Sandy Bonds is making the past come alive with a course called “Reinventing Yourself: Creating Your Past Alter Ego.”
Throughout the fall term, students will learn about the lives of Europeans in the medieval and Renaissance periods, as well as design and construct their own period-accurate clothing.
This fall marks the third time Bonds has taught this course as part of the Freshmen Seminar program, which gives first-year students the chance to work closely with faculty members in small class settings of 20 students or fewer.
On the first day of class, Bonds, a theatre arts professor and costume designer, brings in images from illuminated manuscripts, sculpture and other art that depict individuals wearing medieval and Renaissance dress. Students choose which “character” they want to be for the rest of the term.
The selection dictates which time period and location students examine and what clothing they construct. For example, a student who chooses a woman in an Italian fresco from the year 1350 not only reproduces the dress the woman wears, but also researches what her life was like, including the geographic region she lived in, the political climate, what her home and furniture might have looked like and what she might have done in her leisure time.
Meanwhile, Bonds teaches the students basic hand and machine sewing techniques and patterning skills, and the students create their clothing, striving to make it in the ways their characters would have hundreds of years ago. To cap off the term, the students celebrate their success with a party, adorned in their new (but very old-style) clothes.
— Amanda Miles
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