WiSe 21/22: PS-Medieval English Literatures: Middle English Romance
Andrew James Johnston
Comments
Romance is probably the medieval genre whose traditions have best survived into twenty-first century (popular) imagination. Figures such as Sir Perceval or Tristan and Iseult are known to a broad modern audience through different media such as opera and film, while King Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere remain even more famous, eternally locked as they are in their romantic triangle.
For various reasons, most of England’s contribution to this body of literature is remarkably late, beginning only in the fourteenth century, and uneven in quality, especially if compared to the grand products of Old French and Middle High German literature written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Only in the second half of the fifteenth century did an English author, Sir Thomas Malory, undertake to create a version of the Arthurian cycle whose ambition was to rival that of his French models.
But what, from a conservative point of view, may look like a rather embarrassing feature of fourteenth-century (and earlier) Middle English romance can also be seen as a peculiar advantage. Precisely because Middle English romance as a genre is so diverse, and in some cases even odd and – supposedly – naïve, does it give us a remarkable insight into the tastes and habits of thought of a broad segment of the late medieval English reading/listening public and, thus, into the various aesthetic, ideological and cultural uses to which Medieval literature could be put.
The texts to be discussed in this course are:
Havelok the Dane
(anonymous)Sir Orfeo
(anonymous)The Franklin’s Tale
(Geoffrey Chaucer)The primary texts will be made available to students on blackboard at the beginning of the semester.
close16 Class schedule
Regular appointments