The Massachusetts Medievalist on the Norton Anthology and Open-Access Teaching Resources (2 of 2)
Monday's post called attention to the unsavory "First Day Complete" program currently infiltrating numerous campus bookstores. Today, the Massachusetts Medievalist thinks about the need to move away from one of the items available in those bookstores: the Norton Anthology of English Literature (NAEL), the grande dameof textbooks for the literature classroom.
The latest edition of the Middle Ages volume of NAEL will feature some excellent improvements, justly touted and celebrated on Twitter and elsewhere in late August 2022. These include elimination of the of the term “Anglo-Saxon,” acknowledgement of literature in English as part of a more global Middle Ages, more accessible presentation of Middle English, and more context/explanation of Christian doctrine. Julie Orlemanski, co-editor of the new edition with James Simpson, received more than 500 likes on Twitter as she announced the changes (in the world of medieval scholarship, 500 likes is a lot). All of these points evade the crucial question of why we are still creating anthologies and textbooks with for-profit publishers when the obvious national need is for open-access texts.
We must see open access to educational materials as a social justice issue, as numerous thinkers and commentators with platforms much vaster than mine have argued. Most of the undergraduates in the United States are already taking on too much debt and working too many hours outside of class. Consistent use of no-cost materials as widely as possible across the university can help to mitigate our students’ financial stressors. The current NAEL-Middle Ages volume is $61.25 new, and I’m assuming the next edition will be slightly more.
Part of that $61.25 goes to the editors. Sean Shesgreen estimated in 2009 that each NAEL editor receives between $10,000 and $84,000 a year, depending on length of service on the anthology's board. (Shesgreen notes that “Editors would sooner talk about the sex lives of their colleagues than reveal what they garner from the anthology” p.301). Julie Orlemanski (University of Chicago) and James Simpson (Harvard University) are probably two of the most highly-compensated medievalists in the entire world, even without a five-figure bonus for their editorial work on NAEL.
Years ago (2014?), student finances led me to stop using an assigned anthology in my lit survey classes. Even with options like used copies or semester rentals, they still weren’t buying it. When I would assign NAEL, or its quasi-competitor the Broadview Anthology, my students routinely used their phones to photograph assigned readings from the hard copy books of the one or two students in the class who had actually bought them.
I ended up compiling the all-open-access materials I needed with the help of super hero librarians. Admittedly, all medieval literature is way out of copyright, so it's probably easier to compile an all-OAR set of texts to replace the NAEL Middle Ages volume than its twentieth and twenty-first century volume. The field of medieval studies offers excellent OAR resources; organizations like TEAMS Middle English or SMFS Texts and Translations provide models for production and dissemination of high-quality materials at no charge to the end user. The OAR revolution is a chance for medieval studies to be an interdisciplinary leader.
I cannot fully describe to you the absolute relief I see in many students' faces when they realize there is no bookstore bill for my class. Many of my colleagues have similarly moved away from traditional textbooks and toward OAR. It's good that NAEL is trying to be more inclusive. It would be even better not to have NAEL and other anthologies at all, to live and work in a world where students' course materials aren't sourced through a for-profit textbook publisher but provided in accessible and fungible digital forms that work seamlessly across platforms. In that world, OAR is the default mode rather than a quirky outlier. We can make it happen.
N.B. I attempted to contact Julie Orlemanski twice to hear from her about her work on NAEL. She did not answer my emails, one in late August and one in early November.