As Wolfgang Clemens notes, speaking of Chaucer, "No other English poet of the Middle Ages has managed to incorporate so much philosophical and scientific material into his poems . . ." (Chaucer's Early Poetry). However, students rarely have the background reading which is necessary to recognize the rich intertextuality of the works of Chaucer, for modern students rarely have the opportunity to study the texts which Chaucer, his contemporaries, and his successors--even to the time of Milton--assumed that "educated" readers would know. In order to recognize the wealth of explicit allusion and implicit intertextual relations of later Middle English and early Renaissance works--indeed, even to begin to understand a learned allegory such as The Court of Sapience--one needs a grounding in the Latin learning of medieval Europe.
In this course, then, we will examine selected works of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English literature in the light of the school texts, encyclopedias, and other learned works which Chaucer and other poets assumed that all "literate" persons shared. The topics to be considered in this course will include education and the Seven Liberal Arts (with an introduction to basic texts of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic), the knowledge of the natural world (including the bestiary and lapidary traditions), medieval teachings on the nature of human beings (including teachings on the humours and the five "wits"), on the social order (including the "estates" and the duties of princes), on history and myth (including those central medieval stories of Thebes and Troy, as well as the medieval traditions of iconography surrounding the pagan gods), on the heavens (astronomy and astrology), on heaven and hell and the lives of the saints. Throughout the course, we will concentrate on the range of ideas which were widely familiar, and sometimes fundamental and paradigmatic, to medieval writers and readers in western Europe.
TEXT Garbáty, Thomas J., ed. Medieval English Literature (Waveland Press)