This course is designed for students in the M.Ed. program and is geared towards the preparation of teaching materials for middle or high school curricula. I will naturally be offering feedback on those teaching materials, but this is NOT an introduction to pedagogy. Rather, this course will focus on discussion of the major theoretical concerns in these texts and on preparation of lesson plans or other student activities based on the texts. We will meet twice a week. At the first meeting, we will discuss students' brief thought papers, and we'll use the second meeting to discuss lesson plans or activities designed by students.
In the Summer II 2015 session, the course will focus on conceptions of race, gender, and the monstrous.
Race, Gender, and the Monstrous: Teaching Medieval Literature
Summer 2015 Schedule:
Week 1: Mandeville's Travels and the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle
Week 2: Gerald of Wales, History and Topography of Ireland, and The Táin
Week 3: Nun's Priest's Tale and Prioress's Tale (Squire's Tale and Franklin's Tale, if time permits)
Week 4: Old English Genesis B and the Prose Edda
Week 5: Yvain and The Four Branches of the Mabinogi
An In the Middle post on "Re-making the Real Middle Ages," counteracting narratives of a monolingual, monocultural, monoracial past
Mandeville's Travels
This page from the Cultural Crusades Project at UMich has some great background on the Crusades, with a timeline and map that links to more information.
You've got a very simple T-O map at the back of our edition of Mandeville, but here are a couple of more complex mappae mundi, one from the twelfth or thirteenth century and the other (s. xiii) the famous Hereford mappa mundi.
Letter of Alexander to Aristotle
If you scroll down through this post on medieval precursors to Lolcats, you'll arrive at this image of Alexander in a submersible.
Gerald of Wales
Images of the Topographia Hibernica in MS 700 from the National Libary of Ireland. This NLI blog post highlights some of the images, as well as linking to other resources.
For the story of the werewolves encountered by the priest, see also this BL blog post.
The Táin
Ann Dooley's Playing the Hero (Toronto, 2006) reads the texts through various theoretical lenses.
Canterbury Tales
Helen Cooper's volume on The Canterbury Tales in the Oxford Guides to Chaucer is a great resource for teaching the Tales.
Here are images from the Ellesmere Manuscript. Scroll down to f. 148v (image 3098) for the Prioress and f. 179 (image 3103) for the Nun's Priest.
Nun's Priest's Tale
A post on "Respectability Politics and the Nun's Priest's Tale"
Prioress's Tale
Arnie Sanders (Goucher College) has put together a page on the Tale and the interpretive issues at stake. Here's a similar page by Michael Delahoyde (Washington State).
A Burne-Jones image of the Virgin Mary and the "litel clergeoun."
One of the most famous images of supposed host desecrations is from this series, painted by Paolo Uccello for an altar predella (i.e., the strip at the bottom of the altarpiece) in Urbino between 1465 and 1469. Click "next" in the upper right to see the rest of the series, including this image of blood from the tortured host running under the door and alerting Christians outside the house. You can also see an image (if you scroll down) of the host bleeding when stabbed, proving that it is, indeed, the body of Christ.
Genesis B
Images from Junius 11, the manuscript containing Genesis B; page 13 shows Adam and Eve, and page 24 shows Lucifer offering the fruit to Eve. If you scroll down to page 49, you've got the story of Cain and Abel.
Susan Oldrieve (Baldwin-Wallace) put together this introduction to the poem, with some possible ways of interpreting the text.
Prose Edda
Images of manuscripts from the Árni Magnússon Institute. Scroll down to "GKS 2367 4to" for images of the Codex Regius, which contains the Prose Edda. ("Stór" gives you larger images; on the right-hand navigation panel, "Blað" is the leaf or piece of vellum, with recto and verso being the front and back sides, respectively.)
Chrétien's Yvain
A page from the Camelot Project on the character of Yvain/Owain in different versions of the story, with a particular focus on Chrétien's text.
Here's a wonderful online exhibition of the 14th-century manuscript of the work in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 1433. The information and audio commentaries are in French, but you can page through the manuscript ("Feuilleter le manuscrit") and its gorgeous illustrations without knowing any French.
Four Branches of the Mabinogi
Some background information from Lisa Spangenberg, written (I think) before the Sioned Davies translation came out; I'd be curious to hear her thoughts on the more recent translation.
One of Siân Echard's many and excellent pages is focused on the Mabinogion. (The course for which this page was created used the Davies translation, for what that is worth.)