ENGL 340 - Studies in Medieval Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Advanced study of selected medieval texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation. Issues addressed may include the social and political dynamics, literary traditions, symbolic discourses, and individual authorial voices shaping literary works in this era. Discussion of these issues may draw on both historical and aesthetic approaches, and both medieval and modern theories of rhetoric, reference, and text-formation.

Topic for 2018/19b: Medieval in the Flesh. Bodies and flesh are sites of dialogue and debate in medieval literature. These debates can be literal, such as the soul and body dialogue tradition in which disembodied souls engage with their decomposing corpses. Bodies in medieval texts refuse to stay dead, in the traditional sense, for a variety of reasons; and undead corpses bear witness to and demand action from the living, sometimes pointing to crimes and other times demonstrating the veracity of Christian belief. More often, these debates are metaphorical, such as women religious ascetics negotiating their places in largely patriarchal social and religious hierarchies through deprivations of their flesh and representations of encounters with divine flesh. Medical texts treat flesh and skin as sites of health mediation, even for afflictions that we would regard as internal. Parchment, the material of books of the western European Middle Ages, is itself non-human animal skin employed by humans in communication across geographic and temporal distance.

This class explores the literary and cultural functions of bodies, flesh, and bodily remains in primarily Old and Middle English texts, but also the 20^th and 21^st century material engagements with medieval fleshy (and formerly fleshy) remains. Some of the texts we read include (but are not limited to): The Dream of the Rood, Old English riddles and medical charms, The Tale of St. Swithun, St. Erkenwald, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, Chaucer’s “Prioress’ Tale,” and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. While Old English texts are read in translation, students have the opportunity to improve their Middle English proficiency with a variety of Middle English dialects. Erin Sweany.

One 2-hour period.