Courses

Current/Upcoming Courses

These courses are currently in session or planned for an upcoming term. We also have a list of past courses.

The Medieval Book

MDV 392M, E384K (also cross-listed with Comparative Literature)
Marjorie C. Woods (will be team taught with Joan Holladay of Art History if scheduling permits)

In recent years medievalists from all disciplines have begun to consider the importance of the manuscript context in which texts, images, and musical notation were recorded and viewed. The size and gathering structure of a manuscript, page layout, letter size and color, and kind and placement of extra-textual material, for example, reflected the scribe's sense of the material he or she recorded at the same time that they helped to aid and control the medieval reader's use of the manuscript and affected his or her understanding of its contents. This course will explore and integrate three aspects of ongoing research: the role and perception of books as objects, issues of literacy and reading, and "the archaeology of the book." In the process of doing so, we will treat such topics as secular and religious libraries and centers of book production, women as readers and users of books, the illumination of texts, and the collecting of manuscripts. The course is intended as an introduction to tools for the study of manuscripts in the original and to basic questions surrounding the use of these objects as primary source materials.

Texts

There will also be a packet of required and recommended readings. All required readings will be in English, but students will be encouraged to read materials in whatever additional languages they know. The selection of some of the readings will be determined by the interests and disciplines of the students in the class.

Requirements

There will be group oral presentations on the aspects of medieval books studied in the different disciplines represented by the students in the class, individual presentations of points of discussion for the required reading for a particular day, a short transcription exercise based on a manuscript in the HRC, and a required research paper whose topic will be tailored to the individual interests of each student. A rough draft of the research paper will be required three quarters of the way through the semester, and each student will present the most interesting aspects of his or her research to the class as a whole and provide an annotated bibliography of works consulted.

Because graduate students are no longer allowed to handle manuscripts during classes conducted at the HRC, students will also be required to spend approximately one hour a week in the HRC outside of class examining manuscripts.

For Further Information and to Register

For further information contact Professors Joan Holladay (232-2546; holladay@mail.utexas.edu) or Marjorie Woods (471-8380; jorie@mail.utexas.edu). To register contact Kevin Carney (475-6356; kcarney@mail.utexas.edu; English Graduate Office, Calhoun 210).

The Invention of Race in the Middle Ages

MDV 392M, E 392M
Geraldine Heng

It's an old theoretical canard that race and discourses on race exist in the West only from the Enlightenment on: that premodern European culture is pre-racial, because its operative prioritizing discourse is founded on religion, not biological-scientific taxonomic systems of prioritizing and classification. Medievalists, like classicists, accordingly have, till now, preferred 'ethnicity' as the descriptive category apposite to their period: despite the evidence, in medieval culture and history, of phenomena that we would today identify as race-related, were they to recur.

This seminar will ask itself what is lost or gained by tracing discourses on race backward in time. Beginning with a selection of texts from antiquity, the 'Black Athena' controversy, and recent volumes by David Goldenberg (Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam) and Benjamin Isaac (Invention of Race in Classical Antiquity) we will move to a broad range of texts in the Middle Ages, to ask ourselves what 'racial thinking' is, and consider its historically-contextualized relations to the following (not listed in any order of priority or procedure):

  1. war, conquest, and empire-formation;
  2. language communities, citizenship, and "civilization";
  3. religion, sacred mythology, and ecclesiastical apparatuses;
  4. blood, reproduction, and genealogy;
  5. the body and physiognomy (color, biology, etc);
  6. sex and gender;
  7. slavery, labor, and economic systems;
  8. nation-formation, state-formation;
  9. disciplinary systems of knowledge-power (climatology, geography, medicine, ethnography, etc).

Medieval materials will include literary romances, epics, historical documents, manuscript illuminations, saints' legends, maps, and whatever else may be useful. We will also read a selection of theoretical writing on race by scholars working in later periods, including Foucault, Balibar, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Amitav Ghosh, Ann Stoler, to see how canonical race theory stands up when read alongside medieval texts and documents. Concomitantly, we'll ask ourselves: Why find race in the distant past? Why privilege 'race' even today when 'gender' and 'class' have also been extensively theorized as discourses of difference? How does one avoid the fall into essentialism and reification in theorizing any transhistorical phenomenon?

Course Requirements

This course will run like a research seminar: students with race-related projects in any period, discipline, or culture are welcome, but will be asked to contribute to a collective body of theory, thought, and arguments on race beyond their period or subject. Requirements: two seminar presentations, one term paper (for a letter grade); or two presentations (for credit/no credit). All texts read in English; knowledge of original languages is a substantial advantage.

Texts

Primary texts (subject to change, & open to negotiation if you contact me early): "Airs, Waters, Places," Herodotus, Histories (selections), Song of Roland, Parzival, Moriaen, King of Tars, Richard Coer de Lyon, Prioress's Tale, Miracles of the Virgin, Mandeville's Travels, Marco Polo, Travels, William of Rubruck, Journey, packet of readings.

Vikings and Their Literature

ANT 324L, E 322, EUS 361, GRC 323E, SCA 323
John Weinstock
Graduate credit available - contact Professor Weinstock if you're interested in taking the course under a graduate-level course listing.

Vikings: the very word conjures up images of violence and bravery: lightning raids on defenseless farms, the sacking of great cities, long voyages across cold and uncharted seas, the discovery of new worlds. It is a tale of terror and brute force, tinged with mythology and melancholy. But these Vikings evolved a complex and stable culture, shaped a richly detailed religion, created beautiful art, expanded horizons of the known world, and, most importantly, left behind a body of great literature.

The course will survey Scandinavian literature from the Germanic heroes of the Edda to the great Vikings in the Icelandic family sagas. We will begin with the earliest epics from the Edda which treat the legends about the Goths, Huns, and Burgundians. Then on to the Siegfried-Brünnhilde tale as told in several Eddic lays, the Icelandic Saga of the Volsungs and the Nibelungenlied. Beowulf, the Saga of King Hrolf, and Saxo Grammaticus will illustrate pre-Viking Danish and Swedish-Gautish history. Then Norse mythology with its Odin, Freyja, Thor, giants and trolls will be examined in detail as well as Wagner's use of the mythology to create his Ring. After a brief look at skaldic poetry, the Viking journeys to Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland (North America) will be considered. We will conclude with the reading of some of the classic Icelandic sagas.

Postclassical Latin Lyric: Love, Narcissism, and Sociability in Verse

LAT 366
Professor Marc Bizer
Graduate credit available - contact Professor Bizer if you're interested in taking the course under a graduate-level course listing.

This course is designed to survey the vast post-classical Latin literary tradition from its origins in classical Latin lyric through the period known as the "Middle Ages" and into an age concerned with resurrecting the classical tradition, known as the "Renaissance." Readings will be chosen from varying countries and periods; students will gain an appreciation of how Latin verse was used by poets to cultivate relationships with friends, lovers, and students, but also with their literary predecessors. Another important goal will be for students to gain an appreciation of how brilliant and flourishing early modern Latin lyric was.

We will read and study selections from the following classical, medieval, and renaissance poets/poems:

Assignments will consist of translation and close reading of the texts. Homework, class participation, exams, and a final paper will count toward the final grade.

Prerequisites: LAT 323 or permission of the instructor. Prof. M. Bizer, Dept. of French and Italian. mbizer@mail.utexas.edu.

The Knights of the Round Table

GRC 301, EUS 301, RS 315, WS 301
Dr. Hafner
Meeting: TTH 2:00-3:30

This course will be dedicated to the medieval stories centering around King Arthur and three of his most prominent knights: Iwein, Tristan, and Parzival. We will read sections of the Old French romances by Chrétien de Troyes as well as some of their Middle High German and Middle English renditions. Studying these masterpieces of European literature within their historical and cultural context will pose a plethora of questions: Did any of these people actually exist? Why did chivalric romances become such a success in Europe in the late 12th century? What does chivalry mean? What was the life of a knight really like? Why do women and love become important topics for discussion? Why do we still enjoy reading these romances?

All texts will be read in translation; no previous knowledge of Medieval literature is required.

The seminar will include screenings and discussions of modern movie adaptations of Arthurian literature such as Excalibur, King Arthur, Camelot, Tristan and Isolde, Revenge, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and The da Vinci Code. These screenings will be scheduled in the evening. They are an integral part of the class and attendance is required. Films on reserve. This seminar contains a substantial writing component.

TEXTBOOKS: ASSIGNMENTS:

Icons

ARH 383
Glenn Peers

This seminar will examine the meaning and theory of painted panels in the medieval world. The word 'icon' has a wide semantic range in Greek that includes all manner of images, but the painted, wooden panel is the focus of this seminar. The theology of icons from the early church and later periods will be examined, and its implications for our understanding and explanations of these objects will be a necessary aspect for discussion. But the seminar will be concerned primarily with painted panels from the Byzantine and East Christian worlds, and how these objects became and functioned as primary objects of devotion for those Christians. An extension of this phenomenon is the movement of icons west during the Crusades and of icons' significant role in west Christian understanding of the sacred past and in their creation of sacred spaces.

Thirteenth Century Spanish Narrative Poetry

SPN 387 / MDV 392M
Dr. Matthew Bailey
Meeting: TTH 9:30 -11:00
Unique #s 48015 / 64895

This course in medieval literature seeks to provide an in-depth understanding of Spanish narrative poetry of the thirteenth century. The course establishes thematic and compositional links between a variety of narratives put into writing in Spain between 1200 and 1300, and examines their connections to narrative traditions both within and beyond Spain. The common element in these poetic texts is the representation of historical personages who have been transformed into mythic figures through the preservation and promulgation of their lives in narrative.

Previous versions of some of these narratives are well documented and will be referenced as a way to appreciate their complexity, popularity and power as didactic or propagandistic tools.

For any students taking the course for Medieval Studies, other vernacular or Latin versions of these narratives, such as Apollonius of Tyre, the Alexandreis, and Santa María Egipciaca may serve as primary readings. Substitutions may also be made.

Requirements and Grading: The class will be conducted in Spanish and/or English, as circumstances require. Lectures will provide a background and methodology for approaching the assigned readings. Class discussion will provide a format for the assimilation and interpretation of the readings. Regular attendance and participation are required for the successful completion of the course. Reading exercises, written and oral, will be conducted regularly to check student progress on pronunciation and comprehension (25%). Students will present an oral report on one of the assigned readings (25%), prepare an annotated bibliography of criticism relevant to their research topic (25%), and write a final research paper (25%).

Textbooks and/or class materials: Readings of longer narratives: Cantar de mio Cid, Poema de Fernán González, Libro de Apolonio, Vida de Santa Oria, Vida de Santa María Egipciaca.

Brief narratives: Roncesvalles, Elena y María, ¡Ay Jherusalem!, El Dio alto que los çielos sostiene, Libro de la infancia y muerte de Jesús, Razón de amor, Disputa del alma y del cuerpo.

Selected passages from: Libro de Alexandre, Vida de San Millán, Historia troyana polimétrica, Mocedades de Rodrigo.

German Literature: Middle Ages through Humanism (800-1450)

GER 386.1
Dr. Susanne Hafner
Meeting: TTH 12:30-2:00 in EPS 4.102A

In this seminar, we will trace the development of German literature from 800 to 1450, with particular emphasis on the time period between 1150 and 1230. We will read selected works against the backdrop of the intellectual, political, and cultural history of the Middle Ages. Although it is essential to read the texts in their entirety, we will often focus on particularly significant passages in class. These texts will be supplemented by examples from music, the visual arts, and codicology (notably the manuscripts available at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center) pertaining to the time period.

Texts/Readings

NB: These texts correspond closely to the departmental reading list.

Grading/Requirements

Past Courses

The following courses have been offered in the past, and may be offered again. The descriptions here are meant to give an indication of the kinds of teaching and topics addressed within the program. Click the course name to see expanded information about it.

Medieval Field Survey

MDV 392M (Fall 2006)
Elizabeth Scala
Crosslisted with ENG 392M. This course introduces students to a variety of current areas, topics, and methodologies in medieval English studies. Working across Old and Middle English genres, the course will include presentations and assignments from various members of the medievalist faculty on their particular areas of expertise and current research. During the semester we will focus our attention on four important texts spanning the "medieval period" as broadly conceived and its various genres: Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a text bordering the classical and medieval periods that has been translated by King Alfred into Old English, Chaucer into Middle English and Elizabeth I into early Modern English, the French Romance of the Rose, also partially translated by Chaucer, the Middle English Pearl, and Walter Hilton's Scala Perfectionis. These texts are in differing and overlapping ways central to medieval English literary studies, but many are seldom encountered in most regularly organized courses, even at an advanced level. Supplementing our reading of these larger works will be a number of shorter primary texts (selected lyrics from the Harley 2253 ms, Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, the Life of St. Katherine) as well as critical and theoretical essays to provoke our discussion. Throughout the semester, we will also make a number of visits to the HRC to introduce codicological, paleographical, and editorial methods into our discussions of these works.

Premodern Lives

E 392M (cross-listed, Fall 2006)
Daniel Birkholz
An inquiry into biography and its uses: social and scholarly, past—various pasts—and present. Our driving concerns will be to ask how doing biography (or biographically inflected scholarly work) is necessarily different with regard to early eras. ‘Early’ historical periods tend to be defined for us by their comparatively sparse documentation and/or their divergent communications technology. Moreover, these are periods commonly regarded as lying prior to the invention or definitive appearance of the ‘individual subject’, ‘public sphere’, etc. Given these and other conditions of difference between premodern and modern vantage points, what limitations frame the very undertaking of biography before modernity? And in the face of such obstacles, what may be gained by adopting an explicitly biographical approach in the study of early literature and/or history?

Our texts and contexts in the seminar will range from classical through early modern, though with a center of gravity in the medieval. We will read outstanding examples of biography and autobiography drawn from these periods, as well as other works inflected by the biographical mode, in each case asking how the casting of a narrative in terms of the individual human life helps determine what meanings come to be found there.

In addition to our premodern selections themselves, we will examine some famous models in the (always disputed, often maligned) scholarship of historical reconstruction. That works in this subgenre so frequently pursue a biographical narrative line, even (especially?) when the evidence fails them, must surely be an element related to their consistent academic success and crossover popular appeal. Indeed it might well be said that the writing of ‘premodern lives’, by modern scholars across the disciplines, has had a strangely disproportionate impact on developments in disciplinary histories themselves. These two primary orders of reading (early life-writing itself, and modern reconstruction of premodern lives) will be supplemented by shorter selections on biographical theory and practice.

Seminar participants need not be medieval/early modern specialists, or practicing literary scholars; cross-period, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches enthusiastically encouraged. Research opportunities will be tailored so as to fit, challenge and extend individual scholarly trajectories. A major component of the course will involve the conception, planning, research, drafting, revising, and polishing of the seminar paper, ideally to be put to some professional end. A certain amount of proactive self-direction (especially in terms of research agenda) will be expected of all seminar participants, as will a willingness to meet draft/revision deadlines and peer-feedback obligations.

Older Germanic Languages

MDV 392M (Fall 2006)
Sandra Straubhaar
Crosslisted with GER 393K.2. This course will begin with an overview of the Germanic language family and will continue with introductions to, and readings in, at least the following dialects: Gothic, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Low Franconian, and Old High German. Cultural and historical contexts will be provided and discussed for the understanding and interpretation of the featured texts, but the course’s main focus will be on the common features and complex interrelationships of the languages themselves.

Texts/Readings: Texts used will include Orrin Robinson’s Old English and Its Closest Relatives and Althochdeutsches Lesebuch by Wilhelm Braune and Ernst Ebbinghaus. We will also examine manuscript facsimiles and photographs from Hanns Fischer’s Schrifttafeln zum althochdeutschen Lesebuch, from the Arnamagnæan Institute’s webpages, from Klaeber’s edition of Beowulf, and others.

Beowulf

E392M (Spring 2006)
Ernest Kaulbach
Word by word, line by line translation of 3180 lines with special attention to the language and the background.

Prerequisites: Graduate standing and consent of the English graduate adviser.

Classical Backgrounds of Medieval and Renaissance Literature

E392M (Spring 2006)
Dr. Marjorie Curry Woods

In this course we will read in modern English translations classical works that had a major impact on the literature of the pre-modern period. The focus of the discussion and assignments will be on the aspects of the works that were particularly valued in earlier periods, although we will also examine some of the modern critical approaches. We will study the history of the transmission of these works in the Middle Ages and their printing history in the Renaissance, and examine the impact of these traditions on modern editing and textual criticism.

Early Spanish Literature: Women’s Voices in Medieval Spanish Literature

SPN 387
Madeline Sutherland-Meier

In this course we will read works by Spain’s first women writers. We will also look at two genres which, although not composed by women, have traditionally been considered to feature a female voice and to express the emotions and point of view of women: the Mozarabic “jarchas” and the Galician-Portuguese “cantigas de amigo”.

The course will be structured chronologically, so the “jarchas” and the “cantigas de amigo” will be the first texts we will study. The “jarchas” will be considered first in isolation, then will be re-read with their accompanying “moaxajas”. Our first writer will take us back to the fratricidal conflict between Pedro I of Castile and his half-brother, Enrique de Trastámara. Leonor López (b. 1362/1363) and her family suffered in prison during Enrique’s reign and her father was executed at his command. She recalls all of this (and more) in her “Memorias”, which were coposed early in the 15th century. Teresa de Cartagena (b. 1420-1435), who came from an important intellectual “converse” family, is one of the better-known writers on the list. She is the author of two works, both of which we will read: “Arboleda de los enfermos” (a book of consolation) and “Admiracion operum Dey” (a work she wrote in defense of herself after it was discovered that the author of the “Arboleda” was a woman). We will also works by medieval women poets such as Florencia Pinar, Mayor Arias, Isabel González and Queen Constanza of Mallorca, as well as works by religosas such as Costanza de Castilla, Madre Juana de la Cruz and María de Santo Domingo.

Students will present “informes” on a regular basis. During the first half of the semester they will write two short (4-5 pages) reports; a final paper (10-12 pages) will be due at the end of the semester.

Global Interconnections: Imagining the World, 500-1500 AD

MDV 392M & MDV 685L
Geraldine Heng, D.A. Spellberg, Cynthia Talbot, Richard W. Lariviere, Roger Hart

Crosslisted: History, English, Middle Eastern Studies, Comparative Literature, Asian Studies, African/African American Studies, Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies
UT Instructors: Heng, Spellberg, Talbot, Lariviere, Hart
Visiting faculty: Kea, Liu

Graduate courses taught in most university departments today focus on individual countries & cultures, making it difficult to develop a complex sense of what the world is like—how civilizations, ideas, and institutions are interconnected, or how culture, resources, and technology move across geographical space— in any given period of time.

This team-taught, multidisciplinary graduate seminar at UT—the only one of its kind anywhere—will train students to look at the world as a whole: to study the routes along which people, material artifacts, and ideas moved; examine the similarities and differences among religious, social, legal, & economic systems around the globe; and follow the development of warfare, states, cities, hierarchies of organization & power, and transformations to modernity during the premodern period that we will call, for convenience, the “Middle Ages” (approximately 500-1500 AD).

Five UT faculty from History, English, Religious Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Asian Studies, and two visiting faculty specializing in medieval Africa and Eurasia, will collaborate in seminar to map a global continuum from Spain in the West, to China in the East, and spanning Europe, Maghrebi & Sub-Saharan Africa, Islamic Near Eastern civilizations, and India.

We will examine the border zones of contact created by wars of religion between West & East, which drove transfers of culture and ideas, and consider the role of war in creating overarching collective identities and geopolitical communities, states, and premodern nations. We will follow the track of technology, money, skills, & information along established trade routes like the trans-Eurasian Silk Road and the gold caravan routes of Africa, from points of embarkation to termini in emporia and courts. We’ll see how the slave trade, religious missionizing, pilgrimage, and exploration simultaneously offer the globe as a series of discrete zones and a gridded network of linked spaces. We’ll consider the role played locally and globally by technological wonders such as compass, stirrup, gunpowder, and paper, and certain key mathematical, legal, and philosophical concepts.

Our global transversal will be driven by a set of overarching questions that will complexify in the course of the semester. For instance: does social and economic organization reproduce itself in similar-ways-with-difference throughout the globe in premodernity, so that themes and patterns can be traced across kings and courts, warrior and administrative culture, institutions and codes, laws, mythologies, literature and art, across the world? Are there “global feudalisms”—systems of organizing agriculture, external defense and internal order, political hierarchy, and relations to land—that conjointly mark the long period of premodernity in distinct ways? Do cities, states, empires, and institutions in this period borrow from, and imitate far-flung models—communicate—in ways that have yet to be fully understood? (Consider a recent remark by cellist Yo-yo Ma that “the Silk Road is the ‘Internet’ of the premodern age.”)

To train students to “think globally” and across disciplines, while working locally, and with the disciplinary tools inculcated by their own departmental training, the seminar will also offer opportunities for students to conduct original research in many fields. For students in literature, for instance, the genres of travel literature, biography, romance, hagiography, journal, chronicle, and legend offer opportunities to work on the Alexander legend, Prester John, Marco Polo, St Thomas of India, Benjamin of Tudela, Ibn Battuta, the Franciscan journals on the Mongols, Cathay, and the Great Khan, crusade chronicles, Charlemagne romances, Christopher Columbus, etc, within a global perspective & a rich, multifaceted international context.

Each student will design his/her own contribution to the seminar in consultation with a faculty member on the instructional team. Because the faculty team has a wide variety of specializations (from Indic legal codes to Chinese mathematics, science, & technology; from Indo-European courtly culture to gender in Islam), student projects can take many forms. It may also be possible for visiting faculty to oversee projects (the visiting Africanist has a subspecialization in Arabic cartography). The unique format of this seminar allows for substantial flexibility.

We welcome students from any department, period, field, discipline, or specialization who has something to offer the seminar, and who are willing to work substantively at thinking through the issues we will address. No prior knowledge of the medieval period, or of any of the countries & questions we address, will be assumed.

History of Iran to 1800

HIS 331G/MES 321/RS 363
Denise Spellberg
A survey of the social, cultural, and religious transformation of Iran from the pre-Islamic Achaemenid dynasty to the imposition of Shi`ism by the Safavids in the pre-modern era. Emphasis on the transformation of distinctly Iranian features as a result of the Islamic conquest and the centrality of this area as a center of shifting influences from both West and East.

3 exams, 25%
1 essay, 25%

Islamic Historiography: The Old World and the New

HIS 388/MES 381
Denise Spellberg
Primary and secondary works focus on debates about Islamic historiography in the context of interdisciplinarity in law, religion, anthropology, and Western historiography. Issues such as authenticity, narrative, communal identity and social control will be emphasized in the focus on Muslim slaves and issues of diaspora in both medieval MIddle Eastern and premodern American contexts.

Reading seminar: 3 assigned class essays 90%; class participation and attendance, 10%.

Late Byzantine Art, 13th - 16th Centuries

ARH 383
Glenn Peers
This seminar will examine the art and architecture of the Byzantine empire from the dispossession of its capital in 1204 by the Franks, the re-conquering of Constantinople in 1261, its fall to the Ottomans in 1453, until the lingering echoes of medieval Hellenism on the Bosporos was last heard in the late sixteenth century.

Part of the seminar necessarily focuses on the extraordinary cultural revival at Constantinople from 1261-1453, as one of the great ironies is that the capital became a dynamic cultural centre for the entire Mediterranean while it steadily diminished in political influence and military power. The magnetism of Hellenism and the heritage of Orthodoxy for surrounding cultures were important for the development of the Late Medieval world.

Therefore, this seminar will also examine orbiting cultures, like Armenian, Georgian and Trapezuntine kingdoms of the Caucasus, Crusaders in the Holy Land and Cyprus, Serbs and Bulgarians in the Balkans, Muslim dominions of the Middle East, including Seljuks and Ottomans, and Italians and French in the West. Each will reveal the vital qualities of Byzantine culture even as the Second Rome was eclipsed and replaced with new empires.

Love in Medieval Europe: Literature, Art, Music

MDV 392M & MDV 385L or MDV 685L
Rebecca Baltzer, Susanne Hafner

This interdisciplinary seminar will present the idea of love as it manifests itself in three main areas: literature (including both narrative and lyric poetry), the visual arts (especially manuscript painting), and music of the Middle Ages, primarily the period from the 12th through the 14th centuries in Western Europe.

Graduate courses taught in most university departments today focus on individual countries & cultures, making it difficult to develop a complex sense of what the world is like - how civilizations, ideas, and institutions are interconnected, or how culture, resources, and technology move across geographical space- in any given period of time. Literature from Latin and several medieval vernacular languages will be included, together with translations and musical transcriptions as appropriate. Contemporary critical analysis and writings on cultural context will also be assigned and discussed.

Several works which incorporate all three arts of poetry, music, and painting will be studied in some detail, such as the early 13th-century romance Guillaume de Dole, the early 14th-century Roman de Fauvel, Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, the Manesse Liederhandschrift, and the Codex Buranus. We will also read Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan, the prototypical love story, which portrays the lover as the perfect artist and musician and which borrows heavily from art and architecture for allegorical expression. We will look at selected lais by Marie de France, notably her Lai de Chievrefeuil, which we hope to hear performed live by the Houston-based ensemble Istanpitta. (Several other field trips and guest lectures/performances are planned.)

To train students to "think globally" and across disciplines, while working locally, and with the disciplinary tools inculcated by their own departmental training, the seminar will offer opportunities for students to conduct original research in many fields. We welcome students from any department, period, field, discipline, or specialization who have something to offer the seminar, and who are willing to work substantively at thinking through the issues we will address. No prior knowledge of the medieval period, or of any of the countries & questions we address, will be assumed.

Politics of Court Literature

CL 382
Samer Ali

This is a seminar that is open to undergraduate and graduate students who know Arabic. The goals are (1) to survey a variety of court literature, belle-letters (al-Jahiz), advice to courtiers (al-Sabi), and heroic panegyric (Abu Tammam, al-Buhturi, al-Mutanabbi) (2) to familiarize students with medieval literary theory and modern interdisciplinary techniques of analysis, and (3) to give individuals extensive practice reading Arabic and holding discussions in Arabic. Students will study Arabic poetry within the context of social and artistic discourses. Moreover, there will be an emphasis on the oral performance of poetry: Verse in Arab society was not only read aloud, it was memorized for public recitation as part of a tradition of ritual performance and story-telling. In this respect, we will examine Arabic oral performances in the context of Homeric epic and Skaldic poetry. Students will gain an understanding of literary works from an "ethnopoetic" perspective, not as "words on the page," but as "cultural practice" that both reflects and shapes society. Graduate students will fulfill course requirements appropriate to their standing.

Psychoanalysis, Chaucer, and the Medieval Subject of Desire

E 392
Elizabeth Scala

Offering an introduction to psychoanalytic theory and its analytic purchase on various literary subjects, this course aims to investigate the operations and thematics of desire in the major poetic works of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Focusing on his Book of the Duchess, Troilus and Criseyde, and selected portions of The Canterbury Tales, this course introduces students to some of the most significant texts of the late-medieval period and the genres of romance, dream-vision, fabliau, literary confession, etc., as well their shared and individual conventions. Reading the various identifications, renunciations, abjections, misrecognitions, devotions, and sacrifices in Chaucer’s poetic works, this course surveys the inscription of desire, and the competing desires, in its texts. Thus, we will examine the subject(ions)s of desire in Chaucer’s fictions - those who are allowed to desire, allowed to speak their desire, and the subjections such speaking entails - as well as the particular desires themselves of Chaucer’s fictional and highly gendered subjects. Reading thematically, formally, and theoretically, this course will probe the operations of desire -- its agents, its objects, its entailments or "subjectifications"-- in multiple ways.

In its investigation of the various desires central to Chaucer’s medieval poetics - sacred, sexual, ideological - the course will also approach the issue of modern desire(s) for and upon Chaucer. One of the issues at stake in acknowledging and investigating "our" desires for Chaucer remains the historicity of psychoanalytic reading in relation to pre-Freudian and pre- / early modern cultures. We will therefore probe the relation of psychoanalysis to medieval studies more generally in our interrogation of its traditionally historicist agenda. What desires drive the study of medieval literature and culture? How do particular historical desires, and the regimes of renunciation and discipline informing them, underwrite the very discipline of medieval studies?

Religion between History and Theory

HIS 397L/RS 383
Alison Fraizer

This interdisciplinary graduate seminar is designed to help students working with historical sources from any premodern society to test the applicability of recent theoretical work in religious studies. Topics include the subject of religion and the object of belief; pain and martyrdom; ritual and the discipline of the body; magic, science, and theology; mentality and perception; language and cognition. Week by week we alternate readings + discussions with exploratory essays + student presentations. The course may be taken for reading or research credit. Reading list subject to change depending on the interests of the participants.

Requirements. Regular attendance, careful preparation of the readings, and thoughtful participation in discussion (25%); three objective essays (2-3 pages) evaluating shared readings (15%); three essays (3-5 pages) of speculative application to be distributed and presented (35%); final paper (7-10 pages) developing one of the earlier essays (25%).

The Arabian Nights

CL 382
Samer Ali

This course introduces students to the Arabian Nights in translation. The Arabian Nights is a collection of stories framed by one story. The frame story begins as a nightmare about a misogynist who wants to kill his wife. Through the wife’s skill as a storyteller, however, it develops into a tale of love and redemption. The narrative brings fear, madness and love under the same roof, giving the frame story -- and every story -- an exquisite dramatic intensity. This course will examine closely the Arabian Nights in translation as part of an effort to understand medieval attitudes toward death, madness and sexuality. We will supplement our study of the Arabian Nights with other medieval literature, such as famous court odes, legends and romances. We will also focus on the reception of the Nights in the west by authors such as Boccaccio, E. A. Poe, Irwin, and Barth. No background in Arabo-Islamic culture is required. Graduate students will fulfill course requirements appropriate to their standing.

part of a compass rose from a medieval manuscript