Grand Theft Longboat: Using Video Games and Medievalism to Teach Medieval History

This chapter recounts the author’s experiences of teaching a third-year module entitled ‘History and Myth: Writing and Re-writing the Middle Ages’ which engages both with medieval history and Medievalism approaches to representations of the Middle Ages. As part of the assessment, the students are required to present a pitch for a medieval themed video game, feature film or TV series. Katherine J. Lewis describes how the module was conceived with two main purposes in mind: The first to combine the study of medieval history and modern representations of the Middle Ages in a way that would be both engaging and academically valid. The second was to give the students an opportunity to take a more creative and imaginative approach to the past. This enables them to gain a more nuanced understanding of the processes by which events and individuals have been depicted, interpreted and appropriated both in medieval accounts and modern re-creations. Lewis explains that the students are required not simply to identify ‘historical inaccuracies’ in medieval and modern sources but to account for these, considering what sorts of cultural work they perform in relation to issues of authorship, audience, genre and so on.