MEMS Honours and Masters Seminar Units 2010 Semester 1 MEMS8401/7481 Core Seminar 1 Texts and Approaches: Reading the Pre-Modern World Co-ordinator: Dr Jacqueline Van Gent In this seminar, we approach three major texts, in differing pre-modern genres, from several perspectives; textual, editorial, generic, contextual. What decisions do editors of pre-modern texts make, and how do they affect our readings of the works? What did early European writers and readers expect from different genres—romance manuscripts, pamphlets, court records, legal writing? How did social and cultural contexts affect the production of writing? How did textual and interpretative practices establish social and cultural understandings: of power, heroism, illicit conduct, criminality? The 2010 modules include: Witchcraft Pamphlets and Court Records (Dr Jacqueline Van Gent), Legal Readings and Criminal Records (Dr David Barrie) and The Bible in the early to high middle ages (Prof Philippa Maddern) Semester 2 MEMS8402/7482 Core Seminar 2 Themes and Connections: Interpreting the Pre-Modern World Co-ordinator: Prof Andrew Lynch This seminar analyses three key themes of the pre-modern world in order to provide a deeper understanding of this era. Each theme will draw on a diverse range of evidence, from the literary and historical to the artistic, and will be examined from differing analytical perspectives. Themes covered in 2010 include: Practical Writing and useful Knowledge in Middle English (Dr Jenna Mead); Pleasure and Pain (Dr Joanne McEwan) and Religion, Print and Literacy, 1450-1550 (Dr Lesley O’Brien)

Elective Seminars on offer in 2010 (Cancellations may occur at the discretion of the seminar coordinator if the enrolments are considered insufficient)

Semester 1 ‘Men love their bane’: Love and Hatred in the Medieval and Early Modern Love Lyric A/Professor Danijela Kambaskovic-Sawers (English and Cultural Studies) Do desire and frustration go hand in hand? This seminar unit will look at European and English lyrical love poetry from the Middle Ages to the late Renaissance, particularly the traditions of courtly love and Petrarchism, to propose the idea that negative emotion (frustration, disparagement, anger, hatred, tacit or open violence) is often used to make poetry featuring positive emotion (adoration, praise, love) more interesting and powerful. We will read texts closely in order to excavate an intriguing tradition of “hatred” and suggest that this multifaceted notion governs the influence of medieval and Renaissance lyric as fundamentally as the much better studied notion of “love”.

We will also examine the poets’ highly creative and often daring use of Biblical, Classical, historical and contemporary references in constructing the emotional dichotomies such as praise/disparagement, submission/dominance, desire/frustration, love/hate, supplication/anger. The English texts will be our main focus, but Plato’s writing, period visual arts and Italian, French and Latin texts (in the original with a parallel translation into English) will also be studied to help with our understanding of symbols and concealed meanings. Minority (homosexual, female) poetic voices will be heard alongside the majority (male) ones. And finally, love in all its facets seems to be strangely absent from poetry journals nowadays. Having reigned supreme for 400+ years, it has come to be considered ‘awkward’ or ‘almost unsuitable’ as a poetic topic. Although this is primarily a critical seminar with a strong research focus, it will also offer a creative writing segment to students who are interested in engaging with the studied traditions of love and hatred more directly.

Provisionally, the list of texts to be studied includes, but is not limited to: excerpts from Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, excerpts from writings of Florentine 15 C Neoplatonists from the school of Marsilio Ficino, manuscript illuminations and visual artworks by Boticelli, Bernini and other Renaissance artists, the poetry of the troubadours and other anonymous poets, the works of Alcuin of York, English Daniel Arnaut, Michelangelo

Buonaroti, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, Etienne Jodelle, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, William Shakespeare, Emilia Lanier and Lady Mary Wroth. Semester 2 Dreams and Vision in Medieval Literature

Professor Andrew Lynch (English and Cultural Studies)

From its beginnings in late antiquity and developing Christianity, medieval culture was especially rich in literature of dreams and visions. Under the influence of many different scriptural and classical sources, dreams took on a varied and lively significance in the Middle Ages: they could be understood as irrational reflections of psychological states, as a medium for ethical and philosophical teaching, or as inspired insights into otherwise hidden truths, and predictions of the future. Writers used the dream and vision genres to encompass both the earthly and the supernatural, exploring new complexities of consciousness through their symbolic modes. By the high Middle Ages, dreaming and vision were closely associated with the nature of imaginative creation itself, and with the emergence of a new authority for vernacular poetry. European literature in this tradition offers an excellent introduction to major features of medieval thought and culture, and to some of its most significant narratives, many of which find interesting correlatives in Renaissance, Romantic and modernist representations of dream and poetic vision.

Texts featured in the unit, in part or in whole, will include works such as: The Book of Revelations; The Old English ‘Dream of the Rood’; Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun: The Romance of the Rose; Dante: Inferno; Chaucer: The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame; Pearl; Spenser: The Faerie Queene.

Jesuits: Brand Power in the Early Modern Period (1540-1773)

Professor Yasmin Haskell (Classics and Ancient History)

The Society of Jesus earned a formidable and paradoxical reputation in the early modern period. The Pope’s ‘crack troops’ were deployed from Messina to Macao, Paris to Paraguay, converting souls, educating the elites of Catholic Europe and her New World colonies, conducting diplomatic business and scientific research, producing music and drama, poems and pyrotechnics, and a distinctive style of art and architecture. Jesuits were prepared to die for their beliefs in faraway missions, but they were also accused of being slippery and self-serving. They championed native Indian rights but enslaved Africans. In their ranks were to be found hard-nosed heretic hunters, as well as defenders of ‘witches’, and believers in natural magic. Renowned for their chameleon-like ability to adapt to local circumstances – dressing as mandarins in China, hiding out in ‘priest holes’ in Protestant England – the proud and powerful black robes couldn’t help but stand out on Catholic home ground. Victims of their own success, the Jesuits were hounded out of France, Spain, Portugal, and the New World. The Society of Jesus was finally suppressed by the Pope in 1773.

This seminar is not so much a history of the Jesuits as an introduction to the Jesuit culture(s) that proliferated and interpenetrated in the early modern period. We shall consider the Society’s corporate ideology and ‘multinational’ operations, its educational system (with roots in Renaissance humanism), its literary and artistic products, its contribution to the new science, and its view of -- and impact upon – non-European cultures. We shall examine its foundational documents, as well as a selection of famous poems, plays, and works of art and architecture by Jesuits, in Europe and elsewhere. Many of the great writers and thinkers of early modern Europe, e.g. Tasso, Descartes, and Voltaire, were beneficiaries of a Jesuit education, and most remained grateful for it. The Society had brilliantly satirical critics, though, such as Pascal and Barclay. We conclude by reflecting upon Jesuit culture through non-, and anti-Jesuit eyes.

Information in this publication is correct as at September 2009 but is subject to change from time to time. In particular, the University reserves the right to change the content and/or the method of presentation

and/or the method of assessment of any unit of study, to withdraw any unit of study or program, and/or to vary arrangements for any program.

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