Each semester, I teach an introduction to Medieval English Literature, and a seminar on a more specific topic. My current and some past courses are listed below.

This semester, my seminar is focused on reading part of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale.  The course is called A woman in a man’s world: Gender and the battle of the sexes in medieval English language and literature, described below:

This team-taught course will conduct an in-depth exploration of doing gender in late mediaeval England and its portrayal in literary and non-literary texts. To this end, the text, language, and cultural context of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, one of the most famous parts of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, will play a cardinal role. Other texts will feature where relevant. From a linguistic perspective, we will use the text as a lens to consider the development of late medieval English language, including linguistic means of doing and portraying gender. And we will also discuss it as a literary work, analysing Chaucer’s presentation of the interplay between a character, her language, and the story she seeks to tell. This material invites engagement with issues of gender and sex in the period, both in the historical context as well as in comparison with how these issues are dealt with today. The Wife of Bath is cast as a sexually confident, empowered woman, in quite stark contrast to the (gender) role(s) canonically ascribed to women and womanhood in the period. For instance, she has her own firm view of gendered relationships as inherently based on power and conflict. This will lead us into reflection on the longevity of the tradition represented by the Wife, with similar figures very much alive and kicking two hundred years later in Shakespeare’s work.

Half of the sessions for the course will take place at TU Dortmund, with the others at RUB. All sessions will be team-taught, with Dr Florian Dolberg leading analysis of the linguistic aspects of the text and Dr Simon Thomson focusing on its literary interest. Students will be required to actively participate in all seminars.

 

Next semester, I will teach a course on Jews and Jewishness in Early Medieval England.

 

Past courses include:

Poets, heroes, and kings: Anglo-Saxon court culture

An Introduction to Old English

Dreamers and barnstormers: Religion and Revolution in Piers Plowman

Sex, death, and comedy: Making Anglo-Saxon saints

“On the road again”: Metaphorical journeys of discovery in Middle English