Fall 2005

In the Fall 2005 semester, the Medieval Studies Certificate Program offers the following courses.

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MSCP 70100	Introduction to Medieval Studies
	Wednesday.,  4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits
	Professor William Clark
	This course seeks to enable students of the Middle Ages to situate their specific interests and projects within a broad, multidisciplinary framework; to pose questions informed by an awareness of current issues in medieval scholarship; and to undertake successful research at every level from the identification of manuscript materials to the use of electronic resources. There will be weekly readings and discussions on topics across the spectrum of the discipline. The final project will be developed around an individual topic selected by each student.
MSCP 80500	Antiquities & Modernities: Exploring Political & Poetic Space in Medieval Studies
	Thursday, 6:30-8:30 p.m.,  Room TBA, 3 credits
	Professor Ammiel Alcalay
	Through readings in a wide range of sources, this course will investigate two primary issues: 1) How can we - as students, scholars, and readers - approach sources that are classified as "medieval"? What might constitute the political, cultural, and conceptual parameters of such sources? What would we think of as "covered," "off-limits" or in need of different approaches? We will explore how various scholars and writers have engaged with their sources for scholarly and creative ends. Examples of this may range from Louis Massignon's study of al-Hallaj or Michael Sells's versions of Ibn 'Arabi to Robert Duncan's lifelong concerns with Dante; Jack Spicer's use of the Arthurian cycle; Charles Olson's interest in Avicenna's Visionary Recital as interpreted by Henry Corbin; Diane di Prima's translations of late Latin love lyrics, or my own After Jews & Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. Students will be encouraged to consider representations of the "medieval", wherever they might appear (from films like El Cid, The Return of Martin Guerre, or versions of Tolkien, to the uses poets, novelists, architects, musicians and others have put "medieval" materials to. Throughout, we will pay close attention to the transmission of materials (whether through something like the Abbasid translation movement or the permutation of narratives, poetic forms, and material goods), as well as the relationship between learned and vernacular modes. 2) What are "medieval" conceptions of antiquity and modernity, and how do they differ from our own conceptions of those chronological markers? Given that medieval space intersects many different time frames (from Jewish and Islamic to Mayan), what happens when the traditional European and Asian space of medieval studies opens up to the Americas? Is the concept of Europe, for example, more of a cultural and political construct than a geographical entity? Why is Islamic Spain seldom considered an integral part of European history? What happens when we consider the transfer and transformation of the knowledge of classical antiquity through the Islamic world and into European culture? Once we begin exploding some of these categories, what happens when we venture further, to the Americas, for instance? How would looking at the period of around 600 to 1500 in the Americas recalibrate our concepts of the "medieval?" In exploring such questions we will consider many different texts and disciplinary approaches. Texts may include: Alcalay, Ammiel; After Jews & Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture; Bernal, J.D., Science in History, Volume 1: The Emergence of Science; Blackburn, Paul, Proensa: An Anthology of Troubador Poetry; Blaut, J.M., The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism & Eurocentric History; Brotherston, Gordon; The Book of the Fourth World; Duncan, Robert; The H.D. Book
MSCP 80500	Saints & Sinners in the Medieval West
	Tuesday,  6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits
	Professor Thomas Head Cross listed with HIST 70400
	This course will provide an interdisciplinary introduction to the hagiographic literature of western Christianity, focusing on the ways in which contemporary scholars interpret it and the evidence it provides for the development of the cult of the saints. Through reading of both primary and secondary sources, we will study the ways in which ideals of sanctity and the hagiographic expressions of sanctity changed. The course will begin in late antiquity with martyrial literature and continue until the fourteenth century, with its varied ideals of lay and mendicant sanctity expressed in both Latin and the vernacular languages. Topics will include the liturgical cult of the saints; pilgrimage and relic cults; the gendering of sanctity; the development of vernacular hagiography; the iconography of the saints; and the architectural space in which the cult of saints was performed. The course will combine approaches from intellectual, social, art, and literary history.
MSCP 80700	Aquinas on Mind & Related Topics
	Tuesday,  4:15-6:15 p.m., 3 credits
	Professors Gyula Klima and Peter Simpson Cross listed with PHIL 76200
	This course will concentrate on some major issues in Aquinas’ philosophy of mind and metaphysics. A central topic will be the intriguing theoretical alternative that Aquinas, adapting the psychological thought of Aristotle, offers between dualism and materialism, based on his hylomorphist metaphysics. In fact, partly because of theological considerations, Aquinas had to be more thoroughgoing than Aristotle in developing ideas of the will, free choice, mental self-reflection, and moral consciousness (where Aquinas turned more to the thought of the Platonizing Augustine than to that of Aristotle). A good guide to Aquinas’ originality as well as contemporary topicality can be found in Anthony Kenny’s Aquinas on Mind (Routledge, London and New York, 1993). The course itself will use, in particular, Aquinas’ Quaestiones de Anima, selections from his commentaries on Aristotle, and selections from the Summa Theologica. As introductory readings for the “completely uninitiated”, Brian Davies’s The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992) or Aquinas: An Introduction (Continuum, London and New York, 2003), are recommended.
C. L 80700	The World of the Medieval Text
	Tuesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 4credits
	Professor Scott Westrem Cross listed with ENGL 80700
	This seminar will focus on concepts of space and of the world that are reflected in medieval European texts from a variety of literary genres, including verse narratives, geographical treatises, chronicles, encyclopedias, travel books, and maps. Scholars have tended to dismiss "medieval geography" as, at best, naive or, at worst, "complete futility" (to apply generally C. Raymond Beazley's judgment of mappaemundi). This assumption will be a central issue in our seminar as we read material that testifies to considerable interest in (and intriguing speculations about) space-its measurement and boundaries, human habitation within it, its witness to supernatural reality, and its connection with time-between the years 1100 and 1450. This study will allow for a wide variety of critical perspectives. For example, the geographical travel book associated with the pseudonymous Sir John Mandeville survives in some three hundred manuscripts, representing the French original and nine translations (several into English, one of which we will study, as well as Czech, Danish, Dutch, German, Irish, Italian, Latin, and Spanish), yet it is itself a compilation of earlier books, chiefly about Asia, that have been knitted together in what some call a plagiarism and others a brilliant amalgam. In thinking about this book, then, students will find ample opportunity to test a wide variety of interests and abilities relevant to medieval studies-textual criticism, linguistic expertise, cultural studies, and contemporary literary theories that question the stability of a text or its author. Similarly, the encyclopedic account of the world attributed to Marco Polo and the great world map that hangs in Hereford Cathedral attract a wide variety of critical approaches. In all our endeavors, we will remember that these works are literary and medieval, which will (I hope) force us to consider issues about language, taste, literary quality, textual transmission, scribal influences, and many other matters. Readings will be available in the original language and in translation, except for one or two in Middle English, and seminar sessions will include some training in that language. Students competent in medieval (or modern, for scholarship) forms of Latin, Italian, French, German, Dutch, or a Scandinavian language will have an opportunity to apply themselves to primary sources in these languages. Written assignments: three short (2-3 page) focused ("reaction") papers, an essay (5-7 pages) focused on some aspect of the Middle Ages that we can see or use (such as a manuscript or items in a museum), and a final research paper (10-12 pages). Each student will also make a brief (8-10 minute) presentation to the seminar members. If you have questions, you may see me (4406.05), call me (x8326), or write me (swestrem@gc.cuny.edu).
C. L. 88100	Dante’s Inferno
	Thursday, 6:30-8:30pm, Room TBA, 3 credits
	Professor Giuseppe Di Scipio
	The course will study the Vita Nuova and the Inferno in their polysemy with references to Dante`s other works such as the Convivio, De Monarchia, De Vulgari and the Epistles. We will consider the political, historical, philosophical and theological background as well as the poetics of these works. There will be a mid-term paper and a final paper. For more information and bibliography, please get in touch with the instructor via e-mail. Giuseppe.DiScipio@hunter.cuny.edu
Engl 70500	The Canterbury Tales
	Tuesday, 4:15-6:15pm, Room TBA, 2/4 credits
	Professor Glenn Burger
	In this course we will read Chaucer's most experimental work, The Canterbury Tales, taking up a variety of interrelated historical, social, and political questions. How, for example, does Chaucer represent the relations and conflicts among the various classes of late-medieval society, and what effects does Chaucer's own class position-as bourgeois civil servant with strong ties to the aristocracy-have on the production of the Canterbury Tales? What views of gender and sexuality do the Tales present and explore? To what extent are they shaped by Christianity, and how do they represent the relation between Christianity and other systems of belief (classical "paganism," Islam, Judaism)? How does Chaucer treat the interimplication of such categories of identity as race, religion, class, gender, and sexuality? Why-of all the writers of the English Middle Ages-is it Chaucer whom we are most likely to read? What factors have especially contributed to canonizing Chaucer as the "father of English poetry?" Our primary focus will be the Canterbury Tales themselves. But we will also consider some related contemporary texts-such as The Book of Margery Kempe, Le Menagier de Paris, French fabliaux, and Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies-as well as such early fifteenth-century "continuations" of the Tales as Lydgate's Siege of Thebes and the Tale of Beryn. Students will make one brief seminar presentation and produce a final research paper.
ENGL 80700	Medieval British Literature
	Thursday, 2:00-4:00pm, Room TBA, 2/4 credits
	Professor Michael Sargent
	This course will take a variety of critical approaches – rhetorical, new-historicist, feminist and codicological, among others – to unpack the textual strategies and social/cultural role of a particularly remarkable group of late medieval texts: the writings of the Middle English mystics. We will look, for example, at the self-affirming rhetoric of Richard Rolle’s call to the heremitic life; at the way that the appropriation by the pious bourgeoisie of fifteenth-century London of the writings of Walter Hilton both reflected and subverted medieval notions of the religious “estate”; at the complex relationship between the writings of men spiritual advisors and “authorizing” narrators of women’s visions and paramystical experiences and the accounts written by women themselves – of which the Revelations of Julian of Norwich and The Book of Margery Kempe are the best-known examples. We will explore the place of these writings in the construction of late medieval vernacular theology, which also included some of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman and the works of the Gawain poet. We will also consider the physical manuscript culture in which these works were produced and disseminated: how was it, for example, that some of them were copied by the same professional scribes and illuminators as the works of Chaucer, Hoccleve, Lydgate and Gower, and survive in the same large numbers of manuscripts, yet have somehow slipped “under the radar” of English literary history? Others of these works survive in small numbers of undecorated, workaday manuscripts, were equally ignored during the intervening centuries, yet have succeeded in drawing considerable attention from modern critics. What determined whether a book would be a “best-seller” in a non-print culture? How did this change with the introduction of print technology late in the fifteenth century? How did printing itself change the literature that it transmitted? Course requirements include a presentation and a final paper.
FREN 71000	The Romance of the Rose
	Monday, 4:15-6:15pm, Room TBA, 3 credits
	Professor Kathryn Talarico
	If there is a work that can be characterized as a "medieval best-seller," then that text is the Roman de la Rose. It is also recognized as the single most significant work in the Old French literary tradition. It was written between 1225 and 1275 by two different authors with two very different perspectives. Its success with medieval audiences was nothing short of extraordinary, with well over 200 extant manuscripts, covering nearly three hundred years. It had an important influence on works written in the late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, both in and outside of France. By the end of the fourteenth century, it had been translated into Italian, Dutch, and English, and had the (dubious?) distinction of being cited and glossed in learnPd treatises in the monasteries. It was also one of the few vernacular medieval works to have been printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was singled out for praise (rare praise) in the Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse of Joachim du Bellay. This course will focus on a close reading of this text which has remained controversial since the time it was written. We will focus on the "medieval controversies," including the famous debate about the Rose which attracted writers such as Christine de Pisan and Jean Gerson and, more importantly, on the literary debates that have been sparked over the last century. The Rose has been the subject of some of the most innovative and lively scholarly debate during the last thirty years, representing some of the most important scholarship in medieval studies and emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinarity and a variety of critical approaches and methodologies necessary to study this text. Some of these approaches have been: neo-patristics, the history of ideas, intertextuality, reception theory, and manuscript study. Students will have an opportunity to explore a wide variety of theories and approaches during the course of the semester. There will be a website for the course and (still tentative at this writing) access to the manuscript concordances of six of the most important Rose manuscripts housed at Johns Hopkins University. Students are not expected to enter the course knowing Old French: for French Program students (and others who may be interested) we will work on this in class and in special sessions prior to our class meeting time. While this course is given in English, students are expected to read and understand modern French. Students will do oral presentations and there will be a research paper required. Text to purchase: Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose (in the collection Lettres Gothiques. This is a bilingual edition: Old French and Modern French translation).
PHIL 76100	Medieval Philosophy
	Monday, 11:45am-1:45pm, Room TBA, 3 credits
	Professor Frederick Purnell
	A survey of philosophical texts and thinkers from the Fourth through the Fourteenth Centuries. Authors to be studied will include Augustine, Boethius, John Scotus Eriugena, Anselm, Abelard, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham and John Buridan. Major issues will include the relation of philosophy to theology in the Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions and the role philosophy would play in the history of science.
Past schedules:	Spring 2005;Fall 2004;Spring 2004;Fall 2003; Spring 2003; Fall 2002; Spring 2002; Fall 2001; Spring 2001