Teaching Incest in Medieval Literature, Culture and Law

Abstract

As Editor of this journal I do not normally offer contributions to these pages other than my "Del director" column and an occasional book review as assigned and edited by anodier member of the senior staff. But this Cluster on The Riddle of Incest has a back story that may be of interest to those who teach courses that embrace social issues and die history of sexuality. Starting over a decade ago at the College of William & Mary, the Program in Medieval & Renaissance Studies, for which I served as Director during the 90s, began to offer periodic multi-section onecredit courses on topics that invited shared expertise and multiple disciplinary perspectives. Each section met for eight weeks with some common readings and others selected from the research area of the instructor. We inaugurated our series of one-credit topics courses in 1992 with Patrick Geary's Furia Sacra: Thefts ofRelics in the Central Middle Ages, for a course tided The Theft of Relics-jokingly billed as "Body Snatching in the Middle Ages"-and designed sections on relics and pilgrimage (taught by our medieval historian), Byzantine icons and relics (taught by a colleague in Religious Studies), the evolution ofthe reliquary as an art historical object (with an art historian as instructor), and my own section on relics and medieval spirituality. As the core of this undergraduate experience, we always read a major recent book on the subject and invited the audior to campus for the standard public lecture and luncheon discussion with faculty, but also for a private catered breakfast for the author and die students enrolled, informal sessions which no faculty member could attend. Finished books have a false air of closure to them. Working scholars know the mess that's left in our offices, the side topics we silenced for the sake of finishing the project, the leads we dared not follow quite