English 240 Analytical Themes

        Our primary focus in English 240 will be the reconstruction of a variety of medieval ways of thinking, the mentalité of a character, a narrator, an author, or the entire work, that makes this era's literature both similar to and different from modern literature.  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, especially the relative absence of "literary realism" as a dominant aesthetic, variation in type characters and social satire, acceptance of supernatural events and agencies (magic, faeries, devils and angels, an immanent [immediately active] God), concern for genre and changing generic rules, etc.  Understanding Medieval English "diverse perspectives" of various estates (nobles, clergy, peasants), occupations (guild members, laborers, artisans [including poets and singers]), etc.
• 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.  What did they mean in 1350, 1400, 1450, 1500, etc.  (Time to consult the Oxford English Dictionary!)
• Celtic culture vs. Anglo-Saxon culture vs. Norman French culture vs. Late Medieval English culture.  How do modern Germany, Ireland, Scotland, England, and France differ from each other?  What happens when you dial back the clock eight hundred years on all of them?
• Pagan faith vs. Christian faith vs. secular cultural mores.  Do you believe the world is best understood in terms of "luck/fate," "destiny," "Nature" as an explanation of real events, a sacred book as a sufficient moral authority for all judgment, demons and angels, an afterlife including Heaven and Hell and Purgatory between them, a single omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient god?  Or do you believe the world is best understood in terms of  political and economic and military power, social status, ethics, and innate human rights?   
• Construction of Medieval genders, maleness, femaleness, homoeroticism, gender and religious iconography (soul as female, Christ as bridegroom of the soul).  Do we believe that we inherit our gender definitions from the events of Genesis, from our parents or grandparents, from some mythic ancestors whose tales we retell, or do we believe that we can invent our gender definitions by some political or social or aesthetic act of self-fashioning?  (Note that the Stephen Greenblatt concept of "Renaissance self-fashioning" may well be anticipated in some late medieval authors' works.)
• Emergence of non-scribal literacy, varieties of literacy, "aurality/orality" of texts intended as prompts for public performance.  Do you see examples of reading, writing, or interpretation written into the medieval text, and if so, how do characters use thsese skills.  How do they interact with other characters' literacy and/or "aurality/orality," the capacity to master a wide variety of stories and other lore without access to reading or writing? 
• 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]). Do you see written artifacts in the text, and if so, what functions do they serve?  Do authors refer to themselves in their own texts, and to what end do they do so?  Does the narrator become a character in the work, either by introducing inscribed interpretations of events or characters, or by drawing our attention to their role in transmitting, altering, or withholding portions of the text they narrate.  Pay special attention to Geoffrey Chaucer in this regard, manufacturer of perhaps the most famous array of self-presenting narrators in English literature, but Sir Thomas Malory and the "Pearl"-Poet also engage in these strategies.
• 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 and other sacred rituals as multi-media spectacles as well as a sacred ceremonies, the calendar governed by the procession of feast days in the Church-year from Easter to Pentecost to Annunciation to Incarnation to Purification, the act of confession as a psychological and social event in both sacred and secular forms.  How do characters use story telling to represent themselves to the world, to adjust their socio-political or moral status, to negotiate with others they love or fear or hate?  How do strategies of concealment and revelation, formal repetition, costume and gesture shape the text? 
• 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.  How does our experience of literature change when we escape the trap of reading modern print editions and re-imagine reading from unique documents or images?  How do an individual manuscript's "images on the edge," as Michael Camille called marginal scribal drolleries (1992), work thematically with or conspire satirically against the text in the main text block?  How do printed texts' wood-block or metal engraved images shape the text for readers of early printed books?