Spring 2005

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

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MSCP 80500	Medieval Masculinities
	Wednesday.,  4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits
	Professor Pamela Sheingorn
	In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler refers to gender as "a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint." In our study of medieval masculinities we will focus both on the improvisations and on the constraints that shape a person’s gender. We will include both visual and textual cultures in our study of masculinities in performance and masculinities as performance. We will consider both gender norms and the challenges that troubled them, from Roman masculinities and the new model of the martyr to chivalric knighthood and the female masculinity of Joan of Arc. Our class sessions will usually combine primary sources (saints’ lives, plays, sermons, treatises, and other medieval texts, as well as visual material) with secondary sources and contemporary theory. Among our topics will be Gods in Human Form; Gendering the Other; Artisanal and Outlaw Masculinities; Saintly Masculinities; and The Paternal Requirement. Students will write frequent response papers, review one book for the class, and write an interdisciplinary research paper of 20-25 pages. Books will be available at the Labyrinth Bookshop at the Graduate Center.
ART 73000	Romanesque Architecture and Sculpture: Art the the Formation of Western Identity
	Wednesday., 4:15-6:15 p.m.,  Room 3421, 3 credits
	Professor Jerrilyn Dodds
	This course explores the powerful architecture, sculpture and monumental painting styles that lie at the heart of the creation of Europe and the idea of the West. It will use a number of strategies to explore how monumental architecture and expressive narrative painting and sculpture were engaged in the formation of a common European identity, and uncover as well the architectural vestiges of diverse groups and cultures that challenge that uniform vision. It is an art that chronicles deep social struggles between classes, intense devotion through pilgrimage, one that advocated genocide, that nurtured enormous creativity, in styles both flamboyant and austere. The course will explore both secular and religious buildings, their decorative and sculptural programs through those aspects of expressive visual language that link the buildings to social history, the history of ideas and political ideology. We will also examine how many of the assumptions formed through Romanesque architecture survive in architectural history today; assumptions about our collective notion of what constitutes the West. Auditors by permission of instructor.
ENGL 70700	Representations of Religious and Racial Difference in Middle English Texts
	Wednesday,  11:45 a.m. - 1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 2/4 credits
	Professor Steven Kruger
	This course is intended as a survey of medieval English literature, providing students with a sense of the wide range of genres and texts that characterized literature written in Britain from ca. 1100 – ca. 1500. The majority of texts will be read in the original Middle English (but students need not have any prior experience with Middle English); we may also read some Welsh, Irish, Anglo-Norman (French), and Latin texts in translation. One subject taken up in many of these texts is religion and the differences among religious traditions – Christianity, Christian heresies ("Lollardy"), "paganism," Islam, Judaism – and we will particularly focus on works in which this subject is central. We will also consider whether religious difference as represented in medieval texts shares anything with more modern constructions of racial difference. Texts read for the course may include John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (in part), William Langland’s Piers Plowman (in part), Cleanness, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Corpus Christi drama, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Lollard and anti-Lollard polemic, Middle English romances like The Siege of Jerusalem and Sir Gowther, Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur (in part), Anglo-Norman romances, Latin texts depicting disputations between Christians and Jews, poems by Scottish authors like Dunbar, Henryson, Douglas, and Lindsay. Students will be expected to do at least one in-class presentation and write a final essay for the course.
ENGL 80700	After the Bible: Religious Narrative in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
	Monday,  6:30-8:30 p.m., 2/4 credits
	Professor Gordon Whatley
	O sages standing in God's holy fire/ As in the gold mosaic of a wall ... (Yeats)  A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing and so I wanted to have Four Saints that did nothing and I wrote Four Saints in Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything. Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything. (Stein). The Christian Bible was only, and barely, the beginning of Christian narrative literature. Two centuries before the Church fathers could agree on the canon of the New Testament, anonymous story tellers were already at work creating new types of narrative about the apostles and saints who embodied and personified Christian life and ideals after Jesus. Known collectively today as "hagiography" and constituting a vast addendum to the canonical Scriptures, this body of texts grew and flourished as devotional and liturgical reading, and as Christian narrative entertainment, for well over a thousand years, during which time it replaced biography and marginalized history in the literary canon. Hagiography is notoriously indifferent to historical authenticity, or psychological realism or verisimilitude, while favoring idealized and melodramatic extremes of virtue and malice, and radically reconstructed gender roles. Emphasizing the miraculous over the mundane, the supernatural over "nature," extolling virginity and pacifism, yet obsessed with violence, victimization and the erotic, the "Lives," "Passions," and "Miracles" of the Christian saints formed a new mythology to enrich the culture of Christian piety and its cults of "God's friends," the Christian saints. The present seminar will provide a selective introduction to this enormous body of early Christian and medieval literature and its modern scholarship, focusing on  the Acts of the Apostle Andrew, the Acts of Bishop Cyprian, the Passions of the virgin martyrs Cecilia and Juliana, Athanasius' Life of the desert hermit Antony, the legend of ThaVs the prostitute, Bonaventure's Life of Francis of Assisi, and the legends of Mary Magdalen and Elizabeth of Hungary (et al.).These common core readings will be all in translation. Seminar projects might focus on selected medieval vernacular versions of these and other legends, and/or on post-medieval manifestations of the hagiographic genres, in works as different as John Foxe's "Book of Martyrs" (Acts and Monuments), Crashaw's lyric meditations on Sts. Mary Magdalen and Theresa,  Swinburne's St. Dorothy, Anatole France's ThaVs (1880), Shaw's Saint Joan, Anouilh's Becket and The Lark, Cecil B. De Mille's Sign of the Cross (1932), Mervyn Le Roy's Quo Vadis? (1951), Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts (1928), and the recent dramatization of Flaubert's Temptation of St. Antony by Robert Wilson and Bernice Reagan (2003), to name only a few.
HIST 70400	Religion in Medieval Europe (1050-1300): Texts and Contexts
	Thursday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits
	Professor Thomas Head
	In this course we consider a wide spectrum of genres of religious literature: polemical documents from the investiture controversy; monastic rules and chronicles; spiritual and devotional works; pastoral works (sermons, manuals for confessors, episcopal visitation records); hagiography; canon law; liturgy; anti-heretical and anti-Jewish polemic; and scholastic theology. Each week we will read an example in English translation, as well as some secondary and bibliographical literature which will be designed to show how to read and do research in the genre in question. Written assignments will be a series of short reports associated with oral reports in class, as well as a prospectus for a research project. There will be a coordinated set of meetings for those students who know Latin to work on reading and translating a series of texts in the original. Latin, however, is not a pre-requisite.
Past schedules:	Spring 2005; Fall 2004;Spring 2004;Fall 2003; Spring 2003; Fall 2002; Spring 2002; Fall 2001; Spring 2001