One of the country’s only medieval camps for kids is right here in the Twin Cities, and it got its start in a peculiar way: with the Augsburg College wrestling team. Augsburg professor of ancient and medieval history, Phil Adamo, had finished creating his medieval studies program, but he really needed some advice on how to market it. He’d never attended camp himself, so he felt at a slight disadvantage.
“We have a fantastic wrestling program [at Augsburg] and one of the things they do to enhance it is run a summer camp,” Adamo says. “Kids come to the camp where the Augsburg wrestling coaches teach and then pretty soon they are going to college—and they come to Augsburg where they are national champions in wrestling.”
Adamo used that model to let kids know about the medieval studies program, and has now been running Medieval Minnesota camp for six years. The only problem? “It’s too short,” says Katie Peterson of Wilmington, Delaware, who has attended the camp four times. “But, you always meet other people who share your interests.”
Adamo echoes this statement, saying that campers are able to find their “tribe,” a group of kids who are just like them. “There’s a whole group of high school kids everywhere who love Harry Potter, who love the Middle Ages, who love Tolkien. Those kids are not necessarily the athletes or the homecoming queen. They come here and it’s like, ‘Oh, I have found the other people, the other students, who are like me!’ And they instantly get that, that other kids are excited about the same things they are excited about.”
“A lot of fun!”
Walking into the music class you will see campers studying the medieval French text to the song “Robyn and Marion” from the 13th-century composer Adam de la Halle, or sitting in on the bow making class where students are fletching arrows (attaching the feathers to the shaft).
The students work together to create their bows and arrows, and is accomplished with cooperation, concentration, bursts of laughter, and lots of smiling.
“I came here because I really like medieval history and it sounded like a lot of fun, and it is!” says first-time camper Ben Bevis, of Boston, Massachusetts, while putting wax on his bowstring. “I’m glad I came!”
Bow making and medieval music are not all these kids are learning about; campers also learn Renaissance dance, medieval swordsmanship, and what it means to make and wear armor. Each student creates a medieval costume that he or she will wear at the Feast on the last night of the camp. They will also get to practice using their bows and arrows at an archery range.
“I came here because I was looking for someplace where I could learn more about medieval history. What people don’t realize is that [while] we look like a bunch of nerds, medieval history is a lot of fun,” says Ari Schlossberg, of Chicago, Illinois, who hopes to become a professor of medieval studies some day.
If Schlossberg continues to come to Medieval Minnesota, he will get a great taste of what the medieval studies program at Augsburg is all about.
“If you come to Augsburg for four years, the medieval studies program will be a lot more intense,” Adamo says. “The college program and the camp are the same in the sense that we are still studying the Middle Ages and some of the topics might be same, but at the college level, students will do things in a more focused, much more thorough way.”
Adamo has learned from past years to make the camp a better educational experience for all involved. “The first year we did the camp, we offered a whole bunch of stuff and we did it for like an hour. We had one hour of dance class and one hour of music and one hour of this and that. We had 50 different things the students did and they were just overwhelmed,” he says. “If you go to dance class once to learn a Renaissance dance, well that’s not enough. You need to practice. So the second year, we started more or less in this structure that we have now where we have the same offerings scheduled five days a week.
“Some people think that studying the Middle Ages is obsolete, an escapist kind of thing, or it’s not a thing to be taken seriously. I don’t think that at all. The Middle Ages can really tell us a lot about the time in which we live right now if we know how to look at it,” says Adamo. “What I am trying to do…is show how relevant the medieval period is to our own times, to show the students how to study this period and how to talk about in ways that will create a broader, more inclusive audience.”
For a guy who never went to summer camp before he started one, he’s doing a pretty great job.
