ENGL 320 A: English Literature: The Middle Ages

The course will provide a lively and wide-ranging introduction to the literature of the Middle Ages, in which students will have the opportunity to place texts remote from our modern era in their social and historical contexts. In this offering of the course, an emphasis will be placed on the fictional “universe” of the court, on and the literary medium of the dream-vision. Students will read and discuss important works of prose and poetry of the early Middle Ages and the Middle English periods, including works by a range of Old English poets, the Anglo-Saxon Life of King Alfred, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and a selection of non-canonical items -- including the marginalized women’s poetry in the early 1500s in the so-called Devonshire Manuscript There will be a mid-term, final, and major term paper.