval property records and collect data that will be used to better understand life in the medieval period. The data will then be uploaded to the Medieval Londoners website, which is open to the public. 

“The goal is less about the actual research, and more about collaboration and accessibility. In this country and across the world, there’s all this incredible research that only other scholars will read. I think it’s valuable to make sure that this research has a wider purpose, instead of being hoarded inside the academic system,” said Campagna, who will defend her master’s thesis this summer. 

Dismantling Academic Stereotypes

Campagna’s research is intertwined with the digital humanities, an academic field that uses the latest technology to answer traditional scholarly questions. She is among a growing group of students who are merging medieval studies with the digital humanities, said Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., associate professor of history and director of the Center for Medieval Studies. 

“Grace is one of the first students in our program to have a formal minor field in digital humanities and to be writing a thesis squarely on a digital topic,” Paul said. “Her work is very exciting and cutting edge and points the way not only to the future of projects like these, but also the humanities.” 

Campagna said she appreciates how the digital humanities make research more accessible to a 21st-century audience. 

“I was really drawn to that format of researching history. It’s very collaborative and accessible, not just one person sitting alone in a library with a lamp, poring over old manuscripts,” she said, chuckling. “I want to keep working with medieval documents, possibly for a digital humanities center, and present them in a way that is interesting and accessible—where people can actually learn something from them.” 

Student Podcasting

Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., an associate professor of history, teaches in Fordham’s Medieval Studies program, one of the biggest programs of its kind in the world. His presentation, Podcasting and the History Graduate Classroom, offered ideas on how to make dense topics easier to digest.

While teaching a course on the Crusader states, which Paul described as “an arcane subject, even within the field of medieval history,” he wanted his students to have a way of interpreting these esoteric and difficult ideas to a larger audience.

“My students were gaining knowledge about something that no one else knows about. So the idea was to get comfortable with communicating these difficult ideas… How are we going to be able to explain the skills and the knowledge that this person has gained in some sort of wider context?”

As a solution, Paul came up with the podcasting idea. He tasked his students with creating a seven-to-10 minute podcast, encouraging them to listen to other popular history podcasts to get a feel of what to do. For the assignment, they were required to gather the technology and equipment they needed, write a script, record the podcast, and work with Paul on editing their audio until they were satisfied with the final products, which were then uploaded to SoundCloud and linked to their website, The Crusader States, for anyone to listen to.

Students were graded on how effectively they organized the information in a comprehensible way, which “was challenging to some people, especially people who were in Ph.D. programs, who have identified themselves as an intellectual. And they’re like, ‘I deliberately can’t speak to other people,’ so we break that down and say ‘you have to try.’”

The podcasts received encouraging responses from Paul’s Twitter followers. Listeners bantered back and forth, gave feedback, wrote comments, and even started to look forward to new episodes after the year ended, which Paul jokingly called “season 2” of the podcast series.

Using Polling Techniques for Instant Feedback

Usha Sankar, Ph.D., a lecturer in the biological sciences department who teaches courses like human physiology, was also looking for ways to keep students engaged. She has found polling techniques to be a useful strategy.

Using polling software, Sankar incorporated an interactive strategy into her lectures to keep her classroom energy as dynamic as possible.

There are many polling technologies out there—Sankar uses Poll Everywhere, a live interactive audience participation website used to gather responses. It can be used to create pop quizzes, polls, teaching games, and more. Students access their personal account page on their phones, answer questions directly, and see responses in real time.

Sankar has hosted a medley of quizzes, games, and competitions on her own Poll Everywhere page to test students about what they’ve learned during the lecture. The interactive aspect of the polling strategy allows her students to feel more engaged than if they were just listening to a lecture.

“Polling is a great way to gauge student engagement and understanding of concepts. The best polling methods are those that are intuitive, easy to access, cheap, encourage full participation, and provide detailed reports and feedback,” she said.

She’s also “constantly looking to improve my teaching,” she said, and polling is a great way to get feedback.

Keeping Students Engaged with Creative Pedagogy

Jane Suda, head of reference and information services in the Walsh Library on the Rose Hill campus, was impressed with the presentations she sat in on during the day, and their emphasis on “how you can use different technologies to make important learning points to the students and also make a creative classroom environment that is not your standard ‘write a paper, take a test’ environment,’” she said.

“In essence it’s like taking the classroom, breaking down the walls, and saying OK, now we’re gonna take what you’re learning in this one class, and throw it out into the public, and so we’re all polling, we’re podcasting, we’re creating websites, and so it’s not just what am I doing for the teacher, but what am I doing for the world, and that’s really dynamic. It changes what the classroom is all about.”

“There’s been a fascination in the Middle Ages that goes back a really, really long way. And why is that? Well, this is a really great canvas on which people project their dreams, their fantasies, a different world that they wished they could inhabit,” said Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., director of medieval studies.

“At Fordham we know, we recognize, that we’re really the home for medieval studies. And we realize that that’s not something that most people would know .., that there was a great place to study the Middle Ages in New York City. So …  we thought, what better place to do that than at a medieval festival?”

The Oxford Outremer Map project is a collaboration among the center’s faculty, students, and fellows to restore a 13th-century map that depicts the coastline of the Crusader states, now modern-day Israel and Palestine. The map was likely made or copied by an English monk named Matthew Paris, said Laura K. Morreale, PhD, associate director of the center, and offers a glimpse into various—sometimes abstract—functions of medieval maps.

“It’s very different than how we understand maps today,” Morreale said. “Some of the locales are biblical, so they’re not recognizable in modern terms. A couple places even depict what the mapmakers thought would happen in the future. So, not only is it a practical map, it’s also a kind of visualization of what they hope will happen one day.

“That’s part of the larger conversation,” she said. “Maps should be approached the way you would approach a piece of literature. You don’t just look at the text, but you think about its context and the material reality that surrounded it.”

When Nicholas Paul, PhD, an associate professor of history, encountered the map reproduction as part of the center’s French of Outremer digital humanities initiative, he found the document in poor condition. Besides suffering the expected wear-and-tear over eight centuries, the map had been drawn on the back of a used sheet of parchment. Over time, the colors on the front bled through and obscured Matthew’s drawings and notes.

For years the map was overlooked by medieval scholars, despite its depiction of an important region. Hoping to make it legible again, Paul and Tobias Hrynick, a doctoral student in history, brought the map to the Medieval studies center, where then-graduate student Rachel Butcher, GSAS ’15, worked to spruce it up in Photoshop.

The result is a full, colorized digital version of the map, complete with interactive features and annotations written by the graduate students and fellows.

“It’s not just digitally presented—it’s digitally enabled scholarship,” Morreale said. “It’s user-guided, so users can interact with the map on their own terms. There’s also a discussion section, where users can write in with their input, and there’s a ‘mysteries of the map’ section, where we list the parts of the map we haven’t yet been able to identify. We’re encouraging people to write in if they have some knowledge about these.”

At a colloquium on April 9, scholars discussed the significance of both the map itself—including its relevance to medieval cartography and whether Matthew Paris was indeed its author—and how scholars can use the digital restoration to maximize teaching and research.

“We’re in the process of creating a module for people who want to use this map in classrooms,” Morreale said. “That, in my mind, has been one of the greatest aspects of this project. We were able to take a discussion in our office and project it out into the larger, scholarly world. It’s now accessible to anyone who is interested, with just a few clicks.”

“We can find examples of families in which no one has ever been on crusade, but when one of them marries a woman whose family does have a tradition of crusading, that interest becomes common to both families,” he said. “It’s suggested that this diffusion of interest is the result of some sort of transmission of ideas. I want to know what those ideas were and how they were transmitted.”

During his faculty fellowship, Paul will finish Crusade and Family Memory, a book that will show how 25 prominent European families passed on stories about their participation in the crusades during the 12th and 13th centuries, a time of intense crusading activity.

Whether they were fighting in the Holy Land or elsewhere, such as in Spain, Paul noted that families such as the Dukes of Austria would have been constantly reminded of their family commitments and traditions of crusading by stories and memorabilia, such as banners, weapons and other objects associated with crusading.

“I’m interested in the significance of storytelling within medieval cultures. I think that family traditions of crusading are based, in part, on stories that families told about themselves,” he said.

The book will be built upon archival research he conducted with the support of a prior Fordham faculty research grant at Archivo de la Corona de Aragón in Barcelona, the Archives Départmentales de la Haute-Vienne in Limoges, the Archives Départmentales de Maine-et-Loire in Angers, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Bibliothèque de Saint-Geneviève in Paris.