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.

A survey of western handwriting from the late Roman period until the invention of the printing press. The course will also study the materials used in book production (wax, papyrus, parchment, paper) and the forms of the book (roll, codex). 

The course will consist of weekly transcription exercises, organized in historical sequence, with classroom discussion about the development and characteristics of each hand. In addition, students in the course will work on a hand (e.g. carolingian, gothic, secretary), area (e.g. France, England, Italy), or a time-period of their choice in order to begin to develop a specialization for future work. 

Although the course will survey all major historical hands, the course itself will emphasize certain areas of study (e.g. literary hands, notarial hands, university bookhands) depending on the particular interests of the students in the class. 

Besides studying manuscripts in facsimile, the students will also be able to have occasional access to manuscript materials at the New York Public Library. 

Texts: Leonard E. Boyle. Medieval Latin Paleography, A Bibliographical Introduction. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1984. Michelle P. Brown. A Guide to Western Historical Scripts from Antiquity to 1600. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1999.Barbara A. Shailor. The Medieval Book. Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching 28. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1994.

Beginning with the fourth-century church of San Giovanni Laterano in Rome, the cathedral has occupied a privileged position in the hierarchy of christianity by being the church of bishop. 

By the ninth century the clergy of a cathedral began to be organized along institutional lines and to take on regular, assigned roles in the operation of the cathedral as an institution. Emerging christian kingdoms in the west used cathedrals as both secular and religious symbols even as late as the eleventh century - the most dramatic example was the reorganization in the wake of the Norman Conquest of England. Cathedrals are also everywhere related to the growth of population centers and, as we are still discovering, often in conflict with emerging urban entities: bishops vied with local lords for power, just as chapters struggled with town communes over rights, revenues, property and even justice. In the Gothic period, ca 1150-1450, the cathedral became the often-contested symbol of the power of cities. 

Through a selected series of multi-national examples, this class will compare and contrast cathedrals of different epochs in relation to their creators and their intended audiences.

Identity, Body, and Community in the Canterbury Tales:

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-it is Chaucer whom we are most likely to read? What factors have especially contributed to canonizing Chaucer as the "father of English poetry?" 

Using queer, gender, and postcolonial theory, as well as recent historical and cultural studies exploring the complexities of Chaucer's own social situation and those of his audience, we will investigate how, under the pressure ofproducing a poetic vision for a new vernacular English audience in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer reimagines late medieval relations between the body and the community. 

Even as the Tales respond to and attempt to represent a new symbolic order of modernity that is coming into being in late medieval England-organized around a new sense of individual and national identity-they incorporate the anxieties that such a departure from the past demands. Attending to this queer performativity inherent in the Tales gives its readers (past and present) an opportunity to see the author and audience constructed with and by the Tales as subjects-in-process caught up in a conflicted moment of "becoming." 

In turn, such an historicization may help us as (post)modern readers understand that which has been left behind or not yet thought of in assuming modern identities, and so bring to present-day assumptions about identity the realization that social organizations of the body can be done differently. 

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.

I haven't absolutely decided which non-Chaucerian texts to order. For now would it be enough to say the following: Any edition of the complete Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English will serve. But I would recommend, and will be ordering copies of, The Canterbury Tales: Complete, ed. Larry D. Benson, Houghton Mifflin. This and other non-Chaucerian material will be ordered from Shakespeare and Company.

Until 1934, all that the world knew of The Book of Margery Kempe was a set of pious extracts printed in pamphlet form at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Wynkyn de Worde. The single extant manuscript was only identified when Col. William Butler-Bowden brought it, together with other family antiquities, to the Victoria and Albert Museum for a valuation; the Museum, having no one on staff with expertise in late medieval contemplative and devotional literature, called upon Hope Emily Allen, an independent American scholar then pursuing her own work in the manuscript reading room of the British Museum, to examine the small, workaday paper volume. She immediately announced her discovery in the Times Literary Supplement. 

Ms. Allen proposed an edition of the Book to the editorial board of the Early English Text Society. They agreed, but insisted that she take a collaborator with a stronger background in philology: Prof. Sanford Brown Meech, the editor of the Middle English Dictionary. A job was found for Ms. Allen with the Dictionary project at the University of Michigan, and the two began their collaboration: Meech to produce the text itself and notes on all issues other than those involving late medieval women's spirituality, and Allen to produce a second volume of commentary dealing specifically with those issues. 

The collaboration foundered, however, and Ms. Allen left Ann Arbor: the one volume produced included only some of her comments, identified in the notes by her initials at the end of each entry for which she was responsible. Butler-Bowden produced a modern-English version of the text, in which the more embarrassingly mystical passages were printed in smaller type. 

Today, extracts from The Book of Margery Kempe are to be found in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. The Book of Margery Kempe thus offers a particularly rich opportunity for the study both of late medieval literature, and of the construction of "medieval-ism" as a field. It is in terms of both of these contexts that we will read Margery's book. 

We will read some of the books that Margery read, or that served as models or parallels for her work, including the Middle English lives of three Belgian beguine holy women, and Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ; but we will also read modern criticism of Margery's book, not just as secondary literature commenting on her, but as primary literature requiring examination in its own right.

This is a survey in music of the Middle Ages. The material will be divided into four areas: 1) Chant and Liturgy, 2) Theory and Notation, 3) Motet, and 4) Secular Song. 

Students will be responsible for a presentation and brief paper on an approved topic for each of the four areas. There will be a final examination covering class lectures, presentations, and readings.

T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits 

For further information, contact the Ph.D. Program in Political Science, 212/817-8670

For futher information, contact the Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures, 212/817-8410

This course focuses on issues of performance both in the Middle Ages and in post-medieval revivals and adaptations. 

We will examine evidence for performance practice in medieval dramatic texts and medieval theories of performance in texts such as The Treatise of Miraclis Pleyinge. 

We will consider styles of acting, types of staging, audience, and audience response in the early, high, and late Middle Ages as well as in the reconstructive staging of academically sponsored productions and the more experimental productions of the professional theatre in the twentieth century. 

Among our primary texts will be the plays of Hrotsvit and Hildegard of Bingen, the Fleury Playbook, the Jeu d'Adam, the York Plays, German cradle-rocking plays, Arnoul Gréban's Mystère de la Passion, Mariken van Nieumeghen, and the Royal Shakespeare Company's Mysteries.