Royal Touch in the Economics Classroom: An Account of a Role-playing Activity to Improve Student Engagement

The paper describes a classroom role-playing activity in an undergraduate course on alternative perspectives in economics, during a week which explores religion. The activity is designed to promote engagement by immersing students in a historical re-enactment of the royal touch - a grand thaumaturgical ceremony practiced in medieval and early modern England and France, where monarchs sought to heal scrofula with the power of divine touch. After the re-enactment, the students are invited to join in a discussion to disentangle the economic underpinnings behind the practice. The paper describes the activity in the form of an easily transferrable lesson plan, supplemented with its setup, materials, script, discussion questions and answers. The article further calls on other lecturers to use this activity in their own economics of religion classrooms or use it as a template to experiment with re-enactments of other exciting historical cases.