WiSe 2021/22

How do you get to fairyland? Can Purgatory be reached from earth? How does an exile remember his homeland? What did medieval English travellers write about other parts of the world, and what did writers from other parts of the world have to say about medieval Europe? How and why did medieval writers use imaginary places in satirical and political writing? And what does a tale of a zombie king found beneath a church’s foundations have to tell us about experiences of historic and sacred places in medieval England?
These are all questions that we will explore on this course, which dives into the spaces and places of medieval English literature. We will analyse the ways in which places could be experienced in the Middle Ages – emotionally, spiritually, physically, nostalgically – and the ways in which such experiences were represented in writing. We will set off on a quest to encounter different literary spaces and places from the literature of medieval England: nostalgic home places and far-flung lands, fairy otherworlds and sacred spaces, historical sites and satirical islands. This course will also introduce students to interdisciplinary and “intermedial” methods: how can architecture and art inform the ways in which we read literary depictions of space, for example? We will be supported on our journey by secondary readings relating to space and place from a range of theoretical backgrounds, from human geography to postcolonial theory, to help us understand the ways in which medieval writers imagined and constructed strange places and powerful spaces in their writings (and the different approaches that we might take to these writings as modern scholars).
Primary text work covers medieval English literature from the ninth to the early sixteenth centuries, and encompasses texts originally written in English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman (the latter two will be studied in translation). No prior knowledge of Old English or Middle English is needed for this course, but students should be willing to engage with the full range of literature and critical theory on the unit. Students will be assessed via creative or analytical reflections on, and responses to, particular texts, thematic or generic concepts, and/or critical approaches to medieval spaces and places.