MSP 3501: Exploring the Middle Ages - Med. Identities and Cultures (McGrady)

T/Th,12:30-1:45

This course will (re)introduce you to the Middles Ages by decentering the common Eurocentric approach and prioritizing instead cross-cultural encounters that profoundly marked over a thousand years of shared history. Four units are planned for the semester: (1) early Iberia as an international center of  Muslim, Jewish, and Christian exchange; (2) crusading culture as portrayed in epic poetry, satire, the diary of a Byzantine princess and writings by Muslims living in occupied Jerusalem; (3) travel and discovery as recounted by the well-known Marco Polo as well as globetrotters from Africa and Asia; and (4) an early history of women, studied here through the Arabic epic tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman, writings by the first professional female writer – Christine de Pizan (d. 1431), and the lives of female spiritual visionaries. Our discussions will be enhanced by visits from numerous UVA professors who will discuss their research in relation to our topics. Course assignments include response papers, collaborative class activities, and a final research project that may take the form of a traditional paper, a podcast, or a creative work. This course can satisfy the Second Writing Requirement; fulfills the Artistic, Interpretative, and Philosophical Inquiry as well as Historical Perspectives; and is required for the Medieval Studies major. No previous knowledge of the Middle Ages is needed.

ANTH 3880 African Archaeology (LaViolette)

T/Th, 9:30-10:45

This course covers select topics in the African past, from the emergence of modern humans, to diversification of small- and medium-scale settlements and societies, to the development of medieval cities, states, and empires, to colonial encounters.  We also consider how archaeological methods work to produce knowledge in combination with studies of genetics, climate and environment, and historical methods. The course will provide exposure to the current debates within African archaeology, as we grapple with them.  How do we use archaeology to construct a nuanced picture of ancient African peoples?  We will explore the unique methodologies that African archaeology employs, bringing together data from ecological reconstructions, material culture, oral traditions, historical linguistics and historical documents.  And importantly, we will challenge the received wisdom about the ancient African past, an image born of the colonial period itself, and one used to legitimize and construct those hegemonies.  More than just showing how these narratives are to be supplanted by new ones, many African archaeologists are arguing that what we are learning about the deep African past has important implications for broader debates about the nature of humanity, power, identity, and complexity. 

ARTH 1507 Art and Global Cultures: Art and the Silk Road (Wong)

M/W 1-1:50

Stretching some 8,000 kilometers, the Silk Road is a network of trade routes that provided a bridge between the east and the west between the first and fourteenth centuries CE. Despite periods of disruptions, the Silk Road flourished as a commercial and at times military highway. But more than that, it was a channel for the transmission of ideas, technologies, and artistic forms and styles, with far-reaching impact beyond China and the Mediterranean world. This course introduces the art forms, trade objects, and religions that flourished along the historical Silk Road.

ARTH 2153 Romanesque and Gothic Art (Ramirez-Weaver)

Tu/Th, 9:30-10:45

The medieval monk, Raoul Glaber, described Europe in the year 1000 as a place of Christian renewal in which the continent “…[was] clothing herself everywhere in a white garment of churches.” From the Romanesque churches along the Pilgrimage Routes to the new Gothic architecture at St. Denis outside Paris and on to late medieval artistic production in Prague, this course examines profound and visually arresting expressions of medieval piety, devotion, and power made by artists from roughly 1000-1500. In this class, both sacred and secular artworks supply important records of the philosophical, theological, political, and scientific beliefs espoused by their different patrons from disparate time periods and the artists they commissioned to translate their visions into churches, castles, liturgical objects, sculptures, stained glass, tapestries, household items, and illuminated manuscripts. 

ARTH 2961 Arts of the Islamic World (Phillips)

Tu/Th 12.30-1.45

What’s Islamic about Islamic art? What makes a mosque in Indonesia different from one in Iberia? Where are all the pictures? Do materials matter, and can fine art be mass-produced? And what’s with all that ornament? To answer some of these questions, we’ll be exploring big themes, such as the requirements of worship and imperial building campaigns, daily life and its objects, conventions of representation (or picture-making), the absolute triumph of calligraphy as an art form, the way Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade connected different cultures, and how looting, plunder, and finally colonialism and nationalism also impact on the way we see and understand art and architecture in the twenty-first century.

ARTH 3151 Art and Science in the Middle Ages (Ramirez-Weaver)

M/W/F, 9-9:50

During the medieval period, power and knowledge required the endorsement of clerics.  Alongside secular courtiers they also cultivated creative expressions of their erudition, revealing the medieval interpenetration of art, science and religion.  The artworks surveyed in this course provide lasting records of critically creative confrontations between the scientific and spiritual traditions linked to medieval Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

ARTR 3245/5345, Arabic Literary Delights (Hermes)

Mo, 3:30pm - 6:00

In this course, we will comparatively explore the captivating worlds and words of premodern Islamic(ate) leisure and pleasure across the Mashriq (Islamic East) and the Maghrib (Islamic West), including al-Andalus and Sicily. Our focus will be on the literary representations and socio-cultural as well as theosophical debates surrounding humanistic themes such as humor, pleasantry, wit, frivolity, stinginess, charlatanry, erotology, abstinence, and more.

ENGL 1500 Vikings: Myths and Sagas (Hopkins)

Tu/Thu 3:30-4:45p

This course introduces students to Old Norse mythology and cosmology, and their adaptation into later medieval prose sagas. We will begin with Prose and Poetic Eddas, examining their tales and learning essential historical and cultural contexts necessary to appreciate these bodies of myth and legend. We will then consider how the conversion to Christianity (in the summer of 999) changed Iceland’s literary landscape. Yet the heathen myths survived the advent of this new faith, and even thrived. In the back half of the course, we will focus on texts composed well within the Christian era to investigate the various ways in which medieval Icelanders reckoned with the heathen past of their ancestors while working out their own identity in verse and prose. 

ENGL 3162 Chaucerian Dream Poems (Fowler)

Tu/Th, 12:30-1:45

Poetry can produce real bodily experiences—including laughter, tears, heat, taste, a sense of being intensely present—by means of marks on a blank page, even if they were made by someone who’s been dead for hundreds of years. How does it do that? With that question in mind, we’ll read four poems Geoffrey Chaucer wrote about his dreams together with some poems he had read and some short essays on art, dreams, sensory experience, and virtual reality. The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and The Legend of Good Women are surreal, sweet, funny, philosophical, emotionally intense, feminist, and visually overstimulated poems. Dreams seem to provide Chaucer with a way of thinking about “para-sensory,” virtual experience and its relation to grief, love, and the other passions (the word medieval writers used for “emotions”). We'll be interested in how specific forms of language (image, metaphor, verb tense, and so on) work to produce the cognitive, emotional, and sensory effects of virtual experience. We’ll go slowly, so you can learn to “close read” poetry, and so you’re OK if Middle English is new to you. There are no pre-requisites except a joy in thinking and a love of language.

ENGL 4902: The Bible (Parker)

MW 2:00pm - 3:15pm

The stories, rhythms, and rhetoric of the Bible have been imprinting readers and writers of English since the seventh century. Moving through much of the New Testament, from the Gospels to Revelation, this course focuses on deepening biblical literacy and sharpening awareness of biblical connections to whatever members of the class are reading in other contexts. Along the way we will discuss English translations of the New Testament; the process of canonization; textual history; and the long trail of interpretive approaches, ancient to contemporary. Our text will be the New Oxford Annotated Bible, 5th ed. All are welcome. No previous knowledge of the Bible is needed or assumed. It can be taken before or after the Bible Part 2: The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, taught by Professor Stephen Cushman

ENGL 5559 Introduction to Old Norse (Hopkins)

Tu/Thu 12:30-1:45p

This course provides an introduction to the language and literature of medieval Iceland (also called Old Norse or Old Icelandic, roughly 800-1400 CE), and the goal is to arrive at a sound reading knowledge of the Old Norse language. Drawing upon Byock’s textbook, the first half of the semester focuses on internalizing the basics of Old Norse grammar and vocabulary. While acquiring these rudimentary linguistic skills, we will practice translating short bits of prose and poetry as supplied in the textbook. The course will also include secondary readings to orient us towards Old Norse genres, contexts, and critical/theoretical approaches prevalent in the field, with an emphasis on the history of the conversion and the importation of writing technologies (i.e., basic paleography). 

GETR 3464 Medieval Stories of Love and Adventure (McDonald)

Tu/Th 3:30-4:45

Fulfills the second -writing requirement. Course readings center on King Arthur and his court, as exemplified by the quests of Erec, Yvain, and Parzival. Readings include Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History and Gottfried’s Tristan. All readings in English. 

HIEU 4511 Viking Worlds (Kershaw)

Mo 2:00-4:30

Drawing upon the latest archeological, anthropological and literary studies alongshide historical scholarship, this 4-credit seminar explores the ways in which "the silver seekder from the North" travelled, traded and transformed the world around them, and were in turn temselfs transformed.

HIME 2001 The Making of the Middle East (Richardson)

Tu/Th 11:00am-12:15pm

This course explores the history of the Middle East and North Africa from late antiquity to the rise to superpower status of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. Topics include the formation of Islam and the first Arab-Islamic conquests; slave societies; the fragmentation of the empire of the caliphate; the historical development of Islamic social, legal, and political institutions; science and philosophy; and the impact of invaders (Turks, Crusaders, and Mongols).

HIST 4501 Using and Abusing the Medieval Past (Kershaw)

Weds 2:00-4:30

The Middle Ages will not die. Representations of the medieval past are a pervasive - and often problematic - presence in the 21st-century. This 4-credit class explores the ongoing history of that exploitation: the ways in which the Middle Ages have been used and abused from the nineteenth century to the present day in the service of a range of political agendas from Victorian nation-building to wars of conquest, alt-right extremism and the neo-medieval religious radicalism of today.

JPTR 3100 Myths and Legends of Japan (Heldt)

Tu/Th 5:00-6:15

A seminar exploring Japan's earliest myths describing the origins of its islands, their gods, and rulers through close readings in English of eighth-century chronicles and poems.

RELB 2450 Zen (Heller)

MW 11–11:50

This course traces the history of the Buddhist “meditation school” from its beginnings in medieval China through its transmission and development in Korean and Japan. Through primary sources, we will examine how this tradition emerged from Buddhist thought and practice, and how Zen authors proposed new interpretations of both.  Through an exploration of its expression in visual and literary arts and its institutional forms, we will develop an understanding of Zen ideals and everyday life. We will also consider modern forms of Zen and its reception in the West, and how this shapes our understanding of its history.

RELG 3006 Augustine’s City of God (Mathewes)

M/W 3:30-4:45

The City of God is a foundational book for the history of Christianity and the history of the West in general.  But while many talk about it, hardly anyone reads it.  As Stefon from SNL would say, this book has everything: from creation to eschaton, the character of non-Christian moral action, Christology and the nature of the church, just-war reasoning, Jewish-Christian relations, the reality of zombies, the phenomenology of sex, and fart jokes.

Graduate students are welcome to take the course as a tutorial or “directed reading”.  Please contact instructor for details. Latin not necessary but welcomed. Work for the class could be accomplished either by a paper, weekly small pieces, or something else to be determined in consultation with instructor.

RELI/RELJ 5559 Resurrection (Andruss)

Th, 2-4:30

This comparative seminar traces the history of resurrection in Jewish and Muslim cultural and intellectual history. Students read primary texts—from the Bible and Qurʾān to medieval treatises to modern essays—to explore the concept of resurrection and its role in arguments over reason and revelation, the interpretation of scripture, and the boundaries between rival religious groups.

SPAN 4210 History of the Spanish Language II (Velázquez-Mendoza)

M/W, 3:30-4:45

This course traces the historical development of the Spanish language from its origins as a spoken Latin variety to the present. Topics include: The relationship between language change and language variation; the Indo-European language family; Romanization of the Iberian Peninsula; Classical vs. 'Vulgar' Latin; Visigothic and Arab influence on the Spanish language; expected and unexpected outcomes of nasalization; Medieval Spanish word order; Golden Age and Judeo-Spanish; Colonial Spanish.

ARAH 9585 Art and religion of the Silk Road (Wong)

Wed 3:30-6 pm

Stretching some 8,000 kilometers from east to west, the Silk Road is a network of trade routes that provided a bridge between the east and the west. Although the eastern part of the routes had been in use for millennia, the opening of the Silk Road occurred during the first century BCE, when China secured control over the eastern section and began trading with the Roman Empire through intermediary states in Central Asia. From this time until the end of the Mongol Yuan period in the fourteenth century, with periods of disruptions, the Silk Road flourished as a commercial and at times military highway. But more than that, the Silk Road was a channel for the transmission of ideas, technologies, and artistic forms and styles, with far-reaching impact beyond China and the Mediterranean world, extending to Southwest Asia, Africa, the Atlantic shores of Europe, and Japan to the east. This seminar examines topics from the art forms, trade objects to religions that flourished along the Silk Road between the first and fourteenth centuries CE.

RELG 3006 Augustine’s City of God (Mathewes)

M/W 3:30-4:45

The City of God is a foundational book for the history of Christianity and the history of the West in general.  But while many talk about it, hardly anyone reads it.  As Stefon from SNL would say, this book has everything: from creation to eschaton, the character of non-Christian moral action, Christology and the nature of the church, just-war reasoning, Jewish-Christian relations, the reality of zombies, the phenomenology of sex, and fart jokes.

Graduate students are welcome to take the course as a tutorial or “directed reading”.  Please contact instructor for details. Latin not necessary but welcomed. Work for the class could be accomplished either by a paper, weekly small pieces, or something else to be determined in consultation with instructor.

HIEU 2559 Illegal Republics: The Medieval Communes (Vise)

Max Weber famously termed the cities of medieval northern Italy “illegal republics” as they stood completely outside the scope of extant medieval jurisprudence and political imagination. Church officials and emperors were inclined to agree with him. But that did not stop the republics from forming. Students will play a semester-long role-playing game (including a medieval paper-making workshop) to construct a final group project: a medieval republican constitution.

MTWThF 10:30-12:45 (Hybrid)

ARTH 2861 East Asian Art (Wong)

Tu/Th 12:30 - 1:45 pm

This course is a general introduction to the artistic traditions of China, Korea, and Japan from the prehistoric period to the modern era. Major topics include funerary art, Buddhist art, and later court and secular art. The course seeks to understand artistic forms in relation to technology, political and religious beliefs, and social and historical contexts. It also introduces the major philosophic and religious traditions—Confucianism, Daoism, Shinto, and Buddhism—that have shaped cultural and aesthetic ideals of East Asia. The lectures survey major monuments and the fundamental concepts behind their creation.

RELB 2715 Introduction to Chinese Religion (Heller)

TR 9:30–10:45

This course serves as an introduction to the religious beliefs and practices of China, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. Engaging textual, material, and visual traditions, the course covers several broad themes in Chinese religion, including ritual, self-cultivation, means of communicating with the gods, and the intersection of political authority and religion. 

RELC 2050 "Rise of Christianity" (Shuve)

MW 10-10:50am

How did a movement that began as a Jewish sect become the official religion of the Roman Empire and forever change the world? In this course, we will trace Christianity’s improbable rise to religious and cultural dominance in the Mediterranean world during the first millennium of the Common Era. We will examine archaeological remains, artistic creations and many different kinds of writings—including personal letters, stories of martyrs and saints, works of philosophy and theology, and even gospels that were rejected for their allegedly heretical content—as we reimagine and reconstruct the lives and struggles of early and medieval Christians. Our goal will be to understand the development of Christian thought, the evolution of the Church as an institution, and how Christianity was lived out and practiced by its adherents. 

RELG 2820 Jerusalem (Andruss)

Tu/Th 12:30-1:45

This course traces the history of Jerusalem with a focus on its significance in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. How have these communities experienced and inhabited Jerusalem? How have they imagined the city and interpreted its meaning? How have Jews, Christians, and Muslims expressed their attachments to this contested space from antiquity to modern times? Our exploration will be rooted in primary texts and informed by historical and cultural context, as well as scholarly approaches to sacred space.

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ARH 3500/ARTH 3591 Medieval Mediterranean (Phillips and Reilly)

Tu/Th 12:30-1:45 pm

In this course we will delve into the rich history of Muslim-Christian interactions in the medieval Mediterranean, focusing on the concept of 'encounters' through the lens of art, architecture, and material culture. We will consider how communities with differing beliefs and traditions shared landscapes and spaces, from religious buildings to marketplaces, workshops, and city streets. By examining case studies—from Constantinople to Palermo to Cordoba--we will gain insight into how these interactions affected contemporary visual, material and built environments. We will also reflect on whether the Mediterranean is special, or not, and assesses the ways in which connections to other parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa helped shape the region and its hinterlands.   Thus, we will develop a deeper understanding of how power, identity, and cultural translation shaped the medieval Mediterranean world and its art and architecture and reflect on contemporary issues of cultural coexistence and exchange. In a similar vein, we'll evaluate the way cultural heritage groups, tourist boards, and other official and unofficial bodies have described medieval architecture, art, and culture, and ask what is at stake right in the twenty-first century. This course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement.

ARTH 3591-003 Medieval Mayhem (Ramirez-Weaver) 

TTh 9:30-10:45 AM

In this course, we will explore the historical and ideological frameworks in which medieval mystical practices joined the human body with nature, transcended the cosmic harmonies of divine proportion, and attempted to fashion the world according to desire and belief. We examine purifying practices such as the Eucharist or baptism as well as the manipulation of cosmic forces for personal or political reasons, using techniques ranging from horoscopic astrology to necromancy. We will examine the medieval foundations of modern racist ideologies and the legacy of eugenics at UVA specifically. Lastly, we will investigate the role of medievalism in the ideological presentation of histories about the medieval period, with a focus upon the “wizarding world” of Harry Potter. Topics covered include: celestial modeling, eschatology, apocalypses, astrological prediction, horoscopes, talismans and crystals, spells and incantations, medieval gynecology, Hildegard of Bingen, monstrous races, military machinations, relics and reliquaries, late medieval mysticism, Margery Kempe, phenomena such as "holy anorexia," alchemical theory, Hieronymus Bosch, and the medievalism of Harry Potter.

ENGL 3161 Chaucer I (E. Fowler)

TTh 12:30-1:45

We’ll read The Canterbury Tales and perhaps some shorter works looking for the author that the Scots poet Gavin Douglas praised as “evir all womanis frend.” One governing question will be how, for Geoffrey Chaucer and for us, do sexual politics guide political philosophy? This is a course in Middle English, in reading poetry, in considering how fiction shapes political thought, and in thinking alongside someone who lived before modernity and can shake our sense of the world to its roots while telling brilliant stories. We’ll meet under the Scholar’s Tree by Dawson’s Row in camp chairs unless weather prohibits it: bring your sunscreen and hats. Write to Prof Fowler fowler@virginia.edu with questions.

ENGL 3275: The History of Drama I (Parker)

MW 2:00-3:15

The first third of this course will cover the drama of classical antiquity in translation, beginning with Greek plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, then moving from there to the Latin plays of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca.  The next third of the course will consider the kinds of performance that displaced (and in some cases transformed) these pagan traditions after the Christianization of the Roman empire; we will likely read a liturgical drama, a morality play, a saint play, some vernacular Biblical drama and a secular farce.  The final third of the course will cover plays from the Renaissance, focusing particularly on the commercial London stage of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.   

GETR 3464 Medieval Stories of Love and Adventure (McDonald)

Tu/Th 2-3:15 OR 3:30-4:45 (online)

Fulfills the second -writing requirement. Course readings center on King Arthur and his court, as exemplified by the quests of Erec, Yvain, and Parzival. Readings include Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History and Gottfried’s Tristan. All readings in English. 

JPTR 3010 Survey of Traditional Japanese Literature (Heldt)

TTh 2:00-3:15 PM

This course provides an introduction to Japanese literature from earliest times through to the nineteenth century. We will read selections from representative texts and genres, including myth, poetry, prose fiction, memoir literature, drama, and works of criticism. No knowledge of Japanese culture or language is required.

JPTR 3400 Tales of the Samurai (Heldt)

TTh 3:30-4:45 PM

A seminar focusing on influential medieval and early-modern narratives such as the Tale of Heike in which the notion of the samurai first developed. No prerequisites. Satisfies the non-Western and Second-Writing requirements.

LATI 3090: Medieval Latin (Hays)

TR 2:00–3:15

In this course we will read (in the original Latin) the Romance of Apollonius of Tyre, an early medieval novel involving incest, murder, piracy, riddles, shipwrecks, ball-games, prostitution, virtuous fishermen, wicked step-parents, and more riddles. Time permitting, we will also look at the novel's later influence, notably on Shakespeare's Pericles.

PLPT 3010: Ancient and Medieval Political Theory (Bird)

MW, 3-3:50

Western Political Theory from Plato to the Reformation. Among authors covered are Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther. For the medieval period, central themes are natural law, allegorical interpretation of Scripture, and the origins of modern liberal political theory.

RELC 3181 Medieval Christianity (Mathewes)

W 3:30-6:00 PM  

This seminar attempts to introduce undergraduate students with several major approaches to Christian thought in Medieval Europe, in order to offer them a taste of various styles of writing and thinking, in order to orient them to engage various major accounts of the Christian tradition. From Augustine and Boethius through Bernard, Anselm, Hildegard and Aquinas to Ockham, Eckhart, and Marguerite Porete, we will ask questions such as: What are the major debates and concepts that have informed Christian thought historically?  What styles of reasoning and deliberation have been explored, and to what ends? Engaging those questions should open angles of interpretation on what is “Christian” and “theology,” and how they relate to other disciplines.

SPAN 3400 From Kingdom to Empire (Riva)

TTH 9:30-10:45

This course will explore medieval and early modern works written in Castilian from El Cid to Calderón's theater. We will focus on the function of these literary texts in the European and Mediterranean context. Taught in Spanish. Prerequisite: SPAN 3010 and 3300, or departmental placement. Exclude Spanish majors on their 4th year.

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ENGL 4500 Metamorphosing Myth (Clare Kinney)

Tues/Thur 11:00-12:15 

This seminar will explore the appropriation and transformation of some of the influential narratives of pagan antiquity: the myths that are kidnapped and remade as artists pursue their own aesthetic, cultural and political agendas. We will start by reading (in translation) Virgil’s great epic of empire, the Aeneid, as well as Ovid’s influential and bewitching tapestry of mythic narratives, the Metamorphoses. We’ll then move on to discuss the ways in which some medieval, Renaissance and contemporary authors metamorphose these powerful archetypes. Our post-classical readings will include works by Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare, as well as Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses and Ursula K Le Guin’s Lavinia. With luck, we’ll also hear from some of our own creative writing faculty about the afterlives of myth within their own work. Course requirements: regular attendance and energetic participation in discussion.  A series of  discussion board postings.  A 6-7 page paper, an oral presentation, a longer term paper.

FREN 4848 The Good Life? (Ogden)

M, 3:30-6 PM

What is the good life, and what is a good life?  How should a person balance ethical responsibilities with comforts and pleasures?  Is sacrifice required for someone who wants to be good, and if so, how much and of what kind?  How do social expectations help and harm efforts to do the right thing?  We might think of saints as people who live perfectly good lives, but stories about them often grapple with all of these questions and don’t always provide clear answers, instead encouraging audiences to think deeply about their own lives in ways that go beyond any one religious or ethical system.  Above all, such stories can lay bare both how difficult it is to solve moral dilemmas (even for saints) and how closely extreme virtue can resemble appalling vice.  Looking at old and new stories of parent-child struggles, spectacular sinning and redemption, gender transformation, and daily moral predicaments, we will explore a variety of ways to understand what it means to live well.  Course taught entirely in French.

HIEU 4511 Viking Worlds (Kershaw)

Mo 5:30-8

Contact instructor for details.

ENGL 5100 Intro to Old English (Hopkins) 

TuThu 12:30p-1:45p

In this course (open to undergraduate and graduate students) we will learn to read the Old English language (roughly 500-1100 CE). To arrive at a sound reading knowledge, we will spend the first half of the semester internalizing the basics of Old English grammar and vocabulary, and will practice translating short bits of prose and poetry, from prose works like Bede's history, and later poetry such as the Exeter Book riddles, The Battle of Maldon, The Dream of the Rood, and excerpts from Beowulf. Along the way, we will also study Old English genres, contexts, and critical/theoretical approaches prevalent in the field, with an emphasis on the history of the book and writing technologies. Course work includes weekly translations, midterm and final exams, and a brief research presentation (~10 min) on a topic chosen by each student. Successful completion of this course is required for admission to ENGL 5110 Beowulf and Its Monstrous Manuscript in the Spring. 

ENGL 5510 Arthurian Romances (E. Fowler)

TTh 3:30-4:45

We'll dive into what is probably the most viral fan-fiction canon ever: stories about Arthur, Guenevere, Lancelot, Gawain, Merlin, the Ladies of the Lake, and their friends and enemies and magical stage props. What makes this kind of narrative work? How do different authors transform it? The late medieval Morte Darthur by Thomas Malory will be at the core of our inquiry, and we'll include texts from Marie de France and Chaucer to contemporary film. We'll be looking to describe how (and why) the romance genre offers us experiences of philosophy, emotion, political thought, spirituality, and wit. This is a graduate course with room for undergraduates who have some coursework in Middle English. We will meet outside under the Scholar’s Tree by Dawson’s Row in camp chairs unless weather prohibits it. Contact Prof Fowler fowler@virginia.edu with questions.