ENGL 237 - Medieval Literature

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

This course serves as an introduction to medieval literature, with a focus on Middle English literatures (c. 1066-1550). Students become familiar with the linguistic and stylistic features of Middle English, and read a variety of texts from the period. Special topics for the course vary from year to year; examples of topics include: Arthurian literature, Chaucer, the Chaucerian tradition, women’s writing in the Middle Ages, transnational/comparative medieval literatures (including French and Italian), medieval “autobiography,” the alliterative tradition, Piers Plowman and the Piers tradition, dream visions, fifteenth century literature and the bridge to the “early modern,” literature and heresy, gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages, and medieval mystical writing. Students engage throughout with the process of establishing English as a “literary” language; authorial identity; the grounding of English literary tradition; and the role of translation and adaptation in medieval writing. The course also prepares students who might wish to pursue work in medieval literature at the 300 level, and/or pursue a senior thesis in the period. Thomas Hill.

Topic for 2025/26a: Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales.: In this course we will spend the semester on the road with Chaucer in a collective reading of his encyclopedic human comedy, The Canterbury Tales, sauntering with him through fourteenth-century England. An important part of this leisurely immersion is sensory and linguistic, as we experience the text in the original Middle English, acquiring, as an added benefit, facility in English philology. Through close reading, class discussion, and writing we consider the Tales as they provide diverse, intersecting pathways into Medieval critical attitudes toward social and class distinctions, religious and gender antagonisms, town/gown animosities, discourses of desire and sexuality, and conflicts born of a developing urbanism during England’s transformation from a feudal to an early modern society. Besides this “social Chaucer” we consider the “clerkly Chaucer,” and what the Tales tell us about his influential insights into language and meaning; authorship and reading; science and nature; philosophy and ethics; history and collective memory; and psychology and the construction of the modern self.

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

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS