Using your work from class sessions on Roman de Silence and The King of Tars, write an essay in which you
make a claim about the text and its handling of the topics of gender, class, race, or religion. Your thesis should
be a claim based on an observation of a detail in the text and an analysis of how or why that detail matters. It
should clearly state the “so what” aspect, i.e. the reader should be able to understand why it’s worth reading an
essay about your claim.
Some possible questions to start with:
What does Roman de Silence suggest about the way the text’s society saw the connection between nature and
nurture?
What does Roman de Silence suggest about the way the text’s society saw the role of women in society?
What does Roman de Silence suggest about the way the text’s society understood gender?
What does the narrator in Roman de Silence think about gender?
What does The King of Tars suggest about the way the text’s society saw the connection between religion and
race?
What does The King of Tars suggest about the way the text’s society saw miscegenation (interfaith or
interracial marriage)?
What does Roman de Silence or The King of Tars suggest about the way the text’s society saw the role of
children?
How does The King of Tars misrepresent the religion of Islam? Why?
What does The King of Tars’s representation of Christian-Muslim relationships suggest about historical fears of
the “religious Other”?
How might the medieval fears or concerns represented in Roman de Silence orThe King of Tars be relevant to
contemporary society?
You may start with a different question, as long as your thesis ultimately makes a claim about what the text is
doing. how it’s doing it, and why that matters.
Sample Solution
