Class Schedule

NOTE: links to texts and other resources, and fuller bibliographical citations of works mentioned here, can be found by clicking the Readings button above

Week 1

(Aug 23) Introduction and Organization

In this class we will introduce ourselves and do the necessary housekeeping chores: discuss the syllabus, set the ground rules, distribute the assignments, share our background and interest, and make a first attempt at an overview of the long period under consideration here.

Preparatory Work (due Aug 28): Compare the Medieval sections of two major anthologies of British Literature (Norton, Longman, Broadview, etc.). Some of the questions you might want to consider are: what distinguishes one from another? What texts do they have in common? What constitutes the ‘canon’ of early English literature? How are the texts classified and divided? What kinds of introductory or additional material do they include, and why? Prepare a summary of your findings for the class. NOTE: everyone is required to do this preliminary exercise.

Week 2

(Aug 28-30) Defining the Middle Ages: Augustine’s Confessions

Augustine of Hippo’s theological works are still studied and debated today, and his views on Christian doctrine have shaped the dogma of both Catholic and Protestant churches. Here we will look at the Confessions, which is both a very personal and a very public book; we will discuss how it reflects both the times in which it was written – the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire – and how its voice, that of a soul in prayer, brings us close to the origin of the western notion of an individual, private, inner self.

Key Question: How is the Confessions different from a modern autobiography?
Reading: Augustine, Confessions

Week 3

Sep 4 No Class — Labor Day

Sep 6 Augustine, Confessions, Continued.

Week 4

(Sep 11-13) From Rome to Northumbria: history, culture, conversion

This week we’ll try to develop a sense of some of the movements of earlier English history, from Roman Britannia to Germanic Engla-land. Crucial terms in this discussion include migration, conversion, reform, literacy, memory, and history; you should think about how each of these deceptively simple terms can be used as a lens through which we may view the history and criticism of early Old English literature.

Key Question: Why is Bede so concerned about the proper date for celebrating Easter?
Reading: Bede, Ecclesiastical History. For secondary reading see Campbell et al., The Anglo-Saxons; Godden and Lapidge, eds., Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature; O’Brien O’Keeffe, ed., Reading Old English Texts.

Week 5

(Sep 18- 20) Old English shorter poetry

This week our focus shifts from ‘historical’ to ‘literary’ texts, from which we will try to extrapolate a library of genres, a topography of Old English style, and a set of imagined contexts in which such texts might be read. We will also look at the later Anglo-Saxon world in which they were copied, a world whose traces can be discerned in the material setting of the poems in their manuscripts.

Key Question: What is the Anglo-Saxon conception of the ‘self’ as reflected in its poetry?
Reading: Cædmon’s Hymn, selected elegies from the Exeter Book (The Wanderer, The Wife’s Lament, The Ruin), The Dream of the Rood, and The Battle of Maldon: these can be found in most Anthologies of British literature, or downloaded from the Readings section of this site here. For secondary reading, prepare and present a brief annotated bibliography of at least five critical essays on any one of these poems.

Week 6

(Sep 25-27) Beowulf

Beowulf is often regarded as a point of origin for the “English literary tradition,” even though the poem was not rediscovered until the nineteenth century. Our own reading will revolve around questions of memory and commemoration, homeland and history, both in the poem and in our study of it. What does it mean to have an ‘origin’? what origins does the poem itself propose? what endings does it foresee? how are past and present connected in the poem? what is the ‘place’ of Beowulf, both for its original readers (whoever they were) and for us?

Key Question: Does Beowulf go to heaven when he dies?
Reading: Beowulf. Good secondary readings include Robinson, ‘Beowulf’ and the Appositive Style; Hill, The Cultural World in Beowulf; Earl, Thinking about Beowulf; almost any of the essays in the the Fulk or Baker anthologies or in Bjork and Niles, eds., A Beowulf Handbook.

Week 7

(Oct 2-4) The Roman de la Rose

One of the most influential works of medieval literature is the French Roman de la Rose. Its images, themes, and characters are nearly ubiquitous in later Medieval literature, and its formal elements (dream vision, allegory, romantic lament, manual of love, philosophical debate, etc.) are drawn from nearly every kind of literary work written before it. The work is a hybrid composed by two very different authors; in this class we will read only the first part, by Guillaume de Lorris.

Key Question: Is Guillaume’s portion of the Roman de la Rose “unfinished”?
Reading: The Romance of the Rose (tr. Dahlberg)

Week 8

(Oct 9-11) Middle English lyrics

The Old English alliterative style lost its core audience in the generations after the Norman Conquest, and was replaced by rhymed and metered poetry after the French model. Our reading of some Middle English lyrics will introduce us to some practical problems of language and translation, and raise questions of form and purpose, literary identity and anonymity, the politics of style, and the blurry boundaries between secular and sacred language.

Key Question: What are some differences between Old and Middle English lyric poetry?
Reading: selected lyrics (download the list of titles and some MS transcriptions here). Good secondary works include Dronke, The Medieval Lyric; Jager, The Book of the Heart; Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric; Jackson, The Interpretation of Medieval Lyric Poetry.

Week 9

(Oct 16-18) Middle English romance and lai

Middle English romance was shaped by imitation of French models, but developed in a shifting context of conflicting local interests in hagiography, national identity, class, and vernacular tradition. Our reading of two short romances will help us consider these forces as they converge on the narrative pattern of journey and return, loss and restoration, that forms one of the most enduring templates for the construction of the modern self.

Key Question: what is the presumed audience for Middle English romance?
Reading: Sir Orfeo, Sir Launfal (and Marie de France’s Lanval), all of which can be found in the Readings section of this site here. Good secondary works include the essays by Auerbach, Finlayson, Guddat-Figge in Steven Shepherd, Middle English Romances (New York, 1995); the entry by Rosalind Field, “Romance in England, 1066-1400” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), 152-176; Susan Crane, Insular Romance; Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy; Fewster, Traditionality and Genre in Middle English Romance.

Week 10

(Oct 23-25) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Literature in English appears to have been produced in much greater quantity in the fourteenth century. Chaucer’s work is the most obvious example, but in strong contrast to Chaucer’s embrace of French and Italian styles and themes are the poems of the anonymous Gawain–poet, written in a complex alliterative meter that is defiantly English in tone and temperament. The subject-matter of this work draws on the Arthurian legend, which was by this period an integral part of “English” national identity.

Key Question: Is the poem a satire? if so, what does it satirize?
Reading: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (tr. Borroff)

Week 11

Oct 30 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, continued.

Nov 1 Middle English travel and geography: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

With the development of an English national consciousness came a profound awareness of both temporal and geographical rupture, displacement, distance and marginalization; medieval geography placed England on the farthest margins of the circle of the world. Within England itself the valuation of ‘center’ and ‘margin’ was both a literary and a political act; our reading this week tries to look at these issues through the story of one famous traveler—who was perhaps in reality only a maker of masterful fantasies.

Key Question: what is the relation between travel writing and romance?
Reading: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Good secondary works include Higgins, Writing East; Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (ch. 1); Campbell, The Witness and the Other World; Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages.
class handout on early maps (in .pdf format) can be downloaded here

Week 12

(Nov 6-8) The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, continued.

Week 13 and 14

(Nov 13-15, 20 – No class Nov 22) Arthurian material; Malory’s Morte Darthur

The cycle of tales describing the rise and fall of the Arthurian empire is the great political myth of the Middle Ages, embraced by both conquerors and conquered peoples all over Europe from the twilight of the Anglo-Saxon period to the dawn of the modern world and beyond. We will read only a few moments in this shifting and amorphous collection of tales and motifs, looking (once again) at the problems of origins, national identity, memory and the meaning of history.

Key Question: what theories of history are implicit in the story of Arthur?
Reading: Malory, Morte Darthur (Brewer edition). Good secondary works include Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory; Patterson, Negotiating the Past; Warren, History on the Edge.

Week 15

(Nov 27-29) Pearl

This formally complex poem partakes of many genres and styles, among them lyric, elegy, courtly dream-vision, didactic debate, and mystical theology. Critical controversy has centered around the question of whether Pearl is an elegy or an allegory, a poem of personal or universal meaning. Our reading will approach the poem as a consolatio like that of Boethius, a genre which borrows from both modes of expression.

Key Question: What is the relation between the form and meaning of the poem?
Reading: Pearl (tr. Borroff).

Week 16

(Dec 4-6) Reading and Teaching Early Literature

In our last week of class we will revist the questions with which the class began, collate our various experiences of the texts we’ve read, and try to arrive at some rules of thumb to guide our further reading. We will discuss some of the following topics from the point of view of both theory (how do we read early literature? what critical tools can we use or adapt?) and practice (how do we teach it? what methods and texts are most effective for modern students? what is our responsibility, as teachers, to the material and to our classes?):
Development of prose style – excerpts and examples. Does prose have a history? How do you teach literary style in translation?
Poetics and prosody – models and methods. Is scansion necessary? Does form embody culture?
Allusion and reference – the horizon of expectations. How do you teach the backgrounds of these texts? What is a background, and what is foreground, from this distance?
Manuscript and authorship – (re)constructing the scene of writing. What is manuscript textuality? Where is the song in the text? How do ascribe meaning or intention to anonymous, composite, or possibly incomplete works? What is the definition of an “author” in the Middle Ages?

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