Crafting the Renaissance: Experiential Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Classroom

“Crafting the Renaissance” is an interdisciplinary History course that explores material culture in an experiential manner. Students cook from period recipes, cut quill pens, carve block prints, embroider and gamble with dice as an experiential lens revealing gendered cultural practices. The course engages student interest through a project-based approach that is complemented by scholarly and primary source readings, lectures, and discussions focused on gendered spaces, practices, occupations, and roles. The course culminates in a public poster session, at which students share their independent research projects, for which they make or do something in a historical manner, based upon evidence found in primary sources. “Crafting the Renaissance” demonstrates that approaching history from below, by examining early modern lived experience through physical reenactment of everyday skills, deeply impacts student understanding and reveals a more complex past than stereotypical narratives of progress suggest.