Chaucer (Karnes)

Aside from being the best known medieval English author, Chaucer was also the one with the best sense of humor, and this course will give you ample opportunity to appreciate that humor--often bawdy, sometimes indecent, frequently witty--as we read various of his texts. We will read the bulk of The Canterbury Tales and the very strange House of Fame, as well as segments of The Book of the Duchess and Troilus and Criseyde. The diversity of genres, meters, and styles that Chaucer uses mark his effort to make English a legitimately literary language. Chaucer's self-consciousness about this project and his interest in mocking some of the popular poetic and intellectual trends of his day make his literature particularly fruitful for modern readers. As we investigate Chaucer's social, religious, and political commentaries, we will also become very familiar with Chaucer's use and development of Middle English. Requirements include dutiful fulfillment of all reading assignments, two papers, and the occasional quiz.

Medieval Bodies (Lipton)

This course will introduce students to a wide range of discourses on the body in medieval texts and culture. We will explore medieval attitudes to gender, sexuality and the regulation of desire; we will learn about the close connection between medieval textuality and sexuality, and consider the relationship between the body and the construction of subjectivity and identity. For medieval culture, the body could take on many important meanings, as the site of violence, the embodiment of political identity and a symbolic place for the meeting of human and divine. While the focus of the course will be on late medieval materials, students will also read classical and earlier medieval texts crucial to the development of later traditions. The primary readings will cover a range of literary genres (drama, fabliaux, romance, mystical autobiography), supplemented with relevant contemporary cultural materials (excerpts from medieval physiology, theology, clerical antimatrimonialism, sermons, confessors' handbooks, saint's lives and courtesy literature). Secondary materials will include social and theological history, selections from the burgeoning field of medieval literary criticism on the body, and some of the theoretical writing on the body most crucial to recent critical developments. Primary materials may include Ovid's The Art of Love, Augustine's Confessions, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's The Romance of the Rose, The Alliterative Morte D'Arthur, The Book of Margery Kempe, selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, "The Mary Plays" (N-Town) and "The Crucifixion Play" (York).

Medieval Drama: Performing Society (Lipton)

This course will examine the ways medieval society staged itself through the medium of its drama. Medieval drama presents us with a fascinating theatrical practice: ritualistic and sacred, yet also thoroughly social and profane, sometimes spectacular, sometimes participatory in intimate and non-exclusive relation with its audience. We will look at miracle and conversion plays which dramatize crises of belief and belonging, mystery plays that link a cosmic version of Christian narrative to the specific experiences of late medieval people, early liturgical dramas, saints plays, morality plays and contemporary descriptions of royal processions, courtly entertainment and civic celebrations. We will consider such topics as theater's relationship to contemporary controversy about images and iconoclasm, disputes about the nature of the sacraments, and the relationship between lay and clerical authority. In addition to the drama, course materials will include a range of social and historical material, modern theory useful to studying the drama (cultural studies, gender theory, performance theory and ritual theory) and selections from the newly burgeoning field of medieval drama criticism.

Medieval Women Writers and Readers (Lipton)

This course explores women's relationship to medieval literary culture. We will read works by medieval women (including Marie de France, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe) as well as books accessible to or written for women, such as saints' lives, devotional literature, moral instruction and civic drama. Special attention will be given to the social context in which literary activity took place, focusing on the arenas of the court, the cloister and the city. We will explore medieval attitudes to sexuality and the regulation of desire, and consider the relationship between the female body and the construction of female subjectivity and identity. We will also consider how female literacy and female patronage affected literary texts, what conventions governed the representation of women, what kinds of texts were written by and for women, and how women's access to particular genres affected the meaning of those traditions.

The Post-Colonial Middle Ages (Lipton)

Recent current events have suggested a need to understand the cultures of the East and the history of imperialism. The Middle Ages, with its well-known crusades, provides an especially apt venue for exploring these issues, as it was an important age for shaping ideologies of imperialism that continue in Western culture, and since this period is often itself treated as a kind of "Other" against which the present can be defined. In this course, we will read crusading narratives, travelogues and other literature depicting the East. In these texts the East is sometimes exoticized and Othered, at other times depicted as a culture to be conquered and assimilated. We will consider how in a variety of Middle English texts, the East helped to develop and construct a sense of "Englishness" or nationhood, and how the constructions of Muslims as pagans and idolators helped to define medieval Christianity. Readings for the class will include the work of post-colonial theorists (such as Benedict Anderson, Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha), important recent criticism in the burgeoning field of postcolonial medieval studies, and primary texts such as The Song of Roland, Chronicles of the Crusades, The Siege of Jerusalem, The Travels of John of Mandeville, Chaucer's "Squire's Tale" and "The Man of Law's Tale" from The CanterburyTales, and The Alliterative Wars of Alexander.