2020-21 Graduate Courses

Please check with department for details on availability. This seminar investigates a wide range of questions related to the use and function of imagery in medieval books. What are the origins of medieval book illustration in the transition from roll to codex; what kinds of books were typically illustrated—and how; who conceived of the complex pictorial programs found in medieval manuscripts, and how did these programs function? Issues of patronage, audience and reception are central to this seminar, which focuses on specific case studies of manuscripts from throughout Europe dating from the late antique period until the advent of printing.

An introduction for reading knowledge to the oldest literary form of English, with discussion of readings drawn from the surviving prose and verse literature. Readings: Mitchell, Bruce, and Fred C. Robinson. A Guide to Old English. 8 edition. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Further readings will be posted on QUERCUS. Previous acquaintance with Latin, German, or other highly inflected language is useful but not essential.

Dramatic players can embody (and in embodying, personify) ideas, tendencies, and emotions as readily as they can take on realistic human characters—so readily, perhaps, that morality plays may be taken less as a distinctively medieval genre than as a reflex of dramatic performance toward psychomachic allegory more generally. Our course, in its coverage of English-language morality plays c. 1350–c. 1530, will resist critical tendencies that assume any continuous, coherent tradition underlies the extant works, as much as it makes mutual influence among some of those works plainly visible. It will demonstrate the obvious effects of proto-Protestant reforms (and resistances to them) on morality plays, even as it rejects a critical tendency to reduce these plays to their instrumentality in broader movements. In our approach to those works, we will concentrate on newer secondary readings (i.e. published within the last fifteen years, including Johnson, Brantley, Paulson) that have brought forward the moralities’ mutual influence with literary and religious culture, while at the same time deploying performance studies and practice-based research—yes, participating in live recitation and staging will be a requirement of the class—to hone in on what makes these plays, and their outward embodiment of internality, performative. Course Reading List: TBA, but likely to include: The Pride of Life (anon), The Castle of Perseverance (anon), Wisdom (anon), Mankind (anon), Everyman (anon), Nature (Medwall), Youth (anon), Hickscorner (anon), Magnificence (Skelton), and an array of critical works.

Initiation à l’ancien français /Medieval French Language

Reading French Course for Graduate Students

This course offers an introduction to the German language, literature, and culture of the Middle Ages. We will read and translate Middle High German texts, study facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, and inquire into epochal cultural concepts like courtly love and chivalry as well as courtly and clerical designs of identity. Authors discussed will include Hartmann von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide among others. Reading knowledge in German or any medieval Germanic language is an asset, but no prerequisite.

In this course German reading knowledge is taught following the grammar-translation method designed for graduate students from the Humanities. It is an intensive course that covers German grammar with focus on acquiring essential structures of the German language to develop translation skills. The course is conducted in English, and consequently participants do not learn how to speak or write in German, but rather the course focuses exclusively on reading and translating German. Prior knowledge of German not mandatory. By the end of the course, students should be able to handle a broad variety of texts in single modern Standard German. This course is not intended for MA or PhD students in German.

Jus commune: the rise and development of learned jurisprudence in the High Middle Ages.

Jurisprudence is one of the foundational disciplines in the rise of the Universities and the one in which the newly defined figure of the academic most directly became engaged in the rule and development of all sorts of high medieval institutions and practices.  This course will examine the texts and practices relating to medieval jurisprudence.

This year theme will be Space, Sense, and Motion. We’ll be looking at these as representing three recent ‘turns’ in social history, and assess some examples with an eye to evaluating meanings, approaches, contributions, and impacts.

This course provides a framework for the study of social and economic change in England from the accession of Henry II to the passage of the Act of Mortmain under Edward I. The application of statistical methodology to the analysis of source materials is encouraged.

In the 700th anniversary of the death of poeta theologus Dante Alighieri, we will look at selected texts from Dante and Petrarch, along with hagiographical literature and an unusual painted work, regarding various ways in which an understanding of the religious bedrock of medieval culture can increase our appreciation of the written and visual creations of the period.

Introduction to Arabic metrics and the poetic heritage. Readings in Arabic, discussion in English.

This year we will focus especially on early Abbasid poetry of ẓarf (elite wit) and its social context.

Intro to Ge’ez

Proseminar for the Collaborative Program in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy

Location: LI 301 (Lillian Massey Building, 125 Queen’s Park)

Mandatory for CPAMP students in Y1 and 2; program students who have fulfilled this requirement are expected to attend regularly. Other interested doctoral students are welcome to attend as well and should contact the program director to indicate their interest. The proseminar has three components: a series of seminars; an ancient Greek philosophy reading group; and a Latin medieval philosophy reading group. All students in the proseminar must attend the seminars and at least one of the reading groups; students are warmly encouraged to attend both reading groups.

Introduction to Book History

This foundational course, required for all BHPC students in their first term, will introduce students to basic topics such as the semiotics of the book; orality and writing systems; book production from manuscript to computer technology; the development of printing; the concept of authorship; copyright; censorship; the economics of book production and distribution; libraries and the organization of information; principles of bibliographical description; print in other formats (newspapers, magazines, advertisements, etc.); reading and readership; editorial theory and practice. We will also study many artifacts and tools of the trade in situ through visits to the Massey College Bibliography Room and Coach House Books.

Book History in Practice

Advanced Seminar in Book History and Print Culture

The Archive as Text. The field of textual studies is concerned with the production, transmission, preservation, and ongoing history of texts. Recent developments in this field have encouraged an expansion of the term “text” to include all attempts at representation whatever form they may take. Drawing on readings from a range of fields, including textual criticism, archival studies, history, anthropology, and lifewriting, this seminar will explore how archives might be conceptualized as texts and the implications and limitations of that conceptualization.

Practicum in Book History and Print Culture