Introductory description

In contemporary contexts, the labelling of something as 'medieval' often harks back to what is seen as a violent, bigoted, uncivilised past. This module will look beyond this comforting fantasy of a ‘dark ages’ against which the present can be measured, giving you a better understanding of how Western medieval sources actually deal with topics like gender, race, and religion.

While not shying away from the misogyny, anti-Semitism, and racial/religious prejudice sometimes articulated in medieval texts and images, the module will also give you an insight into how such views are challenged or troubled. We will consider how medieval women, Muslims, Jews, and various kinds of racial 'others' were represented in medieval culture. We will do this through focused analysis of a range of different source types, including didactic materials, illustrated works of natural history, exemplary literature, romance, and fantastical travel narratives. No previous knowledge of the Middle Ages is required for the module; the textual materials studied are predominantly written in Old French or Latin, but will be studied in modern French or English translation.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Term 1 or 2

1 Lecture: Introduction; Medieval Misogyny and the ‘Defence’ of Women
Seminar: ‘Three Medieval Views of Women’

2 Lecture: Women in Medieval Saints’ Lives
Seminar: Clemence of Barking’s ‘Vie de Sainte Catherine d’Alexandrie’

3 Lecture: Christine de Pizan and the Defence of Women
Seminar: Christine de Pizan ‘La Cité des Dames’ (extracts)

4 Lecture: Misogyny and Gender in the Bestiaries
Seminar: The Second Family Bestiary

5 Lecture: Anti-Semitism in the Bestiaries
Seminar: The Second Family Bestiary

6 Reading Week

7 Lecture: Parody and Otherness in Aucassin et Nicolette
Seminar: Aucassin et Nicolette

8 Lecture: The Saracen Woman in Aucassin et Nicolette
Seminar: Aucassin et Nicolette

9 Lecture: The Monstrous Races in Mandeville’s Travels
Seminar: Mandeville’s Travels

10 Lecture: The Monstrous Races in Mandeville’s Travels
Seminar: Mandeville’s Travels

Term 3

3 Revision sessions (x 2)

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Knowledge of debates surrounding women, race, and religious difference in the Middle Ages
• Critical thinking about themes in medieval sources that have an impact on questions of gender, race and religion
• Knowledge of medieval sources and the contexts in which they circulated
• Subject specific research skills

Indicative reading list

Core texts:
Fiero, Gloria K., Wendy Pfeffer, and Mathé Allain, ed. and trans., Three Medieval Views of Women: La Contenance Des Fames, Le Bien Des Fames, and Le Blasme Des Fames (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989).
Clemence of Barking, ‘La Vie de Sainte Catherine d’Alexandrie’, in Virgin Lives and Holy Deaths: Two Exemplary Biographies for Anglo-Norman Women, ed. and trans. J. Wogan-Browne and G. S. Burgess (London: Everyman, 1996), 3-43.
Christine de Pizan, La Cité des Dames, trans. T. Moreau and E. Hicks (Paris: Stock, 1986). (digitised extracts to be made available to students)
Clark, Willene B., ed. and trans. A Medieval Book of Beasts: The Second-Family Bestiary. Commentary, Art, Text and Translation (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006). (digitised extracts to be made available to students)
Aucassin et Nicolette (Paris: Flammarion, 1993) or (Paris: Gallimard, 1999).
Le livre de messire Jean de Mandeville, version liégeoise, 1396, trans. Christiane Deluz, in Croisades et pèlerinages: récits, chroniques et voyages en Terre sainte, XIIe–XVIesiècle, ed. Danielle Régnier-Bohler (Paris: Laffont, 1997), 1393-1435. (digitised extract to be made available to students)
Jean de Mandeville, Voyage autour de la terre, trans. Christiane Deluz (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993)
John Mandeville, Book of Marvels and Travels, trans. Anthony Bale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
Selected secondary material:
Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009)
Bale, Anthony, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews, and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London: Reaktion Books, 2011).
Bartlett, Robert. ‘Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31 (2001), 39–55.
Bennet, Philip et al eds. Epic and Crusade: Proceedings of the Société Rencesvals Colloquium 27-28 March 2004, (Edinburgh: Société Rencesvals, 2006)
Bildhauer B. and Robert Mills eds., The Monstrous Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003)
Bloch Friedman, J. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge Mass: Harvard UP, 1981)
Blurton, Heather and Hannah Johnson. ‘Virtual Jews and Figural Criticism: Some Recent Scholarship on the Idea of the Jew in Western Culture’, Philological Quarterly 92.1 (2014), 115–30.
Burns, E. Jane, Courtly Love Undressed (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
Burns, E. Jane, Sea of Silk: a textile geography of women’s work in medieval French literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
Ciggaar, K.N., Western travellers to Constantinople: the West and Byzantium 962-1204 (Leiden, New York: Brill, 1996).
Cobby, Anne E., Ambivalent Conventions: Formula and Parody in Old French (Amsterdam: Ropodi, 1995).
Cohen, J.J. Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)
--------------, Of Giants: Sex, monsters and the Middle Ages, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)
--------------, ‘On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31.1 (2001), 111–44.
Classen, Albrecht ed., Discourses on Love, Marriage and Transgression in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (Tempe: ACMRS, 2004)
Dahan, Gilbert, ‘Les Juifs dans les Miracles de Gautier de Coincy’, Archives Juives, 16.4 (1980), 59-68
Daniel, Norman, The Arabs and Mediaeval Europe (London: Longman, 1975)
Dinshaw, Carolyn, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
Dubost, Francis, Aspects fantastiques de la littérature narrative médiévale, XIIe-XIIIe siècles: l'autre, l'ailleurs, l'autrefois (Geneva: Slatkine, 1991)
Foehr-Janssens, Yasmina, La jeune fille et l’amour: pour une poétique courtoise de l’évasion, (Genève: Droz, 2010).
Frojmovic, Eva and Catherine E. Karkov, eds. Postcolonising the Medieval Image (New York: Routledge, 2017).
Goldberg, David, ‘The Development of the Idea of Race: Classical Paradigms and Medieval Elaborations’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 5 (1999), 561–70.
Green, Monica H., ‘Bodily Essences: Bodies as Categories of Difference’, In A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 149–72.
--------------, ‘Conversing with the Minority: Relations among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages’ Editor’s Preface to special issue, ‘Conversing With the Minority: Relations Among Christian, Jewish and Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages,’ Journal of Medieval History, 34.2 (2008), 105–18.
Hahn, Thomas, ‘The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race Before the Modern World’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31.1 (2001), 1–37.
Heng, Geraldine, ‘The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages,’ and ‘The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages II: Locations of Medieval Race,’ Literature Compass, 8.5 (2011), 315–50.
Kinoshita, Sharon, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
--------------, ‘Deprovincializing the Middle Ages.’ In The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, ed. Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery (Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press, 2007), 61–75.
Kruger, Steven. ‘Racial/Religious and Secular Queerness in the Middle Ages’, Medieval Feminist Newsletter, 16.3 (1993), 32–36.
--------------, The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
Lees, Clare, Medieval Masculinities: regarding men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994)
Martin, June, Love's Fools: Aucassin, Troilus, Calisto and the parody of the courtly lover (London: Tamesis, 1972)
Mittman, Asa Simon, ‘Are the Monstrous ‘Races’ Races?’ postmedieval, 6:1 (2015), 36–51.
--------------, ‘Mandeville’s Jews, Colonialism, Certainty, and Art History.’ In Postcolonising the Medieval Image, eds. Eva Frojmovic and Catherine Karkov (London: Ashgate, 2017).
--------------, and Marcus Hensel, eds. Classic Readings on Monster Theory: Demonstrare, 2 vols (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Press, WMU/Arc- Humanities Press, 2018).
Moore, R. I., The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1987), Expanded edition, 2007.
Nadhiri, Aman Y., Saracens and Franks in the 12th–15th Century European and Near Eastern Literature: Perceptions of Self and Other (London: Routledge, 2017).
Nirenberg, David, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, with new preface by the author (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015; orig. publ. 1996).
Ramey, Lynn T. Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014).
--------------, Christian, Saracen and Genre in Medieval French Literature: Imagination and Cultural Interaction in the French Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2001).
Segol, Marla, ‘Medieval Cosmopolitanism and the Saracen-Christian Ethos’, CLCWeb, 6 (2004), pp.2-12.
Strickland, Debra Higgs, ‘Monstrosity and Race in the Late Middle Ages’, In Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa S. Mittman with Peter J. Dendle (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 365–86.
--------------, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
--------------, ‘The Jews, Leviticus, and the Unclean in Medieval English Bestiaries’, in Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, ed. M. B. Merback (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 203-232
Subrenat, Jean, De l’Etranger à l’étrange ou la conjointure de la merveille (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1988).
Weever, Jacqueline de., Sheba's Daughters: Whitening and Demonizing the Saracen Woman in Medieval French Epic (Garland: New York and London,1998)
Whitaker, Cord J., ed. Special issue, ‘Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages,’ postmedieval, 6.1 (2015).
Williams, David, Deformed Discourse: the function of the monster in medieval thought and literature (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999)

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Interdisciplinary

The module draws on the fields of history, literature, visual culture, and manuscript studies; and examines materials belonging to both English and French cultural history.

International

All modules delivered in SMLC are necessarily international. Students engage with themes and ideas from a culture other than that of the UK and employ their linguistic skills in the analysis of primary materials from a non-Anglophone context. Students will also be encouraged to draw on the experiences of visiting exchange students in the classroom and will frequently engage with theoretical and critical frameworks from across the world.

Subject specific skills

This module will develop students’ linguistic skills through engaging with secondary materials in the target language and through translations of primary materials. It will build students’ capacity to engage with aspects of French culture through analysis of primary material and through seminar discussion aimed at deeper critical thinking. In particular, students’ awareness of gender, race and religion in the Middle Ages will be enhanced through lectures and seminars which engage with scholarship in the field.

Transferable skills

n/a