In this post, Karen Smyth shares her recent experience of introducing medieval heritage trails to students on a Medical Humanities MA pathway.
In moving beyond the traditional discipline of History, what are the challenges and opportunities in teaching not only a cross-disciplinary but also a cross-sector cohort of students? How might the Creative Health agenda, now emerging in the heritage sector, enable medieval history to play a central role in the discipline of Medical Humanities?
Karen shares her teaching experiences which were made possible with the recent award, by the Society, of a Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowship. RHS Teaching Fellowships support the development of new teaching practices in History in Higher Education.
Cross-Sector Challenges
The cultural importance of remembering the past lies in its development of skills in the contextual and comparative study of cultures, generations, and communities, fostering humanity and empathy. These are central aims in the Medical Humanities, a still-evolving area of practice and policy that extends beyond academia, involving a range of cross-sector practitioners as well as theorists. It typically attracts students already in careers in health services, local authorities, arts and cultural organisations, faith groups, the educational sector, academic research, social enterprises, the arts, wellbeing practitioners, and self-organised community groups and activists. For the nature of this subject area, see the polyphony – Conversations across the medical humanities.
The teaching reported here was trialled for two years before this report compilation on an Applied Arts module for the MA Medical and Health Humanities at UEA. The module has a civic focus and ethos. Alongside workshops led by academics embedded in the field, it brings in well-being practitioners to share their frontline reflections and expertise. The cohort sizes were 23 and 16 students per group.
The pedagogical challenge was to make a medieval Norfolk family relevant to students from such diverse sectors with different knowledge bases and learning styles. What practices, concepts, and interventions can students learn to apply about harnessing heritage for health interventions in other contexts and places?
The Challenge of Missing Arcane Specialisms
The Paston archive (1416–1536) is the earliest and most extensive extant family letter collection written in English, comprising over two thousand documents. The medieval letters provide what would otherwise have been a lost voice of the Middle Ages, detailing daily lived experiences beyond the Royal courts. Their story is full of emotions, resilience, and courage. We read testimonies of family nurturing and strife, education, neighbourly disputes, lawlessness, warfare, sieges, financial struggles, social ambitions, religious dissent, and the dreaded plague.
At first glance, these historical letters seem ideal to study, as this Applied Arts module aims to explore how diverse illnesses, suffering, recovery, and resilience are created, experienced, and treated in diverse ways across various cultures. This correlates with the History QAA subject benchmark statement 1.7, which promotes learning of:
How people have existed, acted and thought in the always-different context of the past. History involves encountering the past’s otherness and learning to understand unfamiliar structures, cultures and belief systems. These forms of understanding illuminate the influence of the past on the present; they also foster empathy, and respect for difference.
Yet, the students did not have arcane specialisms, such as skills in palaeography or language to read the sources, visual culture to read buildings or artefacts, or expertise in landscape history. Many from international backgrounds were unfamiliar with the social and political contexts of the time, such as the Wars of the Roses or the Bubonic plague. How, then, can we walk in the otherness of the Pastons’ social structures, cultures, and belief systems, and how can we foster empathy skills through their experiences?
A heritage trail prompts the focus: how to walk in the footprints of lives lived? The concept of lived experience is prominent in Western healthcare systems (with the emergence of Experts-by-Experience) but is rarely theorised. For historians, the caution of re-creating any sense of lived experience with recognition of all the historical mediations across the centuries is of no greater relevance than with the Paston letters. Medieval letters are not ego-documents; they tend to be transactional and/or conversational, with many gaps in the archives.
Heritage landscapes, though, allow us to connect through the stories of lives lived. In addition, the emerging Creative Health agenda in the heritage sector provides a direction, we propose, with its use of diverse sensory, embodied, and alternative cognitive interpretations. The Jinty Nelson fellowship enabled the trial of the use of immersive Creative Health interventions in the heritage sector as a teaching template.
This responds to the RHS October 2024 call to increase collaboration between academic and public agendas as historians: The Value of History: a new briefing from the Royal Historical Society | Historical Transactions. This works in an academic landscape where Smith and Dean’s proposal (2009, p. 20) is finally being championed amidst all the contestations of “research-by-practice.” These critics articulate the iterative, cyclic web of lived creative practice and critical-analytical-led research and design processes.
The Paston Footprints Norwich Trail
Harnessing Paston heritage for health through an immersive focus suggested a very literal walking in the footprints, in the form of a heritage trail.
To this, Karen brought her practice-led research experience of co-production as Co-Director of Paston Footprints. This NHLF project is a collaboration between academics from literature, landscape history and digital humanities, the Norfolk Public Record Office, the Paston Heritage Society, the environmental team of Norfolk County Council, creative arts practitioners, a faith group, a men’s mental health charity, a dementia carer group, a group of teenagers interested in enhancing literacy skills, and a group of people using mobility aids and wheelchairs all took part. Established in 2018 to celebrate the 600th anniversary of the first letter, the mission continues to empower storytelling with the Paston letters, lives, and landmarks.
An overview of the Paston Footprints Norwich city trail, mapped by Dr Rob Knee, used in the teaching trial, can be found here.
The assortment of students’ cultural and professional backgrounds and experiences suggested that the concept of difference could be embraced as an asset in this learning context. The diversity in the classroom could create a microenvironment for experimenting with different models of asset mapping used in heritage projects when co-producing across sectors in health interventions. This meant the learning methods in the student workshops were modelled on the trail co-production methods.
Asset Mapping
The diversification of how we interact with and plan for our local and global spaces is happening at a time of heightened awareness, due to the acceleration of climate change effects and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Responding to such trends, in 2022, Historic England published A Strategy for Wellbeing and Heritage 2022-25 and likewise, the UK Heritage Alliance published a harnessing heritage for wellbeing strategy: THA-Strategy-2021-2026.pdf. In this context, cultural itineraries cater to various motivations for those seeking physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. As an ice-breaker, we invited our international students to share any similar projects they knew that had occurred in their countries. This opened up the discussion of different cultural attitudes to land usage and creative, holistic health measures.
UEA students’ (back row) asset mapping via Post-it group clustering with four of the Paston Footprints co-producers (front row left to right: Dr Sophie Cabot of Hungate Medieval Art, Rik Martin of Community Action Norfolk, Karen Smyth of UEA, and Dr Rob Knee, Chair of the Paston Heritage Society). For teachers and students who prefer a digital version over Post-its, Padlet sessions can be effective.
To further probe the creative health agenda, we had a classroom-based session discussing differences across disciplines to asset mapping. This responds to the History QAA subject benchmark statement 1.8:
History’s reciprocal relationship with other subjects can also have an important influence on the student’s experience of the subject and the abilities gained: interdisciplinarity more broadly brings fresh approaches, perspectives and ways of investigation and conceptualisation.
Students determined that asset mapping, in a cross-disciplinary way, could follow the routes of the co-production methods of the trail. Teaching Asset mapping the intangible – heritage storytelling (family dynamics, social unrest, pandemic, age of austerity, walking), belonging (cross-sectional communities), health outcomes (physical and mental)
As in the creation of the trail, the theorists and Humanities scholars in the class began with historical sources. These students identified that the heritage story could be asset-mapped for its connections with today’s wellbeing and illness narratives. Sociologists and mental health well-being practitioners were keen to explore how empathy skills might be developed by examining the otherness of historical lived experiences.
The heritage site was identified as another asset: how might belonging to a place be promoted? How might historic monuments be used in mindfulness promotion? Stakeholders and volunteering roles were discussed in relation to community activists’ and well-being advocates’ asset mapping practices, with the aim of reducing isolation, promoting cross-sector demographic interactions, and developing new skills. Meanwhile, asset-mapping different audience demographics follows practices by health scientists, and how to promote both creative and physical access.
Walking-as-praxis
Next came the walking boots. The students were taken in small groups to experience the Norwich city trail themselves through various immersive practices.
The first mile of the walk in Norwich city centre was led by a re-enactor, who used verbatim discourse from the letters (in Modern English). Students were immersed in the world of John Paston III and Margery Brews. This included visiting the site of and hearing the first-ever written Valentine’s letter read in the original Middle English to convey the sense of the historic voice (listen here: Margery Brews 1477 Valentine Letter). Our embodied ‘John Paston’ introduced the students to the benefits of the garden herbs for defeating the plague, pointed out the wooden corbel in the church roof of his mother and father as he reminisced, and shared the gossip about the street brawl outside the Cathedral Gates.
Figure 2: UEA Medical Humanities students on the Norwich Paston Footprints Trail, led by re-enactor Dr Rob Knee. Creative Commons 4: Paston Footprints.
The re-enactor interacted with the students, asking their opinions. He sometimes welcomed 21st-century attitudes. For example, he welcomed the idea of vaccines in a pandemic while still applauding the holistic health support of herbal medicine. He was somewhat dubious of TikTok or Instagram snapshots of family life over the legacy of the stone roof corbels. At other times, he was bemused by the students’ attitudes, as when he asked them what they would do if they were caught up in the Pastons’ neighbourly disputes, if their horse were stolen at the nearby hotel, or if they had a wayward daughter who married for love rather than social ambition.
In today’s modern practices of experiential heritage trails, our proposal was to create what Mark Auslander, the sociologist, describes as ‘an intimate traffic’ between contemporary practices and historic discourses (2016, 17). This resulted in the interactive dramatisation of how lived experiences can relate and differ across different cultures (and ages). Health practitioners noted how the participatory dialogue helped maintain concentration skills and how mindfulness could be promoted by searching for clues in the built heritage to uncover hidden stories.
The second experience invited students to role-play during the walk. If they accepted this challenge, they were given a name, an imitative medieval headdress, a description of a role, sometimes a prop, and an activity to engage in. The re-enactor leading the walk prompted the walkers when to participate. Roles included that of a scribe delivering a letter, an apothecary collecting herbs, a cleric chanting prayers, neighbours chanting the Paston curse, or walkers carrying herbs to waft at passers-by to prevent catching the plague, a pilgrim being awarded a pilgrim’s badge at the Cathedral, and so on.
Students were then given the option to either continue with the Norwich walk (after taking a break and enjoying refreshments in the Castle café) at their own pace, or they could team up in pairs and select one of the other Paston landscapes. This self-directed walking experience was supported by a pre-recorded audio drama podcast (produced by Holly Maples, Professor of Theatre, University of Essex) and other resources, including 3D reconstructions of Paston buildings (produced by James Mindham), accessibility audits (by Action Norfolk), mindfulness prompts (by marketing strategist Emily Parker), creative activities, family activities, and opportunities to delve deeper into Paston history. This provided students with an alternative to group walking, as the general public might do if not part of a health, heritage, or leisure group.
The Jinty Nelson fellowship kindly funded the transport for students to access the locations of the other heritage trails, which included:
- Literary Landscapes: the origins of the story in Paston.
- Walk like a pilgrim: a walk at the seaside in Bacton.
- Women’s history: Mautby and Margaret, the “first woman of letters”.
- Siege and defiance: Gresham’s Forgotten Landscape.
- Blofield’s Sensory Steps: Edward’s recusant music and hidden lyrics.
- Oxnead’s Whirlpools of Misadventure: the unravelling of the story.
Outcomes
The workshop on co-production and asset mapping techniques, followed by immersion in the trail, encouraged students to consider how both those co-producing the trail and walkers experiencing it through different creative access methods might relate to walking in Paston footprints.
The heritage students valued connections with the past as a means of promoting a sense of belonging to place, which enabled the public to discover the story through guided conversations, self-exploration, and digital interactions, promoting skills-building in reading historical sites and sources. Meanwhile, the health practitioners developed an awareness of how different forms of role-playing are informed by the assets of different audience demographics.
Just some of the student discoveries included how heritage trails offer a creative intervention for those needing cognitive stimulation or distraction from internal rumination to reduce anxiety, which informed the development of the first conversation walking style. The second role-playing style was identified as developing emotional empathy skills by walking in others’ lives and building confidence. The group walking was identified as increasing a sense of safety by a number of students.
The contrast with the self-guided tours was identified as a well-being intervention for those who find groups confronting, for those with neurodiverse needs requiring quieter walking methods (listening to the audio blocks out the cityscape sounds). Meanwhile, the walks in other landscapes offered a range of alternative well-being interventions.
The students identified that people with disabilities often have a unique lens through which to interpret spaces, based on their embodied, sensory experiences and situated knowledge, which can offer a different way to engage with cultural heritage. As one student asked, ‘What if someone with visual loss were to lead the pilgrimage in Bacton? Would that not defamiliarise the walking experience for all and recover the historical practice of why people went on pilgrimage?’. The reflective seminar after the walk concluded, centralising the voices of people with disabilities in accessing and interpreting cultural spaces helps address Article 30 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: the right ‘to take part on an equal basis with others in cultural life’.
Discussion
Walking as a learning praxis to promote immersive experience of different forms of creative access to the Pastons’ lived experiences, enabled students to learn how to asset-map their own learning skills. This differs from Trevelyan’s critique of modernity in the early 1900s, which idealised walking as a historian’s access to a lost-in-time, Romanticised past (Trevelyan, 1928). This was motivated by a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, which aimed to de-accelerate and experience emotions in order not to feel disembodied. This appreciation for well-being and immersive connection with place has resurfaced in the last decade with the rise of the Creative Health agenda, such as yoga classes being introduced into stately home venues.
There is, however, a more nuanced opportunity as shown in this case study with co-production processes, where History scholars can work cross-sector with well-being practitioners and theorists, around the concept of creative access (in addition to physical access) to heritage landscapes. This is where open minds about the variety of asset mapping, combined with the live re-enactor or the audio drama podcast, come into play on these Paston trails, with a desire to centralise connections with the heritage story.
This shows how walking-as-praxis does not need to be about the quelling of ‘our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with civilised words’ as in Trevelyan’s model (Jamie, 2008, p. 26). Instead, it is a questioning process of how to storify the past in biographical landscapes. The places are neither yielding nor empty, but storied and perpetually contested, as we build empathy skills through the otherness of past lived experiences and bring them to curate and interpret the heritage site through diverse sensory, embodied, and cognitive styles today.
About the author
Dr Karen Smyth is Honorary Professor of Literature at the University of East Anglia and Co-Director of Paston Footprints. She has authored critical studies on medieval East Anglian texts, heritage studies on identity, place, and intangible health benefits of community storytelling, and co-produces creative adaptations of the premodern.
For the academic year 2023-24, Karen received one pf the Royal Historical Society’s Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowships. This Fellowship has enabled her to establish a workshop on cross-sector heritage trail production and evaluation, allowing students to access seven trails in Norfolk and to produce teaching materials at https://www.pastonfootprints.co.uk.
The trail continues to be used in other teaching contexts, including literature, history, and adaptation studies.
HEADER IMAGE: Map of Paston heritage trails. © Creative Commons 4: Paston Footprints
