"Glutton had put down more than a gallon of ale, and his guts were beginning to rumble like a couple of greedy sows. Then, before you had time to say the Our Father, he had pissed a couple of quarts, and blown such a blast on the round horn of his rump, that all who heard it had to hold their noses."

"Many hundreds of angels harped and sang…. Then Peace played on her pipe, singing this song …  

After the sharpest showers the sun shines brightest

No weather is warmer than after the blackest clouds,

Nor any love fresher nor friendship fonder

Than after strife and struggle, when Love and Peace have conquered."

Tracing the dream adventures of Will as he searches for the meaning of his life, William Langland's Piers Plowman traverses the whole range of human experience as medieval thought conceived it, bringing us from Glutton, pissing and farting, to the gentle heavenly abstractions of Peace and Mercy. Langland's poem is--alongside the work of Chaucer, Dante, and Boccaccio--one of the great narrative achievements of medieval culture. A dream allegory that is also autobiographical; religiously pious and yet theologically daring; traditional in its politics even as it is taken up as a rallying cry by those participating in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381--Piers Plowman arises out of its complex historical moment to give that moment a complex, ambivalent, sometimes self-contradictory voice.

In this course, we will read Piers Plowman with particular attention to what it might tell us about late-medieval (fourteenth-century) English culture. In doing so, we will follow four interrelated lines of investigation. (1) We will read the text(s) of Langland's poem with care, attentive to moves between the socially-engaged and the theological, the "personal" and the "political," dream and the everyday world of English rural and urban life. (2) We will consider the poem's intertexts: how it takes up and transforms such influential models as the Romance of the Rose, and how it relates to such contemporary poetry as Chaucer's. (3) We will look at recent critical work on the poem, particularly writing that considers the poem's politics and its relation to the developing Lollard heresy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (4) We will consider how theoretical work in cultural studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, feminism, and queer theory might be brought to bear on a premodern text like Piers.

This course will focus on the French romance of adventure (a poor definition of genre if there ever was one!), romances written in the late-twelfth through the mid-thirteenth centuries. While they stand side by side, and emanate from the vernacular romance tradition of the earlier Tristan legends, Marie de France, and most especially, Chrétien de Troyes romances of King Arthur and his court, our texts distance themselves from their predecessors through their distinctive approach to familiar themes of tournaments, "courtly love," celebration of feasts, male and female sexuality and desire, and the like. Some of the themes discussed will be: the construction of gender, the details of historical reality which frame these romances and separate them from their predecessors, the evolution of the romance genre.

Our in-class readings will focus on four romances (required purchases): Renaut. Galeran de Bretagne,modern French trans. Jean Dufournet (Paris: Champion, 1996); Jean Renart. Le Roman de la rose ou Guillaume de Dole. English trans. Patricia Terry and Nancy Vine Durling, (Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1993). Whilethis is a "handy" translation, a much better one (and one that will be on reserve) is the one by Regina Psaki: The Romance of the Rose or Guillaume de Dole (New York: Garland, 1995); Gerbert de Montreuil. Le Roman de la violette, modern French trans. Mireille Demaules (Paris: Stock, 1992); Heldris of Cornwall (?); Silence, ed. and trans. (facing page translation with Old French) Sarah Roche-Mahdi (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1992). These texts can be ordered from http://www.amazon.com or http://www.amazon.fr . Used books can be purchased from http://www.alibris.com . The texts studied, with one exception (the Roman de Silence), are from the period of roughly 1195-1230, a period, we will see, that witnessed a dramatic shift in the writing, performance, and conception of vernacular romance. Students will be expected to do a variety of readings in earlier romances, especially those of Chrétien de Troyes, as well as to consult secondary sources (a bibliography will be distributed during the first class session).

Required work: an oral presentation; research paper (minimum 20 pages). Both the oral presentation and the research paper topic will be discussed with the instructor within the first month of classes so that research can begin immediately. A draft of the research paper will be due before the Thanksgiving break.

This course will examine the history of the Jews in the early centuries of Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean world. It will explore the historic encounter of Muhammed and the Jews and the establishment of the slim policy towards non-Muslims. Special attention will be paid to the economic and communal life of the Jews in Egypt and Iraq and the cultural development of the various centers of Jewish life under the impact of Islam. The distinctive contributions of Muslim Spain (Andalusia) in the creation of medieval Jewish civilization will be emphasized. The course will conclude with some consideration of the historic factors initiating the long decline of the world of Islam and its Jewries.

This course will deal with the epic poetry of medieval Castile and will focus on those works that have been deemed representative of the genre: the Poema de mio Çid, the Poema de Fernán González as well as the Mocedades de Rodrigo and other fragments of supposedly epic cycles. Aiming at redefining both the genre and the canon, often associated with cantares de gestas and romances, we will begin by reexamining the various theories thus far advanced on medieval epic and then proceed to analyze classical epic material in the Libro de Alexandre and the absence of such material in the works under examination,. In this context, attention will be paid to the chroniclers of the later Middle Ages which are believed to have incorporated many of these epic fragments in their prose narrative. Special emphasis will be given to textual problems, to the transmission of the material text as well as to the organization of the literary text (language, use of rhetoric, techniques of artes poetriae, intended readers, reception etc.). Texts will include Cantar de mio Çid, ed. Alberto Montaner, Barcelona: Crítica; Poema de Fernán González, ed. Juan Victorio, Madrid: Cátedra; Libro de Alexandre, ed . Jesús Cañas Murillo, Madrid: Cátedra and other epic fragments.