This would be a possible question for the second part of the exam.
“In the beginning of the semester we discussed the necessity of keeping opinion and presumptions out of our study of medieval texts. After a semester of reading and assessing the merit of the texts, would you say it is possible or impossible to keep modern perspective out and remain unbiased? How so?”
I think I know what you’re referencing here in your first sentence, Josh, though I’d put it quite differently, since I don’t believe there’s any way to keep opinion out of our reading experiences and certainly wouldn’t see that as a positive development, were it to become magically possible. Instead, I’d say that we discussed (with Mortimer’s intro as a catalyst, I recall) the ways we might try to be open to listening to the past rather than telling it what it should be, from our later vantage point. We discussed the ways our modern positioning requires something different from us than the positioning of the texts’ first audiences required of them. But I never aspired to any sort of bias-free encounter. I don’t even know what that would really be. A question we might consider in the forum of the exam (which really needs to be oriented toward evidence and the analysis thereof) is which texts seem particularly challenging (more than others in the collection) to us as modern, chronologically-delayed readers, and what we might make of this observation, what it might tell us about our culture and theirs.