Literature University Seminar

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The delight of a naughty tale well-told is a near universal human pleasure - even if it is often a guilty one. In this course, students will discover the Middle Ages from a new perspective as we eschew the frequently austere epic poetry of the aristocratic court sin favor of the enormously popular, commonly comedic, and often lewd short stories that emerged as a distinctive genre in Medieval Europe between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. We will read a wide range of short tales drawn from English, French, German, and Italian sources, and in so doing will encounter boastful knights, cuckolded lords, defiant ladies, and quarreling couples alongside a dizzying array of bodily functions gone awry and genitalia endowed with the power of speech. By learning to understand these tales not only as popular entertainment, but also as valuable documents of the anxieties, assumptions, prejudices, and values of the age and cultures in which they were produced and consumed. This will be achieved in part through comparison of the short narrative texts forming the focus of this class with other works of the medieval period, including scholastic debates, sermons, and codes of law, as well as with representations of related themes in the visual arts, including illumination and sculpture. In all this, we will directly address the challenges presented to readers by pre-modern literature and learn how modern scholarship engages with literature through the development and honing of analytical and close reading skills via seminar discussions, comparison of conflicting interpretations by modern scholars, and careful attention to the interaction of form and content.