The Honors College

Spring 2004

LIT 4930 Honors Special Topics: Medieval Cultures

M 7:10-10:00 HC 114

Michael Harrawood, Instructor

174 MCH; 6-8617

mharrawo@fau.edu

Office Hours: MW 3:30 – 5:30; TR 1:00-2:00, and by appointment

Required Texts:

Saint Augustine, The Confessions; Oxford World Classics, ISBN 0-19-281774

Robert Hanning & Joan Ferrante, eds, The Lais of Marie de France; Baker Books, ISBN 0-80-10-2031-X

Mark Musa, The Portable Dante; Viking Press, ISBN 0-14-023114-5

John DuVal and Raymond Eichmann, Fabliaux Fair and Foul; Pegasus Press ISBN 188781820-8

Mark Musa and Peter E. Bondanella, The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio; Norton Critical Edition, ISBN 0-393-09132-5

Chretien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances; Penguin ISBN 0-14-044521-8

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: Norton Critical Edition ISBN 0-393-95245-2

We will use these and only these editions for the class. I will ask any student who comes to class with a different edition to leave the class.

Course Description: This course is intended to familiarize the student with the many literatures and cultures of the Middle Ages in Europe. Because the rich and intellectually dense texts we will be considering were generated in an age that seems so remote from our own (this may be a delusion!), we will study seriously the cultural, political, economic and theological context in which texts were written and to which they made sense. We will try to understand how the middle ages were able to hold together ideas that seem paradoxical or even incomprehensible to us today. How could Joan of Arc been burned as a heretic while Gilles de Rais, one of history’s first serial killers and her partner in glory at Orleans, could have been remembered almost as a saint? How could Boccaccio’s anti-clericism, expressed so fully in his Decameron, have been tempered by his fear of hell after he was cursed by a Sienese monk? How is it that the categories of “the sacred” and “the profane” operate so differently in this period than in our own. Students in my other lit courses have heard me say that American “slash” and “splatter” films are the literature of our own age which come closest to a medieval sense of spirituality and spiritual longing. In this course, we’ll get a chance to see what that means.

Evaluation: I’ll base grades on 1) attendance and participation, 2) writing exercises: three 5-page papers and a 10-page final paper, 3) daily quizzes. The four papers will count for 70% of your final grade; class discussion and quizzes will count 30%. I will be happy to confer with students about individual grades at any time. Roughly, the breakdown of the papers into grade values will be this: each 5-page paper will be 15% (for a total of 45% of your 70% for papers), and the 10-page paper will count for the remaining 25%.

Attendance: As always, attendance is required in order to pass this course. You may have two (2) unexcused absences. After the third absence, I will file an F for you for the final grade of the course. Also as always, if there is a problem that keeps you from class come see me and we’ll try to work something out. Anybody coming late to class will be marked absent for that class.

Quizzes: I will give a short quiz at the beginning of each class on the material assigned for that class. I will pass out the quizzes at exactly 7:10 p.m. Any student arriving after that time will get an automatic F for that quiz. The purpose of the quiz is to assure a lively and well-informed class discussion involving everybody in the course.

Papers: We’ll generate paper topics in class as we go. Since this is an upper-division course, I expect that all papers will be free from spelling and grammatical errors, and that they will consist of a sustained and rigorous engagement with our texts and their issues. (No Hobbits!).

A Note on Plagiarism: You don’t really need this if you’ve shown up for the first day of the course. But let me put it here anyway: Plagiarism is representing someone else’s work as your own. If there are issues with citation or research, please come see me and we’ll get through it. But do not hand in a paper that has been written for you. FAU presently subscribes to several agencies that hunt down web-based plagiarism which make it pretty easy to check student writing. In addition – and more importantly – the Honors College presently has an honor code that covers all types of cheating on course work. Just do your own work – you’re probably smarter than whoever’s out there writing papers for pay, anyway.

Schedule: What follows is a working itinerary for the course. Please read it carefully and think about how you would like this course to go. This schedule is not a contract and does not oblige us to stick to a pre-arranged timetable.

Week One. January 12: Introduction to the course. From Perotin to Machaut. Bede and The Dream of the Rood. In class. Introduction to Augustine.

Week Two. January 19. (This is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The class will meet at an alternate time that we all will determine together.) Confessions, Books 1-6. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy

Please examine also the website: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/augustine.html

Week Three. January 26: The Confessions, Complete.

Read also, from The City of God: “Preface” Book 11, Chapter One, “Of this part of the work wherin we begin to the origin and end of the two cities,” from http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/augustine.html.

Five-page Paper due in my mailbox by 5 p.m. Friday January 30. No late papers!

Week Four. February 2. The lives of St. Catherine of Alexandria. From Virgin Lives and Holy Deaths; read also the life of St. Catherine from Christine de Pisan; The Letters of Abelard and Heloise and “Religious Women in the Later Middle Ages.” (handouts).

Also of interest: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook3.html

http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/fc/fcwebho.htm

Week Five. February 9. The Lais of Marie de France. For Thursday, read also “Demons and Spirits,” and “Women’s Symbols,” (handout).

Also of interest: http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/love-in-the-arts/marie.html

Week Six. February 16. Chretien de Troyes: Erec and Enide, The Knight of the Cart. Read also, “The Idea of Chivalry,” “The Secular Origins of Chivalry,” and “Chivalric Life in the High Middle Ages” (Borst) (handout). Read also “The Historical Mythology of Chivalry,” and “Chivalry and War” (handouts).

Also of interest: http://www.princeton.edu/~lancelot/

http://home.c2i.net/monsalvat/chretien.htm

http://www.princeton.edu/~lancelot/romance.html

Five-page Paper due in my mailbox by 5 p.m. Friday February 20. No late papers!

Week Seven. Feburary 23. The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor (handout), Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text.

http://www.medievalchurch.org.uk/p_hugh.html

Week Eight. March 1. Dante: Inferno.

Also of interest http://www.princeton.edu/~dante/dante2.html

http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/culture/lit/italian/da_p.htm

Spring Break. March 8-13. No class.

Week Nine. March 15: Dante, Purgatorio. Read also “The Knight Owein’s journey through St. Patrick’s Purgatory” (handout).

Five-page Paper due in my mailbox by 5 p.m. Friday February 20 (!). No late papers!

Week Ten. March 22. Dante, Paradiso.

Week Eleven. March 29. Fabliaux Fair and Foul. Boccaccio, The Decameron, “Author’s Preface and Introduction,” First Day Stories.

Week Twelve. April 5. Boccaccio, The Decameron. Second, Third Day Stories ; Fifth-through-Tenth Day Stories . Read also “Contemporary Reactions,” “Fabula vs Figura: another interpretation of the Griselda story,” “Three Studies of Death in the Middle Ages.” (handout).

Week Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, April 12, 19, 26. The Canterbury Tales. We will spend the last three weeks of the course using the Norton and online sources.

Ten-page paper due in my mailbox by 5 p.m. Friday April 23. No late papers.