| Sumario: | Scholars have often discussed the benefits of teaching medieval and Renaissance texts to first-year college students, but unless students already have a taste for such texts, they often find medieval and Renaissance works difficult, intimidating, or plain uninteresting. Current reading theory attributes these problems to a difference between our students' culture and experiences and those assumed by the work. We have found that using multi-media and technology can bridge this gap. In our 'Literature and Composition' course, we used our multi-media technology to enhance student understanding of medieval and Renaissance texts, and we used our web site and e-mail discussion list to make electronic texts available to students and to help students generate ideas about all three texts, as well as the others studied. All forms of technology can cause problems, but our experience demonstrates that the benefits of using multi-media and Internet technology far outweigh the inconveniences. Multi-media technology helped our students understand the unfamiliar language of Le Morte D'Arthur and the physical reality of Shakespeare's stage, while Internet technology gave our students access to texts, background information, and critical resources, and the ability to express their own ideas and challenge others. As a result, many of our students were confident enough about the medieval and Renaissance texts to write formal papers about them, and many cited these texts as favorites.
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