This module will explore some key themes in medieval literature through a selection from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as well as an anonymous romance of the fourteenth century, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The focus will be particularly on how these texts support and/or subvert ideas of chivalry, and thereby interrogate matters of genre and themes of friendship, gender, truth and power. The texts will be read closelyin relation to their literary, social and historical contexts.

This is a course suitable both for students who have never studied Chaucer or other medieval literature and also for those who already have some familiarity with Middle English. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight will be read in a parallel text edition with facing translation into modern English.

On completion of the module students will be expected to demonstrate a good knowledge of fourteenth-century Middle English, and an ability to read the set texts closely and in terms of their contemporary contexts. Students will further be expected to discuss the texts in relation to a number of key ideas including chivalry, genre, gender, truth and power. Students will be sensitive to medieval narrative practices and able to demonstrate engagement with a range of critical methodologies.

There will be two lectures per week, which will provide information on context, critical perspectives, and textual interpretations; there will also be a weekly seminar, which will include detailed textual analysis and language work, as well as student-led discussion. The emphasis in the seminars will be on close reading of the Middle English texts; help will be given with reading the texts in the original.

Whilst studying this module, students will practise and develop a number of skills, including the ability to read Middle English confidently, the cultivation of scholarly and contextualist research, the use of a range of critical methodologies, and the ability to consider a wide range of texts when producing a critical argument.  Employability skills include the ability to synthesise information, operating in group-based discussion involving negotiating ideas and producing clear, informed arguments in a professional manner.

The module is assessed 2 1600-word essays; the first is to be handed in in Week 7; the second is to be submitted at the end of the course. Sample essay questions are provided in the module guide.

The module is assessed according to the Marking Criteria set out in the English Literature Course Guide.There are otherwise no academic or competence standards which limit the availability of adjustments or alternative assessments for students with disabilities.

This is an indicative content list and may change – full details will be provided in the first lecture.

From Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales:

The Knight’s Tale

The Wife of Bath’s Prologueand Tale

The Clerk’s Prologueand Tale

The Merchant’s Tale

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Please see Background Reading List for an indicative list.

INDICATIVE READING AND RESOURCE LIST:

Primary Texts

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales should be read in the Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (Oxford University Pres, 1988), or the Complete Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor (Broadview, 2008)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. and trans., W. R. J. Barron (Manchester University Press, 1998).

Selected Secondary Reading

i) Chaucer

Valerie Allen and Ares Axioties (eds), Chaucer: New Casebook (Macmillan, 1997)

Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales (Oxford University Press, 1989)

Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Steven Ellis (ed.) Chaucer: the Canterbury Tales (Longman, 1998)

E. Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (University of California Press, 1992)

Stephen Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer (Harvester, Blackwell, 1986)

Lesley Johnson and Ruth Evans (eds), Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: the Wife of Bath (Routledge, 1994)

Peggy Knapp, Chaucer and Social Contest (Routledge, 1990)

Jill Mann, Feminizing Chaucer (Boydell and Brewer, 2002)

Helen Phillips, An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales: reading, fiction, context (Macmillan, 2000)

ii) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360–1430 (Routledge, 1988)

W. R. J. Barron, Trawthe and Treason: The Sin of Gawain Reconsidered: A Thematic Study of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Manchester University Press, 1980)

Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, eds, A Companion to the Gawain-Poet (Brewer, 2007)

J. Burrow, A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (RKP, 1971)

Ad Putter, An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet (Longman, 1996)

iii) General

David Burnley, Courtliness and Literature in Medieval England (Longman, 1998).

Conor McCarthy, Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Middle Ages: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 2003)

Bernard O'Donoghue, ed. and trans., The Courtly Love Tradition, (Manchester University Press, 1982).