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TEACHING incest in medieval LITERATURE, CULTURE AND LAW George D. Greenia College ofWilliam & Mary 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 CentralMiddle 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 La corónica 35.2 (Spring, 2007): 15-37 16George D. GreeniaLa corónica 35.2, 2007 yet, the cherished theses abandoned as we assembled documentation for an argument that changed as we worked. The breakfast interview was the uncensored peek into the workshop when students got to privately ask an author what she found that surprised her, what she left purposely omitted, where her own expertise ran aground, where a later complementary article or even second book would balance the picture, what other researchers would have to take up. Patrick Geary did an excellentjob oflaunching this series and odier guest authors who came to campus -John Boswell for a course on The Abandonment of Children, E. Ann Matter on The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages, Edward Peters for Inquisition,James Taborwho helped us teach The Book of Revelation: From Rome to Waco, Alison Weber for Women and Mysticism: 4eresa of Ávila- all embraced the format and gave us brilliant lectures and prompted challenging conversations. In the Spring of 2002 we resolved to prepare another interdisciplinary course on Incest in Medieval Literature, Culture and Law. It was not a casual decision: a few years earlier we had talked about mounting a course on suicide in literary and cultural studies and eventually, well, chickened out. The material to read and discuss was certainly rich and intriguing and the interdisciplinary approach provided a calming distance and professionalization to an inherently disturbing topic. But howwould undergraduates react? Could we handle their unpredictable emotional responses? What if some tried to harm diemselves becausewe filled their imaginations widi terrible possibilities or somehow validated the dark fears that already haunted them? Teaching incest was not going to be much easier, so we started more programmatically, with a faculty seminar the preceding May. Campus participants included a clinical psychologist, a physician from the student health center and an anthropologist, as well as faculty from literature and history.1 It seemed crucial that the Counseling Center staffwere kept in the loop in case they started to notice a spike in campus conversations about incest reflected in their clients' voiced concerns. Campus clinical psychologists were invited to brief the teaching faculty and reacquaint themselves on issues that might arise and they helped...

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