Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

The study of selected works by Geoffrey Chaucer, especially The Canterbury Tales, read in the language in which they were written and situated in the context of Fourteenth century European culture.

COURSE DETAILS:

 After 600 plus years of “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote,” it is tempting to think of Geoffrey Chaucer in only the fustiest of terms: the deadest and whitest of England’s dead white males; the moribund cornerstone of a moribund canon; a thousand yellowing pages on a creaky bookshelf. Lost in this staid (and deeply inaccurate) vision of Chaucer, however, is the kaleidoscopic and sometimes radical brilliance of his work, a collection of writings that alternately hum with skepticism and faith, anxiety and optimism, paradox and ambiguity, pun and punch line, sex, piety, moralism, violence and wit. The man John Dryden dubbed the “Father of English Poetry” was, it seems, as fond of a good fart joke as he was of an astute philosophical point. Readers of Chaucer will find both, often in the same place.  

In this course, we will consider several early dream visions before turning to Troilus and Criseyde and then The Canterbury Tales, the last and most vexing of Chaucer’s works. In the process, we will work to place Chaucer within the linguistic, political, and cultural contexts of late-medieval England, and we will consider not only why Chaucer mattered in his own tumultuous age but why he still matters in ours.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Of studie tak ye moost cure and most heede.
Noght o word spak ye moore than ys neede,
And that is seyd in forme and reverence,
And short and quyk and ful of hy sentence;
Sownynge in moral vertu ys your speche,
And gladly wolde ye lerne and gladly teche.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: