ENGL 615: Medieval Learning and the Intertextuality of Late Middle English Literature

• Round 1. Medieval Education: The Trivium
  • Medieval Education: A History and an Overview of Medieval Schools
    
  • Stephen Hawes, The Pasttime of Pleasure as Educational Summary
    
  • Medieval Education: The Twelfth-Century Renaissance and Rise of the Universities (shifts in the paradigms)
    
  • The Court of Sapience as an Introduction to Wisdom
    
  • Medieval Education and Women (what was taught in the nunneries; what would women have learned even without formal education; considerations of female literacy; the Menagier de Paris on what every young wife ought to know)
    
  • The Transmission of Pagan Learning to the Medieval World: Isidore and Boethius
    
  • Theoretical Works on Education: John of Salisbury; Hugh of St. Victor
    
  • The Seven Liberal Arts (Cassiodorus; Martianus Capella)
    
  • Grammar: A Short Introduction to the Main School Texts
    
  • The Aesopic fables of Chaucer, Lydgate and Henryson
    
  • School Texts and Moral principles: Maximianus on Old Age; Cicero on Friendship; Seneca's Moral Epistles
    
  • Rhetoric: The Basic Tenets, as found in Cicero and Quintilian
    
  • Rhetoric: The Medieval Developments (St. Augustine, De doctrina Christiana; The Artes praedicandi, dictaminis, poetica [Geoffrey de Vinsauf, etc.]--quia omnis qui versifacatur suos versus exornare debet in quantum potest [all who versify ought to amplify their verses as much as possible] --Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia II.i.2 [17]))
    
  • Dialectic (Logic): The Basic Tenets and Principal Textbooks (with some consideration of the medieval developments: William of Ockham, etc.)
    
• Round 2. Medieval Education (cont.): The Quadrivium; Nature and her Realms
  • The Texts of the Quadrivium and the Basic Tenets of these Subjects: Arithmetic (Boethius, Ars metrica); number symbolism (Hopper, Medieval Number Symbolism); the economies of "ars metrike" in "Summoner's Tale" and "Shipman's Tale"
    
  • The Texts of the Quadrivium and the Basic Tenets of these Subjects: Music (Boethius, De musica); harmony and the music of the spheres (Bartholomaeus Anglicus 1: 458; House of Fame 1015ff); harmony and proportion as a "world view" (rationality of universe)
    
  • The Texts of the Quadrivium and the Basic Tenets of these Subjects: Astronomy (Sacrobosco, The Sphere; the Ptolemaic system; Pseudo-Aristotle, De mundo [in vol. 3 of the Ross translation of the Works of Aristotle]; Caxton's Mirrour of the World)
    
  • Macrobius on the Dream of Scipio: On the Cosmos (the Planetary "Sphere") (also see Caxton's Mirror of the World, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, etc.)
    
  • The Planetary Deities: The Mythographers, Boccaccio's Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, Chaucer's "Knight's Tale"; Henryson's Testament of Cresseid; Lydgate, Reason and Sensuallyte; Gower, Confessio Amantis Book 5 (Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods; E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance)
    
  • Bernard's Cosmographia on Creation and Procreation (see Wetherbee; on "School of Chartres" see R. W. Southern in Medieval Humanism)
    
  • The Goddess Natura: Alan of Lille's De planctu Naturae, Romance of the Rose, Parlement of Foules, Confessio Amantis, the interludes "Nature" and "The Four Elements" in Early English Dramatists ed. J. S. Farmer (George Economou; Lucks; The Great Chain of Being by A. O. Lovejoy, the first couple of chapters; Aerish Beestes: House of Fame Book 2 [Apuleius, "De deo Socrates"])
    
  • Genesis on Creation; St. Basil, Hexaemeron; St. Ambrose, Hexameron (these being commentaries on the seven days of Creation) (also Cohen's "Be Fruitful")
    
  • Symbolic Landscapes: the Garden, Paradise; the Field Full of Folk, etc. (Giamatti on Earthly Paradise; Lewis on Allegory; "Merchant's Tale"; Passus 1 of Piers Plowman)
    
  • On the Physical Earth: Caxton's Mirror of the World; Bartholomaeus Anglicus; "This World Fares as a Fantasy," Item 106 in Religious Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Carleton Brown, pp. 160-164.
    
  • "Will" on Truth, Education, Knowledge and Nature: Piers Plowman Passus 8-12 (the third vision) and also Passus 20.
    
  • Exotic Places and Monstrous Races: Pliny (and Friedman); The Travels of John Mandeville; The Travels of Marco Polo; Pilgrimage sites (Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostella)
    
• Round 3. The Natural World (cont.); Human Society
  • Bestiaries and Lapidaries (Physiologus; Bestiary; Beryl Rowland; White, "Medieval Animal Lore"; Evans, Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; English Medieval Lapidaries; Arber, Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution; Anderson, An Illustrated History of the Herbals); Pearl; "Annot and John" (The Harley Lyrics); Alison (Chaucer's "Miller's Tale," ll. 3233-3270) as "weasel," "wether," "swalwe," "kid," "calf," "joly colt," "prymerole," "piggesnye" etc.
    
  • The Physics of Broken Wind: House of Fame 2.765, Summoner's Tale; Boethius, De musica 1.3, 1.14; Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale 4.14-18; 25.58 (Grennen, in Annuale mediaevale 8: 42; Boitani, in Chaucer Review 17: 212-214; Irvine, in Speculum 60: 850-876)
    
  • The Elements and the Humours (see Caxton's Mirror of the World; Byrhtferth's Manual (or Enchiridion); Bartholomaeus Anglicus, etc.); Medical theory and practice: the Herbalist, the Barber-Surgeon, the Physician (and Chaucer's Doctor of Phisicke); basics of Galenic medicine
    
  • Alchemical and Magical Lore (including popular perceptions and pre-conceptions in Middle Ages): Chaucer's "Canon's Yeoman Tale"; Chaucer's "Franklin's Tale"; Lydgate and Burgh's Secrees secretorum
    
  • Social Hierarchy and the Estates: Piers Plowman (B-text), Prologue and Passus 1-7 (esp. Passus 6); also include some consideration of Winner and Waster and the Prologues to The Canterbury Tales and Confessio Amantis; see also the Speculum stultorum; Walter Map's De nugis Curialium; The Office and Dewtie of Kyngis, EETS OS 3; Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Book 3; Nemesius, On the Nature of Man
    
  • Satire and complaint: "A Poem on the Times of Edward II"; Lydgate's "Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep"; his "Against Millers and Bakers"; his "Against the Horns of Women" (all of these in his Minor Poems); "London Lickpenny" and the other poems in the section entitled "The Wicked Age" in Rossell Hope Robbins, ed., Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries; cf. G. R. Owst on satire in sermons, in his Preaching in Medieval England; cf. Chaucer's "Parson's Tale" on extravagent dress and other ills of the times
    
  • Advice to Princes: On the Ideal Ruler (Macrobius on the Dream of Scipio, Romans 13; St. Augustine, City of God, 5.24; Aquinas On Kingship; Dante, De monarchia; Chaucer's "Melibee" and "Monk's Tale" and "Knight's Tale") (include some consideration of the ending of Troilus and Criseyde; the first book of Lydgate's Lives of Ss. Edmund and Fremund)
    
  • Advice to Princes: What every Prince needs to know (the Secreta Secretorum--Lydgate's; also Manzalaoui; Giles of Rome; Hoccleve's De regimine principium [which is based upon Giles of Rome])
    
  • "The King's Persons": official and unofficial attitudes towards the Jews in medieval society; church doctrine and royal protection and mob violence; did Chaucer's Prioress ever meet a Jew?
    
  • Human Psychology: the Faculties (Reason, Will, Sensation, etc.): Lydgate, Reason and Sensuallyte; "Will" etc. in Piers Plowman (see Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits)
    
  • Macrobius on the Dream of Scipio: On Dreams (the Prophetic "Sphere"); House of Fame; Parliament of Fowls (Spearing on Dream-Vision Poetry; opening of Romance of the Rose)
    
  • Human Physiognomy: reading character in the face (The Book of Physiognomy; Chaucer's "General Prologue," etc.)
    
  • Chivalry and Courtesy: Lydgate, "Stans Puer ad Mensam"; Babees Book; The Book of the Order of Chivalry, EETS OS 168 (also Diane Bornstein; also R. F. Green, Poets and Princepleasers, Chap. 3)
    
  • Hunting and Hawking (Dame Juliana Berners, The Book of St. Albans; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight)
    
• Round 4. The Supernatural Realm (and miscellaneous, working towards closure)
  • The Bible in the Middle Ages; revelation and authority; four-fold method of interpretation; the development of the concordance, index, etc. as preaching tools; use of Biblical story in Mystery Plays, in Canterbury tales, etc.
    
  • The Apocryphal books of the Bible; "The Life of Adam and Eve"; "The Gospel of Nicodemus" (and its story of the Harrowing of Hell); the story of the Quest of Seth for the Oil of Mercy (and the legend of the True Cross); Lydgate's Life of Our Lady
    
  • Saints and miracles; relics; The Golden Legend; Chaucer's "Second Nun's Tale"; Lydgate's "Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund"
    
  • Mysticism: Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite on the Divine Names and Mystical Theology; The Cloud of Unknowing; Julian of Norwich; Margery Kempe; Walter Hilton; Richard Rolle
    
  • The Fourth Lateran Council and its influence on literature; story collections illustrating the sins (as in Handlyng Synne); literary confessions (as in Confessio Amantis)
    
  • The Meditations on the Life of Christ as a "supplement" to the Gospels and as a technique of meditation; Franciscan Literature
    
  • Heaven and Angels: the heavenly hierarchy; angeology (Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite)
    
  • The Christian concept of history; Redemption History; the Eucharist as re-enactment of redemption history; the Church calendar (the annual cycle of feasts and fasts as re-enactment of redemption history); the mystery plays as re-enactment of redemption history
    
  • The Originators: culture heroes to whom are attributed the invention of various branches of knowledge and culture: Orpheus as inventor of music; Tristan as inventor of Hunting and Hawking; Moses, Cadmus, and Carmenta as inventors and transmitters of alphabets; see Lydgate, The Pageant of Knowledge; Gower, Confessio Amantis, Book 4; Caxton's Mirrour of the World
    
  • The Poet (conceptions of): the scop, the bard, the "vatic" poet, the "makar"
    

email: Stephen.Reimer@UAlberta.Ca
URL: http://www.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/engl615i/engl615i.htm/