From courtly romance to bawdy fabliau, with stops for royal theatricality and religious devotion, this course explores the diversity within English literature from c. https://sites.google.com/site/puellalibraria/teaching/late-medieval-lit1100 to 1500.
Course Documents
Spring 2013 Syllabus
Close reading guidelines
Close reading texts:
Passage for CR 1
Passage for CR 2
See also the BL image of the 'Sumer' music, along with this recording by the Hilliard Ensemble
Language resources
METRO - Middle English Teaching Resources Online
An excellent site with many useful exercises on grammar, syntax, style, and literary analysis.
It's great to have a ME dictionary online, but you may need to do some experimenting in order to get a feel for making effective searches. Here's a brief tutorial video.
You can also get a bit of an idea what we think Chaucer's Middle English sounded like in this clip and also this one.
Teach Yourself to Read Chaucer's Middle English
From the Harvard Geoffrey Chaucer Website, this is a set of self-tutorial lessons that will help you with the meaning and pronunciation of the language.
Sir Orfeo
Images from and information about the Auchinleck Manuscript (prob. 1330-1340), our source for Sir Orfeo. Here's an image at the end of Guy of Warwick, one of the few images that survived centuries of scavenging by people wanting to sell individual leaves. (Guy was a romance hero who fell in love with a woman of higher social standing and had to prove his valor before marrying her. Later, overcome by remorse for his violence, went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and then lived as a hermit for the rest of his life. All's well that ends well?)
Gawain
The manuscript contains four illustrations of scenes from the poem, including the Green Knight brandishing his severed head, Bertilak's wife sporting a jaunty polka dot frock, Gawain's assignation with the Green Knight, and Gawain returning to Arthur's court. Here are the opening lines of the poem. See these images on a single page, here. Here is the link to the Cotton Nero A.x Project, which makes available images and texts.
A section from a BBC 4 documentary that followed Simon Armitage as he tried to link the events and locations of the poem to factual sites on the modern map of England - listen for the alliteration in Armitage's translation of the poem.
Trailer for "Sword of the Valiant" (1984), a film version that is not particularly faithful to the text
Wife of Bath
Images from the Ellesmere Manuscript, containing Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - the Wife is on f. 72, on the second page of images.
An utterly charming video about the Dunmow Flitch Trial, mentioned in the Wife of Bath's Prologue (ll. 217-18)
Affective Piety
An image from the Hours of Mary of Burgundy (Flanders, c. 1475). Think about affective piety and the kind of devotion we see in the texts from Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.
See also this image, inviting meditation on the five wounds of Christ.
For more on medieval anchoresses, see this brief introduction to the Ancrene Wisse, as well as these images of a cell inhabited by one Christine Carpenter in the Surrey village of Shere in the fourteenth century.
Gower
Here is an image of Gower's tomb. Note that he rests his head on bound copies of his three major works (Vox clamantis, Speculum meditantis = Mirour de l'omme, and Confessio amantis), written in the three major languages of medieval England. For comparison, you can see that Anne Stanhope is depicted resting her head on pillows, while the French knight Jean d'Alluye rest his feet against a lion.
Sumer is icumen in
Here is a recording of 'Sumer is icumen in' (Middle English), and here is a recording of the Latin version, 'Perspice Christicola'
BL image of the musical notation for 'Sumer is icumen in'
Links for the drama project
A brief excerpt (with the second part here) from the play Mankind, performed in front of Lincoln Cathedral.
Remember that the other way to perform mystery plays is by moving wagons through designated stopping points where audiences watch the plays. Here's the arrival of a wagon at one of the performance points in the 2010 York Plays.
Here is some commentary on a production of The Second Shepherds' Play at the Folger Library, and this is the final section of a 1954 production at The Cloisters in New York (including, bizarrely, music from Bach's Magnificat), hosted by a young Alistair Cooke.
Images and other extras
An image of the Rota Fortunae (Wheel of Fortune, before it was a gameshow)
Piers Plowman: image of the Malvern Hills
Using the Vernon Manuscript (c. 1400) to uncover the origins of West Midlands English
A lengthy (~20 mins.) film inspired by the marginal images from the Luttrell Psalter (c. 1320-1340) - lengthy, yes, but well executed with close attention to detail
A website devoted to the wall paintings (dating from the 13th - 17th centuries) in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Lakenheath, Suffolk
News items of note
Reconstructed head of Simon of Sudbury (Archbishop of Canterbury, killed during 1381 Peasant Revolt) (13 Sept. 2011)
A thirteenth-century brooch found near Bridekirk, Cumbria (northwest England) may have belonged to a child (25 Jan. 2012)
Women may have played an important role in the Peasant Revolt (14 June 2012)
Just at the tail end of the Middle Ages, the Battle of Bosworth Field saw Richard III killed and Henry VII established on the throne as the first Tudor monarch. Remains found underneath a car park in Leicester may be the bones of Richard III, and a Canadian-born cabinet-maker in London has given a DNA sample in order to confirm or rule out the tentative identification. (7 and 27 Sept. 2012)
The Black Death was probably airborne, and the movement of rats (and their fleas) is insufficient to explain the spread of the disease. (29 March 2014)