Middle English Literature

“Just don’t take any course where you have to read Beowulf,” remarked a certain disgraced director in one of his best-known films. In ENGL 311, you will not have to read Beowulf, or any Old English texts; instead, you will read some of the masterpieces of Middle English literature from the period in which English literary culture first emerged as a body of work in conversation with but distinct from the great traditions of the European Middle Ages.

From the earliest beginnings in the thirteenth century, when literature in English was scarcely considered worthy of being written down; to the great achievements of the late fourteenth century, when some of the language’s most admired works were written; to the end of the Middle Ages in a period of tumult and anxiety, we will examine both the best-loved classics and some of the lesser-known gems, all to get a sense of what makes this period so different from the one that followed it, and a source to which centuries of authors turned for inspiration. We will spend time in Camelot, to see how stories of King Arthur both shaped the national identity and provided a powerful example of political catastrophe. We will get to know the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, who more than any other writer convinced the world that English was a language in which serious literature could be written. We will travel north to Scotland, where in the fifteenth century a group of writers developed the first postcolonial literature in England, using the language of the colonizing power to express resistance.
So although there won’t be dragons, there will be poetry. There will be honour, sworn friendship, sheer joy in the beauty of the world, madness, and yearning for God. There will be passionate love, and sex (a fair amount of that).