I am a medievalist and scholar of French language/literature who studies the relationship between poetry and issues of vulnerability and care. The questions that guide my research stem from a conviction that literature can cultivate relations of care in our vulnerable world. I first became interested in these ideas through experiences of long-term illness and caregiving that heightened my awareness of the complexity of our caring needs and the ways in which the arts express, address, or answer them. My fascination with this topic crystalized unexpectedly in a required medieval literature class. The late medieval French poetry in which I now specialize exhibits extreme sensitivity to the caring capacities of poetry amid the turmoil of plague, war and civil war. Not only did this sensitivity surprise and move me, but it challenged my preconceptions about the foreignness of the distant past. This combination of exploration, affect and reevaluation is what I foster in the classroom. I want students to think carefully about their own aesthetic encounters with medieval vulnerabilities and to gain a better understanding of our relationship to the past and how/why we should care about it.