ENGLISH 240:  Medieval Literature

A leaf from a Book of Hours, probably from Poitiers circa 1470, recording the Little Office of the Virgin, a portion of the Mass

Spring 2012  Instructor: Arnie Sanders
Department of English, Goucher College  Page last updated: 02/07/2012 02:39:06 PM

2/6/12--  "Ceyx and Alcyone" from Ovid's Metamorphoses (trans. A. S. Kline) Book XI, lines 410-709.    Presentation schedule sign-up page.  Middle English Practice Conference sign-up page.   Forms of the medieval text and levels of student commitment.  Modern and Middle English Open Vowels  Material culture study opportunity: stained glass windows

Rota Fortuna from the Codex Burana (ca. 1230)  Medieval chess in a Walters Art Museum ivory medallion

 

Malory Major Explicits and Possible Composition Order: this link is especially relevant to Malory's Morte Darthur, but its basic problem is hiding behind the modern scholarly editions of every medieval literary work.  This is because they were produced for oral/aural performance and made as a custom artifact, by hand, one at a time, as parchment or paper manuscripts.  Each individual manuscript version of a "work" has come to be considered, by scholars, to be "a work unto itself."  For undergraduates, it seems safer and saner to teach the literature as if there were a single, stable, author-owned text.  Nevertheless, in some cases (Breton lais, Chaucer's works, Malory), variations between manuscript and edited versions can be enormously productive for critical interpretation.  If you want to explore this, ask me for advice and I can point you toward "flexible" places in our edition that can be read otherwise.  In the case of a known author who was actively writing for decades, variations may even indicate "authorial revision" or varied performances of the same text, as a singer or instrumentalist might perform a song differently for different audiences or on different nights for the same audience.  Literature contains manifold performance possibilities for both readers and authors.  For English 240, it will be enough for you (initially) to learn to "perform" and interpret the significances of the editors' version of the works.  But if you want to peek behind that immensely deceptive curtain into the world of medieval literature as its authors experienced it, get ready to think about surviving variants of the text, how they are laid out on the page, with which other works they are juxtaposed and in what orders.  If you take the Chaucer seminar and read the Canterbury tales, variant tale orders are an inescapable an wonderful part of the terrain.

          For a reference point at which authors' texts start to become "fixed" by authoritative editions, moveable type printing was first introduced for Bibles, law books, philosophy and the classics around 1452 in Europe, and by 1478 William Caxton had brought the first press to England.  By then, and especially in Caxton's case, vernacular texts began to make their way from variant manuscripts into standardized print editions at around this point.  Manuscript composition and circulation remained commonplace, especially among nobles and persecuted groups (e.g., "recusant" Catholics after England's Protestant Reformation), but standardizing, commoditized print editions of the sort modern students take to have "biblical authority" as stable texts become market-dominant over manuscript books by about 1600-1650).

Stuck for a paper topic?  Go to the Medieval Institute International Congress web site and open the "Sessions" PDF files for each day.  Search for "Trolius" (or whatever your favorite major primary source could be identified by) and look at the titles of the talks.  Then, write the paper you imagine ought to be delivered for that title.  If you get no hits for the title, try a main character, the genre, or some other issue-related term that might kick out a hit (e.g., "Decapitation," remember some unfortunate maidens in Malory and our old pal, the Green Knight?).  Give the Kalamazoo author credit for the inspiration, but the paper will be yours.  What—this doesn’t work for you?  Send me an email telling me which of the major works we read that you feel best prepared to write about, give me some idea what you are thinking about the works.  I will reply with some possibilities for papers.

        Kalamazoo 2008 Web Pages: Varieties of Middle English Pronunciation Aids and Goals; Types of passages which easily reward comparative performance; Friar Huberd's lisp; the PrioressT "O Alma Redemptoris Mater"

        In-Class Presentation Schedule.  Click here for guidance for how to prepare the presentations.  Note that you should not try to "cover" the reading for the day.  Focus your presentation on some issue or passage of interest to you, and use the Voice Board to record performances of the passage or passages to illustrate what you find interesting. 

        Analytical Themes in English 240:  This list of issues that are likely to emerge as we read and discuss this material is intended to stimulate your thinking and to help you find points of connection for your in-class presentations.  The list is offered to help stimulate your thinking, but it is not intended to limit other kinds of inquiries you might pursue.  Applying Critical Methods from English 215 to English 240: Reading early literature challenges beginners because the strangeness of the language is compounded by the strangeness of the customs, social roles, and almost every expectation one might bring to the earlier era from our own.  Take delight in that strangeness!  Let it show you an aesthetic and cultural norm that will challenge you to think like someone from another time.

        Do you want to hear more portions of Chaucer's poems read in Real Audio format?  Click here to go to the Chaucer Metapage's audio file index, and scroll to the bottom.  There you also can find an audio excerpt of The Book of the Duchess, and two excerpts from Troilus and Criseyde, the last work we'll read this semester. 

Summary

English 240 is an intermediate level introduction to Medieval culture and Middle English literature. Our primary focus will be the reconstruction of a variety of medieval ways of thinking, the mentalité of a character, a narrator, or an author, that makes this era's literature both similar to and different from modern literature.  Because they produced the largest surviving secular body of work from the era, we will focus on the "courtly makers" of English poetry, following the general topics of love and death. In addition, we will read contemporary non-fiction materials to help students reconstruct the medieval socio-political and theological world in which that loving and dying took place. Our objectives are to understand how Medieval people actually encountered their literature and culture through period documents and historical studies, and to understand the rules followed by Medieval artists, especially their debt to and modifications of the classical traditions of Greece and Rome. We approach Middle English literature through five major genres: lyric, dream vision, romance, Breton lai, and the didactic essay.

The historical materials will provide a basis for knowing how Medieval literature drew upon and embellished the lived experience of the Middle Ages. Students are cautioned, however, to beware the tendency to read literature as a literal picture of medieval life. Even avowedly mimetic artists transform their subjects according to genre rules, and their audiences have to follow similar rules in order to perceive the mimesis or re-presentation of reality. To know the literature, we have to know both how poets' audiences actually experienced events as well as poets' rules for describing those events and the rules they expected their audiences to follow when interpreting their texts.

Student Learning Outcomes: (click on the link for an explanation of what these things mean)

1)  Students will demonstrate Middle English reading skills to experience directly the way C12-15 people experienced their world in literature and in documents they used to negotiate their lives' most important moments (e.g., didactic or romance narratives, "last wills" of the dying, ceremonies of fealty and homage for feudal relationships, marriage ceremonies, etc.).

2)  Students will learn to interpret Middle English literature with full respect for its elements of continuity with Modern culture, and for its stark differences of mentalité, social organization, and aesthetics, using the terms of art by which modern medieval studies scholars analyze and understand these texts.  Click here for descriptions of some major themes which could guide your interpretation of Middle English literature.

3)  Students will use textual evidence to reconstruct and to distinguish the world-views of medieval men and women of many "estates" and occupations, avoiding reductive generalizations about "the medieval audience" and seeking evidence of the full diversity of this era's linguistic and emerging national identities.

4)  Students will be able to analyze individual works of Middle English literature in their generic contexts (e.g., romances, lyrics, dream visions), their thematic contexts (e.g., Arthurian literature, advice and complaint literature), and their material contexts as they have survived in manuscripts and early modern printed editions.    

 "Academic Honor Code: Reference to the academic honor code is required of all course syllabi as a reminder to students.  Suggested wording includes: Reminder: All students are bound by the standards of the Academic Honor Code, found at www.goucher.edu/documents/General/AcademicHonorCode.pdf." 

          So much for what the college requires me to tell students about the Honor Code.  This policy is unfortunate, because frequent, forced repetition of important statements of values results in the diminishment of those values in the minds of the benumbed witnesses (i.e., the students).  I believe in honor as a human achievement that one can win or lose by one's actions, especially as it applies to scholarly study.  I also see some value in codifying what "honor" means.  Here is my attempt to do so.  I distinguish between accidental plagiarism, in which the author obviously intended to cite sources but carelessly cited them at the wrong place, and outright theft of intellectual property intentionally passed off as one's own.  Cases of the first type usually are opportunities to teach and learn, but they may go to the Honor Board if they happen late in the semester, after we have discussed source use and its importance to your readers.  The second type will be sent to the Honor Board without hesitation.  Students also are increasingly content to cite sources long after their prose has begun to borrow ideas from those sources.  That is technically plagiarism, too, but it has become so common that I must spend gallons of ink and hundreds of keystrokes un-teaching it.  Never make me guess whose ideas I'm reading.  Cite sources when you first depend on them.  I am more interested in knowing how well you can think than in how well your sources can think.  Let there be a bright line of fire between ideas that are originally yours and those of other writers to which you refer. 

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