Abstract This introduction defines crumpling the timeline as a classroom practice in which instructors and students explore medieval texts alongside twentieth- and twenty-first-century works. In this special issue, some contributors describe teaching strategies that pair premodern literature with overtly “medievalist” contemporary works. Other contributors engage students in analyzing themes, questions, and rhetorical strategies found both in medieval texts and in more recent works that do not explicitly invoke the Middle Ages. Developments within medieval studies as a field necessitate new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between the present and the past. Often surprised by the common ground between medieval preoccupations and our own, students embrace the opportunity to incorporate their own cultural expertise into classroom conversations.

Innocent III’s 1215 decree requiring an annual confession of all Christians spurred the development of religious instructional works, some of the first texts written for nonnoble audiences and arguably the ancestors of working-class literature. This article explains the historical and cultural contexts that gave rise to these texts and the rich pedagogical opportunities they provide.

In modern usage, living “off the grid” means living totally independently, without the modern conveniences of publicly supplied gas, electricity, and water; it also refers to people who strive to remain unrecorded in governmental, financial, and medical documents. More generally, to live off the grid is to live against the grain of society, ideologically at odds with the mainstream. As we have put the idea to use for this guestedited issue, “Teaching Medieval Literature off the Grid,” instructors who incorporate noncanonical texts into their classrooms resemble the above definitions in several respects. For one thing, to teach “off the grid” is almost always to teach selfsufficiently — to locate the texts you think are important and figure out for yourself why they are important, to provide or create your own introductory notes, glosses, and other relevant contextualizing material for your students. It is to build a lesson literally from the ground up. You are certainly off the beaten path, without much assistance or advice from textbooks, teachers’ manuals, online resources, or other scholars’ work; there is little, if anything, to vouch for or justify your lesson plan. To put it simply, and most generally, to teach off the grid is to teach outside the comfort zone of the canon, without the builtin validations and pedagogies that literary tradition provides. The challenges of teaching off the grid are many, but this issue of Pedagogy argues that the rewards are great. Noncanonical texts can shed light on perspectives different from those represented by the culturally authoritative texts of the canon, often can serve the useful purpose of defamiliarizing traditional readings, and