Module ENGL3921: Medieval Bodies: Embodiment, Sex, and Religion in Medieval Literature

Department: English Studies

ENGL3921: Medieval Bodies: Embodiment, Sex, and Religion in Medieval Literature

Prerequisites

• None.

Corequisites

• None.

Excluded Combination of Modules

• None.

Aims

• To explore ideologies and theories surrounding medieval embodiment, both primary and secondary.
• To examine the medieval body in relation to the soul, to sexual pleasure and performance, to religious and racial difference, and to miscegenation.
• To bring contemporary ideas and concerns surrounding embodiment, including EDI perspectives, into sustained critical discussion with medieval texts.
• To narrate cultural ideologies that grounded medieval fears around and expressions of the body.
• To analyse the motivations behind the presentation of medieval bodies, to explore the questions these bodies pose, and to interpret these bodies with a variety of tools and theoretical devices.

Content

• The module considers the ways that medieval texts are drawn to and express difference: sexual, religious, and racial.
• The module explores the medieval body’s relationship to the soul, its connection to temporality and eternity, its mutability, and its ability to outwardly express a person’s spiritual state.
• The module examines the ways medieval ideas of embodiment both intersect with and diverge from modern conceptions.
• The module charts the generation of abnormal births and their relationship to miscegenation, monstrosity, disability, and race.
• Topics of seminars cover monstrous bodies, black bodies, disabled bodies, gendered bodies, Saracen (Muslim) bodies, as well as the bodies of saints, the bodies of penitents, and the bodies of the supernaturally transformed.
• Major texts discussed are The King of Tars, Cursor Mundi, OE St Christopher, and Sir Gowther. Supporting primary texts include The History of the Holyrood Tree, De Origine Gigantum, Hereford Mappa Mundi, The Trotula, Capystranus, Bevis of Hamptoun, Firumbras, The Life of St Berachi, The Life of St Theodora, Life of St Katherine, Roman de Silence, Bisclavret, Melusine, Trentals of St Gregory, St Erkenwald, and Sir Amadace
• Major theoretical perspectives include those of Carolina Walker Bynum (the somatomorphic), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (monster theory), John Block Friedman (the monstrous races), Cord Whitaker (race), Geraldine Heng (Saracens), Carolyn Dinshaw (gender), Edward Wheatley (disability), and Corinne Saunders (the supernatural). As such this module draws on a multiplicity of theoretical discourses including the medical humanities, disability theories, and postcolonialism.

Learning Outcomes

• Students will read extensively on perspectives of medieval embodiment in relation to religion, sex, and difference; analyse in great depth the questions that these texts raise; and engage in rigorous academic enquiry into a specific text or topic with robust theoretical framings.
• To articulate medieval approaches to bodily difference and to connect these to EDI approaches.
• To wrestle with diverse or contradictory theoretical approaches to a text.
• To narrate the anxieties and pleasures that embodiment reveals in medieval literature.

• Students studying this module will develop:
• critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts
• an ability to demonstrate knowledge of a range of texts and critical approaches
• informed awareness of formal and aesthetic dimensions of literature and ability to offer cogent analysis of their workings in specific texts
• sensitivity to generic conventions and to the shaping effects on communication of historical circumstances, and to the affective power of language
• an ability to articulate and substantiate an imaginative response to literature
• an ability to articulate knowledge and understanding of concepts and theories relating to literary studies
• skills of effective communication and argument
• awareness of conventions of scholarly presentation, and bibliographic skills including accurate citation of sources and consistent use of scholarly conventions of presentation
• command of a broad range of vocabulary and an appropriate critical terminology
• awareness of literature as a medium through which values are affirmed and debated

• Students studying this module will develop:
• a capacity to analyse critically
• an ability to acquire complex information of diverse kinds in a structured and systematic way involving the use of distinctive interpretative skills derived from the subject
• competence in the planning and execution of essays
• a capacity for independent thought and judgement, and ability to assess the critical ideas of others
• skills in critical reasoning
• an ability to handle information and argument in a critical manner
• information-technology skills such as word-processing and electronic data access information
• organisation and time-management skills

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

• Seminars: encourage peer-group discussion, enable students to develop critical skills in the close reading and analysis of texts, and skills of effective communication and presentation; promote awareness of diversity of interpretation and methodology.
• Consultation session: encourages students to reflect critically and independently on their work.
• Independent but directed reading in preparation for seminars provides opportunity for students to enrich subject-specific knowledge and enhances their ability to develop appropriate subject-specific skills.
• Typically, directed learning may include assigning student(s) an issue, theme or topic that can be independently or collectively explored within a framework and/or with additional materials provided by the tutor. This may function as preparatory work for presenting their ideas or findings (sometimes electronically) to their peers and tutor in the context of a seminar.
• Coursework: tests the student's ability to argue, respond and interpret, and to demonstrate subject-specific knowledge and skills such as appreciation of the power of imagination in literary creation and the close reading and analysis of texts; they also test the ability to present word-processed work, observing scholarly conventions. In individual Special Topics, the assessment may, where appropriate to the subject, take an alternative form, such as 'creative criticism'.
• Feedback: The written feedback that is provided after the first assessment allows students to reflect on examiners' comments, giving students the opportunity to improve their work for the second assessment.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment:

Before Assessment 1, students have an individual 15 minute consultation session in which they are entitled to show their seminar leader a sheet of points relevant to the assessment and to receive oral comment on these points. Students may also if they wish, discuss their ideas for Assessment 2 at this meeting.

■ Attendance at all activities marked with this symbol will be monitored. Students who fail to attend these activities, or to complete the summative or formative assessment specified above, will be subject to the procedures defined in the University's General Regulation V, and may be required to leave the University