Once again this year, of the two summer workshops I offer for kids, Renaissance Week is filling up much faster than Medieval Week. I guess it's not a coincidence: one of the parents signing up confessed that the Renaissance seemed "way more appealing" than the medieval era.

Meanwhile, I taught a session on medieval music recently to some adult students of traditional fiddle. “What do you mean by ‘medieval’?” one of them asked. “Was it when they had those low-cut gowns? Was it when they had those pointy hats? Is there maybe a movie we’ve seen that is set in the middle ages?” “Did they have any upbeat music?” asked another.

I had forgotten that regular people have few or no images for the middle ages. And the images they might have aren’t the same as mine. People may think of cold stone buildings and eerie Gregorian chant, of torture and gruesome martyrdoms, of the Black Plague, hunger, ignorance, witch-burnings… and then possibly of some Monty Python routines involving cows and coconut shells.

None of this, of course, suggests a week of summer fun for kids.

So let me mention that the medieval era is also the time of dragons, unicorns, castles, and mazes. The late middle ages featured fantastic storytelling, beautiful calligraphy, daring adventurers, knights in shining armor, music you want to dance and sing to, funny and captivating stories, fancy clothing, and gorgeously colorful, accessible, sometimes cartoonish art. (See England’s nearly thousand-year-old Bayeaux Tapestry, http://www.bayeuxtapestry.org.uk/Bayeux1.htm, for an example, or any unicorn art, such as this: http://www.yorkminster.org/img/fullsize/product62.jpg.)

In the places where art had a chance to flourish, the stuff that was produced in the late middle ages is (to me) unrivalled for simple loveliness. If I had another life to live right now, I’d spend it learning to draw the whimsical animals and narrative scenes and, best of all, the decorative borders of flowers, vines, and geometrical shapes that adorn the pages of medieval manuscripts: http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/images/Rouen.JPG.

I never stop being fascinated by how -- with the important exception of high-church art and architecture -- nothing is ever quite perfectly symmetrical, even when the idea of symmetry is there. People who made art were craftspeople, not scientists (as would famously become the case in the Renaissance with figures like Leonardo da Vinci) and not even “artists” in the way we understand the term today. They were making things up in real time, literally doodling in the margins: http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/chg/content/images/2007_3368.jpg. Kids look at a few pages of medieval manuscripts and calligraphic alphabets and they reach for the paints or colored pencils, coming out with the most gorgeous illuminated capitals or newly-designed coats of arms. It’s as kid-friendly as can be.

I do skip the bloody martyrdoms and the Crusades, just as we might not want our kids to dwell on the latest news of torture and aggression in our present-day world. We do mention in class that many of the arts we enjoy were available only to those with leisure, and that life was full of toil and terribly short on choices for most people.

But one advantage it had over our own age -- and I think this was true for many more centuries, until relatively recently in Western history, perhaps the nineteenth century -- is that the arts and skills and crafts enjoyed by adults were equally available and accessible for children. There was no separate kids’ music or art, because there was no need. The children of working families also took part in practical crafts, rather than idling at home while their parents left to work in adults-only environments. In our workshops, the kids are always fascinated to learn how to spin raw wool into yarn and to consider that, in an earlier age, they would already have been be experts at these kinds of skills.

Our consumption-based culture doesn’t offer kids so many opportunities to enjoy a sense of practical competence. I wouldn’t take my chances going back in time, but we’ve paid a high price for our modern comforts. It’s a great treat to be able to bring some of these old arts to my young urban neighbors!