Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines literature and language within specific social, cultural, geographical, and textual environments to explore the mutually informing relationship between history and text. May be further organized by historical period, genre, or critical approach. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Medieval Literature

Monsters, Mysteries, Quests, Sex, and Death

English 211 - The Place of the Past 

The medieval is remote from our present moment, while in the very middle (the Middle Ages, after all) of the history that produced this present moment. The medieval is something entirely other from us; there, we find the strange, violent, beautiful, grotesque, spiritual, scary, funny, but in these recognitions, we can find that the medieval remains very much who we are. Literature comprehends these mysteries.  

We start in the late 600s, when a socially awkward cowherder skips out of a beer-swilling party to go curl up with the cows, and has a dream of a enigmatic shining figure commanding him to ‘Sing creation.’ We end around the year 1500, with a dark slapstick comedy of a sheep dressed as a baby who might be dinner or the savior of humanity. In between—and this is the short list—we get an epic hero slaying a dragon (of course), ecstatic visions of Christ on the cross (also of course), not to mention penis riddles, heretic confessions, courtly love songs, and blinding farts. 800 years of dynamic change in language, history, religion and culture from which emerges, well, us.  

In this course, we will survey medieval English literature from its historical and mythic beginnings in the oral traditions of the Dark Age heroic past, through the violent transformation following the Norman Conquest where Old English met Norman French and begot the language we now speak, to the complex wonders of Chaucer and the Gawain-poet whose gorgeous poems emerged in an age of plague, religious crisis, and political upheaval.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

We will be studying medieval literature historically and culturally, grounding our thinking in how it reflects the moment it was written, The course will explore the diversity of medieval genres—epic, elegy, romance, lyric, mystical vision, drama—and explore the religious, intellectual, and literary cultures that produced these authors and their texts. In so doing, we will consider the weird yet familiar world of medieval literature and think about how literary imagination and language reflect on particular moments in the wild, changing, complicated period of history that gave birth to our modern world and selves, and we will consider how medieval literature continues to mean for us in 2026.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Most readings will be taken from the Broadview Anthology. This book is available in local bookstores and in online book dealers both used and new--so shop around. Having the physical copy is recommended for the possibilities of in-class work and open-book exams.

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: