English 240 Analytical Themes

        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 not intended to foreclose other kinds of inquiries you might pursue.

• Literary conventions of the era and historical cultural realities of England in C12-15
• Key Middle English terms in transition from Medieval to Modern meanings: love, courtship/courtly/courtesy, trouþe, noble, gentle, author/auctorite/auctorized/auctor, literatus, villain, churl, book, romance, faerie.
• Celtic culture vs. Anglo-Saxon culture vs. Norman French culture vs. Late Medieval English culture
• Pagan faith vs. Christian faith vs. secular cultural mores
• Construction of Medieval genders, maleness, femaleness, homoeroticism, gender and religious iconography (soul as female, Christ as bridegroom of the soul)
• Emergence of non-scribal literacy, varieties of literacy, "aurality/orality" of texts intended as prompts for public performance
• Manuscript culture vs. print culture, MS "book" and "work" and "author" vs. print, MS text production and circulation, the emergence of "author" from "auctor" and "authorized" as a term to construct authority (first used in print by Caxton [1480], but first used in manuscript by the author of a 1399 political poem and second by Malory [1460-70, Malory: Works 717]).
• Material and social life in a noble household (setting for most surviving secular works of literature), including social roles, implements for eating and drinking, food and drink, tapestries, wood and ivory carving, stained glass, building architecture
• Cathedral architecture and the drama of the Mass as a multi-media spectacle as well as a sacred ritual, the calendar governed by the procession of feast days in the Church-year from Easter to Pentecost to Annunciation to Incarnation to Purification.
• Modern reconstruction of the lost, pre-print past from old things, the "witnesses" which endured from the past to the present: architecture, manuscript and print texts, fabric including tapestry, painting including book illumination, stained glass, carved wood and ivory and stone, etc.  Why it is important to slow down, to get to know some old things very well.