What does it mean to teach a "humanities core" (HumCore) at Stanford today? Over the last few decades, our fields of study have witnessed a growing discomfort with the Western canon. It is no longer tenable to associate humanistic study in California solely with that famous story which starts in Ancient Greece and ends in the United States, stopping along the way in the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. Stanford faculty have been taking part in these field-defining conversations for many years.

On "the inspiring resistance that the [Middle Ages] imposes on us, and the hermeneutic difficulty—maybe even the impossibility—of accessing medieval culture."