ENGL 341 - Studies in the Renaissance

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

In-depth study of selected Renaissance texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation.

Topic for 2024/25b: Devious Bodies and Dangerous Minds: Health, Medicine, and Disability in Renaissance Literature. The Renaissance is often dubbed the dawn of modernity, a time of shaking off ignorance and comprehending the world anew: in art, physics, medicine (and more). But by observing the last of these fields through a literary lens, this course aims to develop a more nuanced narrative. We see that even as new understandings of anatomy and the role of doctors emerged, old certainties persisted: that women were ominously leaky, physical health reflected spiritual wellness, certain geographies bore inferior body/minds, and monstrously deformed figures could portend evil things to come. Such narratives shape and are contested in some of the era’s greatest texts, from Montaigne’s Essays and Shakespeare’s Richard III in the sixteenth century to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Milton’s Samson Agonistes in the seventeenth. We read them to generate new interpretations and understand how the cultural scripts of somatopsychic otherness they engage not only inflected the lives of disabled early moderns but continue to impact marginalized people in the present. By revising our concept of the Renaissance, then—by revisiting its obsession with ugliness and beauty—we strive toward new insight into the dynamics of dis/ability that structure our world today. Pasquale Toscano.

This course satisfies the pre-1800 requirement for the English major.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS