Life in the Medieval Church
	Professor: Karen Sullivan
	Course Number: LIT 2241		CRN Number: 10385	Class cap: 20	Credits: 4
	Schedule/Location:	Tue Thurs 10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin Language Center 208
	Distributional Area:	LA  Literary Analysis in English
Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians interpreted and reinterpreted the accounts of the lives of Jesus Christ, the Apostles, and the martyrs of the early Church and strove to imitate these lives in their own daily existence. In the course of this ever-renewed return to the sources, Christians struggled to adapt these early models of sanctity to a world radically different from that of their predecessors. Should one remove oneself from the corruption if the world or remain within it and attempt to reform it? Should one attach oneself to the wretched of the earth, sharing in their poverty and misery, or seek power in order to bring society into conformity with God's will? Should one study classical literature and philosophy, in the hope that they will strengthen one's faith, or avoid these fields, in the fear that they will weaken it? What should the role of women be in the spiritual, intellectual, and institutional fabric of Christianity? The history of the Church in the Middle Ages is largely the history of changing answers to these questions, as late antique models of sanctity give way to monasticism; as challenges to the Church arise both from within, in the form of the Gregorian and other reforms, and from without, in the form of heretical sects; as the mendicant orders, with their scholastic training, gain intellectual and, ultimately, political power within ecclesiastical institutions; and, finally, as practitioners of the anti-scholastic “modern devotion” (devotio moderna) come to prominence on the eve of the Renaissance. Readings will be drawn from biblical, patristic, Benedictine, Cistercian, Dominican, Franciscan, and other sources.  This is a pre-1800 Literature course offering.

Arthurian Romance
	Professor: Karen Sullivan
	Course Number: LIT 249		CRN Number: 10380	Class cap: 22	Credits: 4
	Schedule/Location:	Tue Thurs 1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 201
	Distributional Area:	LA  Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Medieval Studies
In this course, we will be studying the major works of the Arthurian tradition, from the early Latin accounts of a historical King Arthur; to the Welsh Mabinogion; to the French and German romances of Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, Merlin and Morgan, and the Quest for the Holy Grail; to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Throughout its history, Arthurian literature has been criticized for the effects it has upon its readers. The alternate world presented by these texts—with their knights errant, beautiful princesses, marvelous animals, enchanted forests, and decentralized geography—can seem more attractive than our own mundane world, and, in doing so, it is feared, can distract us from this world and our responsibilities within it. Over the semester, as we chart the birth and growth of Arthurian romance, we will be considering the uncertain moral status of this genre and its consequences for us today.  This course is a Pre-1800 Literature course offering.

The Canterbury Tales
	Professor: Marisa Libbon
	Course Number: LIT 2401		CRN Number: 10386	Class cap: 22	Credits: 4
	Schedule/Location:	Mon Wed 11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Hegeman 102
	Distributional Area:	LA  Literary Analysis in English
	Crosslists: Medieval Studies
What in the world can storytelling accomplish? This question drives Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and will likewise guide our semester-long exploration of it. An instant classic after Chaucer’s death in 1400, the Canterbury Tales inspired “fan fiction” almost immediately and has since been enshrined as an essential work within the English literary canon, counting writers from Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot among its later readers and admirers. At odds with (or perhaps partly responsible for) its current “insider” and canonical status, though, is the fact that the Tales remains one of the most radically experimental works written in English. By turns beautiful and dirty, politically risky and calculatedly evasive, local and global, poetry and prose, the Tales tests, negotiates, and worries over the ways in which language—written, spoken, read, overheard—constructs reality. It challenges gender and class norms; queries and queers the relationship between tale and teller; and calls into question institutional authority and social hierarchy. Following Chaucer’s lead, we’ll grapple with how literature does (and sometimes does not) influence social change. Put otherwise, what’s the point of telling stories?  This course counts as pre-1800 offering.