A survey of English literary culture in the High Middle Ages, from after the Norman Conquest to c. 1350. The course will attend to the verse, prose, and drama of the period in their cultural contexts.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students: Graduate students will be responsible for a more extensive syllabus, for secondary reading, and for producing a longer, more ambitious and sophisticated, seminar paper, planned in consultation with the instructor.
Athena Title
Medieval Literature 1100–1350
Undergraduate Prerequisite
Two 2000-level ENGL courses or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 3000-level ENGL course) or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 2000-level CMLT course)
Graduate Prerequisite
Permission of department
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
Students will develop confidence in reading works in the early Middle English language carefully and critically.
Students will understand the context of such works and consider how it might impact reception in the past and in the present, including developing an understanding of different (sometimes opposing) historical value systems.
Students will experiment with a range of reading methods and think about the contingencies and exigencies of those methods, both now and in the past. Identify and apply appropriate methods and theoretical frameworks that are fitting for both the text in question and the objectives of the activity.
Students will make arguments about the conclusions of their reading that are well-reasoned and supported by evidence from the text.
Students will practice a range of approaches to the presentation of research and analysis, with a particular focus on close reading—understood as the analysis of form, language, rhetoric, discourse, symbolism, style, and tone through pattern recognition across corpora—as the basis of an extended argumentative essay. Such approaches will also include discussion, oral presentation, visual presentation, and short-form writing.
This course aims to introduce students to early Middle English literature, from 1066 to c. 1350. Reading from a representative sample of authors, students will gain knowledge and familiarity with the literature of the period, particularly works in verse, prose, and drama. They will gain the ability to place this literature and its many forms in its cultural context and in dialogue with literature from other periods. Students will engage with the language of the period, achieve a considerable degree of critical sophistication, and cultivate the ability to discuss the works in question both independently and in class, orally and in writing. The course will provide students familiarity with different historical, literary, and theoretical approaches to early literature.
Topical Outline
While individual texts will vary from year to year and instructor to instructor, the course will cover the same broad strokes: this course provides a survey of writings in English (and related languages in translation) dating from 1066 to c. 1350.
Versions of this course might focus on a particular manuscript miscellany in its cultural context, with attention to conjunctions and logics of compilation in this period. The course might examine the rise of novel verse forms in English, in comparison to their development in the other languages of England. A focus on particular genres might note regional variations in how forms were deployed. Students should develop and appreciation for, and perhaps a critique of, the notion that every English text of this period constituted a kind of ‘reinvention’ of vernacular literature.
Other versions of this course might take a more historicist approach, by considering the relationship of literature to religious, technological, and political changes in the period. Readings could draw on international movements in architecture, philosophy, and education. Such a course might include translations of, e.g. Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova and/or DeGuileville, Pilgrimage of the Life of Man. It might also draw in secondary criticism like Lewis, Discarded Image; Bynum, "Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?;" and Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.
Further possible topics might include the conception of early Middle English literature as a form of translation; it’s manuscript record; dialect studies and regionality; or the scholarly reception of early Middle English, from its early rejection and elision to a modern renewal of interest in the period.
