Professor Lisa Wolverton takes her students directly to the source—to the primary documents that capture the voices, values, and textures of the life of the past.
“Reading textbooks can feel like playing a game of telephone—getting farther and farther from the original message. Instead, I like my students to encounter historical texts first hand, even though our sources are often from a long time ago, from far away places, and certainly not written for 21st century audiences,” she said.
Wolverton, a medieval historian, wants her students to have the chance to make discoveries and to form original relationships with these documents—not just to read other scholars’ interpretations of them. Students in her History 104: World History I (Ancient and Medieval) course read, for example, Marco Polo’s account of entering the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan’s court, the writings of Confucius, early Buddhist poetry, and excerpts from the Koran. “I want them to see what these texts really look like, and to bracket off the judgmental impulse,” she says, explaining that screening out preconceived notions allows readers to focus on what’s really there on the page.
And Wolverton knows that looking with fresh eyes and scrupulous focus can be surprising. She recently translated from Latin to English the Chronicle of the Czechs, the twelfth century opus of Cosmas, an 80-year-old priest whose account begins with Biblical events like Noah’s flood and the construction of the Tower of Babel, then reports on the first inhabitants, traditions, and government of Bohemia. “The translator doesn’t get to skip the boring parts,” Wolverton laughs.
Famous in the Czech Republic, the Chronicle commonly is treated as quaint folklore—tales for children. Scholars have seen it as a record of patronage that idealizes the ruling dynasty. But by attending closely to language patterns, Wolverton discovered how richly allusive the Chronicle is: Cosmas returns again and again to lines in classical texts by Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, which she footnotes in her edition. And far from valorizing the region’s rulers, Cosmas was deeply suspicious of power itself—when the text is treated like a literary whole, it becomes clear that Cosmas frequently embodies power in cruel tyrant figures and positions himself as a humble observer writing on his own terms.
“I have a profound respect for the original source,” she says. “In class, students all have their books open—if someone has a question, I say, ‘Look again; read it aloud.’” To her, the answers aren’t “out there” somewhere—they’re awaiting the careful, curious interpreter of those waiting pages.
—Eugene, Oregon, May 2013