ABSTRACT
One of the biggest challenges facing those of us who teach the literature of the Middle Ages in the late twentieth century is to find a way to make the human life experiences of that period more accessible for students who have never even known a time when there was no TV. Unless students have some feel for the background to the literature and the values of the civilizations which created it, the gap between their own experiences and those portrayed in the literature of Medieval Europe is almost unbridgeable for all but a few highly motivated students. And if we make the literature even more remote by placing it not only in a foreign language, but also in an archaic form of that language, a survey course in medieval Spanish literature for third-year Spanish students can be a frustrating experience for students and teachers alike.
