• Fill out and return to me AS AN EMAIL ATTACHMENT the ENGL 439 Questionnaire attached to the welcome email.  It is also available under course materials in Canvas.  I will use the information on your questionnaire both to get to know you (a bit) and to assign you to a Canvas Discussion Group to which you will post your lower-stakes (ungraded) writing assignments. 
  
• Read completely through the "top layer" of the ENGL 439b Online Syllabus (without following links) and skim this down this calendar of assignments so you have an idea of how the course is organized.  Course information will only be covered briefly in class; you are expected to be aware of the fuller details about assignments and course expectations found on the Online Syllabus.
• Prepare the reading assignment for our first class meeting (listed below).  Because Canvas may not yet be operational, readings on e-reserve in Canvas are also attached to the welcome email.
  

• Ovid, selections from the Metamorphoses, in the translation of A. D. Melville (Oxford World Classics); assigned texts have been chosen to help you understand allusions to these stories in medieval texts (as well as in many post-medieval literary works).  All selections can be accessed on the Kennedy Library website in the EBSCOhost eBook collection (log-in required).  NOTE: while it's fine to read these selections online, I highly recommend that English majors add a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses to their bookshelves. Check it out on Bookfinder.com (inexpensive new and used copies are available!)

• From Book III: Diana and Acteon (pp. 55-58); Narcissus and Echo (pp. 61-66).
  From Book IV: Pyramus and Thisbe (pp. 76-79); The Sun in Love (pp. 79-82, especially reference to Vulcan capturing his wife Venus in bed with Mars).
  From Book V: Minerva Meets the Muses on Helicon (pp. 106-109); The Rape of Proserpine (pp. 109-116).
  From Book VI: Arachne (pp. 121-125); Tereus, Procne and Philomela (pp. 134-142).
  From Book VII: three Medea stories (pp. 144-158).
  From Book VIII: Scylla and Minos; The Minotaur (pp. 170-176).
  From Book X: Orpheus and Eurydice (pp. 224-228); Atalanta (pp. 243-248);.
  From Book XI: The Death of Orpheus (pp. 249-252).
   
  
• Ovid, selections from the Amores, translated by A. D. Melville, in the REQUIRED Oxford World Classics TEXTBOOK, The Love Poems (available from El Corral bookstore, or find it on Bookfinder.com or Amazon.com):
  
  • From Amores book I: poems # 1-5, 7, 9, 15.
    From Amores, book II: poems # 1, 4-5, 10, 12-14, 18-19.
    From Amores, book III: poems #1, 4, 7, 9, 14.  

• Ovid, The Art of Love, books I and II, translated by A. D. Melville, in the REQUIRED Oxford World Classics TEXTBOOK, The Love Poems , pp. 87-127.
  

• Backgrounds to Romance: Courtly Love (online reading; see esp. final paragraph on Andreas Capellanus)
• Review online reading Translatio studii et imperii, especially discussion of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Marie de Champagne
  

• Ruth Mazo Karras, "Sharing Wine, Women, and Song: Masculine  Identity Formation in Medieval European Universities" (.PDF file, 9 pp., on e-reserve in Recommended Readings folder in Canvas).  NOTE: This essay provides a useful context that helps explain the misogynistic mindset of clerics like Andreas Capellanus, Jean de Meun (the 13th-century author of the continuation of The Roman of the Rose), an.d the Wife of Bath's fifth husband, the Oxford Cleric Janekin
  

• Ovid, The Art of Love, book III, translated by A. D. Melville, in the required Oxford World Classics textbook The Love Poems, pp. 129-149.
• Ovid, The Cures for Love, translated by A. D. Melville, in the required Oxford World Classics textbook The Love Poems, pp. 151-173. 
• Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, translated by John Jay Parry; this required textbook (Columbia University Press) is available from El Corral bookstore, or find it on Bookfinder.com.  IMPORTANT:  this translation was chosen because inexpensive used copies are readily available, but the introduction is riddled with erroneous claims and misinformation.  Read the TEXT ONLY, not the introduction, and keep in mind that Andrea's text, modeled on Ovid's Art of Love and Cures for Love, has definitively been proven to be a SATIRICAL text making fun of the conventional depiction of so-called "courtly love" in vernacular French court literature, not a serious text written for Countess Marie de Champagne at her request.  Both Andreas Capellanus and his target audience were university-trained clerics hostile to women and to romance narrative traditions.
   
  

• Ovid was a Roman poet who lived from 43 BC to 17 AD.  His literary works focus on love rather than war, celebrating erotic passion, describing the symptoms of "love sickness," and offering cynical commentary on the seductions, infidelities, and games played by both men and women. 
  
• Ovid's Metamorphoses ("transformations") is a Latin narrative poem in fifteen books recounting over 250 myths of transformation drawn from classical (Greek and Latin) mythology.  Completed by 8 AD, it is the principal source from which medieval and Renaissance poets (as well as many more recent ones!) drew their knowledge of classical mythology.
• Ovid's Amores ("loves"), his earliest surviving work, is a collection in three books of Latin love poetry about the poetic persona's (probably invented) love affair with a woman he calls "Corinna" (probably a poetic construct).  The forty-nine poems of the collection are erotic elegies modeled on works by the earlier Latin love poets Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius. A first version, in five books, dates from 16 BC; Ovid later edited it down to the three books printed inGour textbook.
• Ovid's Ars Amatoria ("The Art of Love") is a tongue-in-cheek, didactic poem in three books completed in 2 AD.  The poet presents himself as a "praeceptor amoris" ("teacher of love") who offers his less experienced pupil(s) a series of cynical lessons on the art of seduction. The first two books teach a young man how to seduce a lady and keep her coming back for more. The third book,  directed at women, teaches how to seduce and manipulate men.  The satirical "lessons" offered by the Art of Love are frequently funny but highly cynical.
• Ovid's Remedia Amoris ("Remedies/Cures for Love") is a cynical continuation of the "lessons" found in the Art of Love in which the "praeceptor amoris" teaches his male pupils how to end a love affair.
• Andreas Capellanus's Latin-language Art of  Love is a 12th-century satire of the conventions of so-called "courtly love" as presented in vernacular French literature by poets like Marie de France and Chretien de Troyes.  Modeled on Ovid's Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, Andreas's work mocks the conventional tropes of love stories created to entertain aristocratic lords and ladies at  French-speaking courts, both in Anglo-Norman England and on the Continent.  It was previously misidentified as a serious work codifying the "rules of love" that were supposedly practiced at the courts of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (in Anglo-Norman England) and of her daughter, the Countess Marie de Champagne (on the continent); this theory held that Andreas was a chaplain at Marie's court whom Marie commissioned to write a treatise outlining the "theory" of (so-called) "courtly love," while Chretien de Troyes's romance The Knight of the Cart demonstrated that "theory" put into practice. The only element in this now discredited theory that is accurate is that Chretien de Troyes apparently DID write the The Knight of the Cart for his patroness, the countess Marie de Champagne.  But both Andreas Capellanus and his target audience were university-trained clerics hostile to women and to romance narrative traditions; in this regard Andreas resembles the 13th-century cleric Jean de Meun who wrote the highly misogynistic continuation of Guillaume de Lorris's allegorical dream vision The Romance of the Rose (which we will read later this quarters).
  

• You will assigned to one of three Canvas PR Discussion Groups where you will post weekly Personal Reactions to one or more readings assigned the preceding week and enter into conversation with at least two fellow Discussion Group members about their PR  postings.  You are welcome to make connections between assigned readings and the modern era; the only requirement is that you quote at least one passage from the assigned texts in your posting. Some weeks there will a specific text to which you must respond (for example, and assigned scholarly essay).  Other weeks the PR is more free-form. In these PR postings, you may draw on personal experience and/or make connections to current or historical events or to post-medieval works, including pop culture and works in media other than the written word (e.g. songs, film and television, video clips, etc.).  But ALL PRs must begin as a response to one or more assigned readings from the previous week.
  
• Personal Reaction postings are due no later than midnight each Friday of the quarter.  By midnight each Monday, you must read the Personal Reactions posted by the other members of your Canvas Discussion Group, pick the two you find most interesting, and respond to them. There are only two requirements:  your Classmate Responses (=CRs) should be respectful (whether or not you agree with your classmate), and must quote at least one new passage from the previous week's assigned readings -- i.e. another passage other than the one(s) quoted by the classmate to whom you are responding.
  
• Neither your weekly Personal Reaction postings nor your weekly Classmate Responses will be assigned letter grades, but they are REQUIRED, and they determine 10% of your 45% Participation, Intellectual Engagement and Collaboration grade.  (Failure to submit a required posting or to follow assignment guidelines will count as an "unexcused absence" from the Personal Reactions Discussion Forum and will have the same negative effect on your grade as an absence from a synchronous Seminar Meeting has on your 10% Class Attendance grade.)
  

• Tuesday Presenters must post a Write-up of their TUESDAY Oral Presentations in the appropriate Oral Presentation forum no later than midnight the following day (Wednesday); ALL STUDENTS must post a Classmate Response to this write-up no later than midnight the day after that (Thursday).
• Thursday Presenters must post a Write-up of their THURSDAY Oral Presentations in the appropriate Oral Presentation forum no later than midnight the following day (Friday); ALL STUDENTS must post a Classmate Response to this write-up no later than midnight the day after that (Saturday).
• Additionally, ALL STUDENTS must post a Personal Reaction to assigned primary readings in their Canvas Discussion Group Forum no later than midnight each Friday; ALL STUDENTS must post replies to TWO other Discussion Group Members' Personal Reaction postings no later than midnight on Monday.  (Earlier is fine!)
  

• Sarah Banapour on Guigemar
• Dani Johannsen on Bisclavret
  

• Review online reading Backgrounds to Romance: Courtly Love 
  
• New Online Reading: ENGL 203/252 study guide for selected Lais of Marie de France

• Review the prologues and epilogue by Marie de France assigned week 1 (.PDF file on e-reserve in Canvas)
• Marie de France, selected Lais.  Read AT LEAST the following selection (you may skip the brief commentaries that follow the medieval text, but they are interesting if you have time):  Guigmar (pp. 33-59); Equitan (pp. 60-72); Bisclavret (pp. 92-104); Lanval (pp. 105-125); Yonec (pp. 137-154); Laustic (pp. 155-161); Chevrefoil (pp. 190-195); Eliduc (pp. 196-233).
• NOTE: you MUST use the translation by Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante in the REQUIRED TEXTBOOK, The Lais of Marie de France (available from El Corral bookstore, or find inexpensive used and new copies on Bookfinder.com).
  

• Eva Rosenn, "The Sexual and Textual Politics of Marie's Poetics" (.PDF file, 10 pp., on e-reserve in the Required Readings folder on Canvas).  This article offers interesting general comments on Marie's poetics as well as specific analysis of Lanval, Guigemar and Yonec.  Note: quotations in languages other than English are not translated, but you can follow Rosenn's argument based on what she writes before and after the untranslated passages.  NOTE: it is unlikely that we will have time during seminar meetings to discuss assigned scholarly essays.  Instead, the first paragraph of your weekly PR will be a response to the required scholarly essay; the second paragraph will a response to at least one of the assigned medieval texts.
  

• Diana M. Faust, "Women Narrators in the Lais of Marie de France" (.PDF file, 6 pp., on e-reserve in the Recommended Readings folder on Canvas)
• Michelle A. Freeman, "Marie de France's Poetics of Silence: The Implications for a Feminine Translatio" (24 pp.; available on JSTOR through the Kennedy Library website; log-in required)

• Review online readings  Backgrounds to Romance: Courtly Love and Translatio studii et imperii (especially comments on similarities between Chretien de Troyes's Knight of the Cart and romances and popular stories about Tristan and Isolde)
  
• New online reading: The Tristan Romances

• Joseph Bedier's The Romance of Tristan and Iseult, a modern retelling based upon a compilation of various medieval sources, is a quick and highly enjoyable read.  It is available online from Project Gutenberg, or you can purchase an inexpensive used copy online from Bookfinder.com or Amazon.  Order a hard copy if you are interested in taking ENGl 459, Love and Death: The Tristan Tradition, for which it is a required textbook; this seminar will next be offered spring quarter, 2021.
  
• The fragments of Thomas's Romance of Tristan  (in Hatto's translation, as printed in the Penguin Classics text of Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan) are available in a .PDF file, 33 pp., on e-reserve in the Recommended Readngs section of Canvas.

• Carlos Flores Hernandez 
  
• Genesis Lopez
  

• Review online readings "Translatio studii et imperii" (esp. comments on Chretien de Troyes and The Knight of the Cart) and "Courtly Love"
  
• ENGL 203 study guide for Chrétien de Troyes's The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot)
  

• Chrétien de Troyes, The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot). NOTE: you MUST use the translation by William Kibler in the REQUIRED TEXTBOOK, the PENGUIN CLASSICS volume of Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes (pp. 207-294).  This inexpensive Penguin Classics translation is available from El Corral bookstore, or you can find it on Bookfinder.com.
  

• Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, "An Interpreter's Dilemma: Why Are There so Many Interpretations of Chretien's Chevalier de la Charrette?" (22 pp.; available from JSTOR through the Kennedy Library website; login required).   Note: quotations in languages other than English are not translated, but you can follow Bruckner's argument based on what she writes before and after the untranslated passages.

• Wendy Knepper, "Theme and Thesis in Le Chevalier de la Charrete" (15 pp.; available from JSTOR through the Kennedy Library Website; login required).
• Debora B. Schwartz, "The Horseman before the Cart: Intertextual Theory and the Chevalier de la Charrette" (17 pp.; available from JSTOR through the Kennedy Library website; login required).

• Marie de France was active ca. 1160s-1190s at the Anglo-Norman court of King Henry II Plantagenet and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (recall that the rulers of England had been French speakers since the Norman Conquest in 1066, when William the Conqueror defeated the English King Harold II in the Battle of Hastings). Marie knew Latin (well) and at least some English, but the works we are reading were written in French. We are reading the Prologue and Epilogue to her collection of Fables, the Prologue to the Lais, and (next week) three lais: "Lanval," "Chevrefoil" and "Guigemar"; "Milun" is also recommended.
  
• Recall that "Romance" originally meant any narrative in the French language (romans was the Old French term for the French language because French is derived from Latin, the language of the Romans).  Over time, it came to refer to a specific type of narrative, or  genre: a fictional story which typically has a long-ago-and-far-away setting, aristocratic characters, plots involving both love and warfare, and a happy ending. As a genre, romances often draw on the conventions of courtly love, depicting lovers who suffer from love-sickness and express their feelings in flowery speeches.  A common plot line involves an adventure where the hero's chivalric prowess is inspired by or enhanced by his love for a lady (who may be unhappily married, imprisoned or persecuted, or whom he may win as a bride through his chivalric prowess).
• Chrétien de Troyes was was active ca. 1170-1190 at several courts on the European continent (the courts of France, Champagne and Flanders, but not Anglo-Norman England).  He knew Latin, but the works we are reading were written in French rhyming verse (specifically, octosyllabic rhyming couplets, the verse form typical of 12th-century French vernacular literature). While Chrétien lived and worked in France rather than in Anglo-Norman England, his works, like Marie de France's, were enjoyed by French-speaking court audiences on both sides of the English channel. He is best known for establishing the conventions of Arthurian fiction in five romances set at the Arthurian court, including Erec and Enide and Cligés (of which we read the Prologues week 1), and the twin romances The Knight of the Cart and The Knight with the Lion, which we are reading this week.  These two romances are thought to have been written simultaneously and presented / read / performed in alternating episodes, since each contains allusions to events that occur in the other.
  
•  The Knight of the Cart is notable for inventing the love affair between King Arthur's wife, Queen Guenevere, and Lancelot, Arthur's best knight (no trace of this affair exists in Arthurian literary tradition prior to Chrétien's romance). Contrary to what has been argued by some critics, Chrétien's romance does not glorify an adulterous love affair; instead, the Knight of the Cart offers a witty contestation of the sort of adulterous love affair which is arguably glorified in the Tristan romances, from which it borrows freely (including variations on the flour on the floor episode, the ambiguous oath, a passion inspired by a woman's golden hair, and an adulterous passion linking a King's wife with his best knight). The Knight of the Cart is preserved in eight full or partial manuscripts.
• The Knight with the Lion, like Chretien's earlier romance Erec and Enide, focuses on a knight who is in love with his wife but struggles to find an appropriate balance between public duty and private desire.  It also explores the tension between Yvain's desire to engage in public demonstrations of chivalric prowess, acts of vain glory that prevent him from fulfilliing his chivalric responsbilities in the private sphere.   
  

• Due MONDAYS by midnight (ALL STUDENTS): your responses to TWO Personal Reactions posted the  previous Friday by other members of your assigned Canvas Discussion Group (minimum 1 paragraph, bringing in additional textual evidence).
  [Tuesday Presenters only: no later than midnight on Wednesday, post the write-up of your Oral Presentation in the designated Oral Presentation Feedback forum on Canvas.]
• Due THURSDAYS by midnight (ALL STUDENTS): your individual responses to Tuesday's Oral Presentation(s) must be posted as replies to the Oral Presentation Write-up(s) posted in the appropriate Oral Presentation Feedback forum on Canvas.
  
• Due FRIDAYS by midnight (ALL STUDENTS): your PERSONAL REACTION postings on one or more of the previous week's assigned readings must be posted to your assigned Canvas Discussion Group Forum (minimum 1 paragraph, quoting at least one passage).  You may also be asked to respond to the required scholarly essays (minimum 1 paragraph; quoting at least one passage).
  [Thursday presenters only: no later than midnight on Friday, post the write-up of your Oral Presentation in the designated Oral Presentation Feedback forum on Canvas.]
• Due SATURDAYS by midnight (ALL STUDENTS): individual responses to Thursday's Oral Presentation(s) must be posted as replies to the Oral Presentation Write-up(s) posted in the appropriate Oral Presentation Feedback forum on Canvas.

• The first paragraph(s) must offer a reaction to at least one of the assigned scholarly essays (Eva Rosenn on Marie de France AND/OR Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner on Knight of the Cart -- bonus points for responding to both!) 
  
• The final paragraph(s) must offer a reaction to at least one of the assigned medieval texts (one or more lais by Marie de France AND/OR Chretien de Troyes's The Knight of the Cart -- bonus points for responding to both!)

• Sabrina Stevens
  
• [Possibly Talia DeMello]
  

• Review online readings "Translatio studii et imperii" (esp. comments on Chretien de Troyes and The Knight of the Cart), "Courtly Love," and ENGL 203 study guide for Chrétien de Troyes's The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot)
  

• Chrétien de Troyes, The Knight with the Lion (Yvain). NOTE: you MUST use the translation by William Kibler in the REQUIRED TEXTBOOK, the PENGUIN CLASSICS volume of Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes (pp. 295-380).  This inexpensive Penguin Classics translation is available from El Corral bookstore, or you can find it on Bookfinder.com.
  

• Rebekah M. Fowler, "Caritas Begins at Home: Virtue and Domesticity in Chrétien’s Yvain" (30 pp.; available from Project Muse through the Kennedy Library Website; login required).

• Roberta L. Krueger, "Love, Honor, and the Exchange of Women in Yvain: Some Remarks on the Female Reader" (download .PDF file, 17 pp., from JSTOR through the Kennedy Library Website; login required).
  
• Jean-Marie Kauth, "Barred Windows and Uncaged Birds: The Enclosure of Women in Chretien de Troyes and Marie de France" (34 pp.; available for download from the Medieval Feminist Forum website; Kennedy Library login does not appear to be required).

• Ben Beckman: Gawain's spiritual and earthly love interests in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (the Virgin Mary vs. Lady Bercilak):
   
  

• Review online readings "Courtly Love"  and "Translatio studii et imperii" (esp. the association of earthly love with sin and references to the Vulgate Cycle, Malory, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight);
• New online readings: The Alliterative Revival (see esp. comments on Prose romance in the section "A Note on Form")
  
• ENGL 203 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Study Guide
• ENGL 203 Malory Study Guide; to guide you through our specific selections, see see also the ENGL 330/512 Malory Study Guide (for references to the Grail Quest, to Lancelot's virginal son Galahad, and to Galahad's spiritual "courtly lady," Perceval's sister)
  
   
  

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in Marie Borroff’s translation, available in two .PDF files on e-reserve in Canvas. NOTE: You MUST use this specific translation, not another one you may have used in another class.] While you will probably enjoy rereading the full text, we will concentrate on Gawain's rival love interests (the Virgin Mary vs. Lady Bercilak), best seen in pt. 2 (description of Pentangle and arrival at Bercilak's castle), pt. 3 (Lady Bercilak's attempted seductions), and, from the end of the part 4, the Green Knight's explanation of his feigned blows and Gawain's misogynistic diatribe.
• Excerpts from Malory's Morte Darthur:  the contrast between earthly and celestial chivalry (Lancelot vs. Galahad); the denigration of earthly love and idealization of virginity in the Grail Quest; and the invention of a spiritualized "courtly love" in the relationship of the virgin Galahad and Perceval's equally virginal sister (.PDF files on e-reserve in the Required Readings folder on Canvas).  NOTE: these  pages were scanned from volume 2 of the two-volume Penguin Classics Morte Darthure; if you are interested in the Arthurian tradition, I highly recommend purchasing this recommended textbook; inexpensive used copies are available on Bookfinder.com.
   
  

• Harvey De Roo, "Undressing Lady Bertilak: Guilt and Denial in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" (download .PDF file, 21 pp., from JSTOR through the Kennedy Library website; login required)
   
  

• Megan Arkenberg, "'A Mayde, and Last of Youre Blood': Galahad's Asexuality and Its Significance in Le Morte Darthur" (download .PDF file, 17 pp., from Project Muse through the Kennedy Library Website; login required).
• Joanna Benskin, "Perceval's Sister as Spiritual Authority and Eucharistic Symbol in Malory's Morte Darthur" (download .PDF file, 31 pp., from Project Muse through the Kennedy Library Website; login required).
  
• Karen Cherewatuk, "Born-Againirgins and Holy Bastards: Bors and Elyne and Lancelot and Galahad" (download .PDF file, 14 pp., from Project Muse through the Kennedy Library Website; login required).
• Donald L. Hoffman, "Perceval's Sister: Malory's 'Rejected' Masculinities"(download .PDF file, 13 pp., from Project Muse through the Kennedy Library Website; login required).
• Tory V. Pearman, "Disability, Blood, and Liminality in Malory's Tale of the Sankgreal" (download the .PDF file, 17 pp., from Gale Academic Onefile through the Kennedy Library website; login required)
• Ginger Thornton and Krista May, "Malory as Feminist? The Role of Percival's Sister in the Grail Quest" (.PDF file, 11 pp., on e-reserve in the Recommended Readings folder on Canvas)
  
  • 
    
  
  
  

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an Arthurian romance written in Middle English by the poet commonly referred to as  the Pearl Poet (active ca. 1375-1400). Generically it is a romance, but note that it was written in English, not French.  By the late 14th century, the term "romance" no longer means "a narrative in the French vernacular"; it refers to a particular genre, a story which typically has a long-ago-and-far-away setting, aristocratic characters, plots involving both love and warfare, and a happy ending.  Romances often draw on the conventions of courtly love.  SGGK has a circular narrative structure; it begins and ends at Arthur's court, where Gawain undertakes his quest, and to which he returns to recount his adventures when the quest is complete.  Formally, in is divided into four sections or "fitts" which combine alliterative and rhymed verse.  The complex hybrid form consists of long stanzas in Middle English Alliterative verse punctuated by shorter passages in rhyme: a two-syllable, one-stress line, called the bob, which rhymes in an ABABA pattern with the following quartrain, called the wheel.
• Middle English Alliterative Verse is essentially the same form as the alliterative verse of the Old English (Anglo-Saxon era) period.  In Middle English alliterative verse, MOST lines still follow the basic pattern established in Old English alliterative verse: the alliterative line does not contain a fixed number of syllables but typically has four stressed syllables; it is separated into two half lines by a pause in the middle called a medial caesura; typically, each half line contains two stressed syllables; and in most cases, the first three stressed syllables (but not the fourth) alliterate with each other, i.e., they begin with the same sound (either a consonant sound or a vowel/H). However, these rules have loosened up considerably by the late fourteenth century, so in Middle English alliterative verse, there is more variation and the "rules" are not always followed (for example, some lines may contain more than four stressed syllables; fewer or more than three stressed syllables in a line may alliterate with each other; sometimes there are lines with no alliteration at all; etc.)
• Sir Thomas Malory (ca. 1405-1471) wrote the Morte Darthur, a lengthy romance in English prose, in 1469-70.  Malory's primary sources were the early thirteenth-century French prose romances commonly referred to as the "Vulgate Cycle" or the "Lancelot-Grail Cycle."  These massive prose romances were the creation of Cistercian monks who reworked what they apparently considered to be "vain and idle" stories set at the Arthurian court in order to connect Arthurian tradition to salvation history, e.g. by sending Arthur's knights on the quest of the Holy Grail.  Malory's text has come down to us in two forms:  an early printed book published in 1485 by William Caxton (the Preface of which can be accessed on e-reserve in the Recommended Readings folder on Canvas), and the so-called Winchester Manuscript, which was discovered in 1934.

• The first paragraph(s) must offer a reaction to at least one of the assigned scholarly essays (Rebekah M. Fowler on Chretien's Yvain AND/OR Harvey de Roo on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- bonus points for responding to both!) 
  
• The final paragraph(s) must offer a reaction to at least one of the assigned medieval texts (Chretien's Yvain AND/OR Sir Gawain and the Green Knight AND/OR the Malory selections-- bonus points for responding to more than one medieval text!)
   
  

• In lieu of a midterm exam, your Annotated Bibliography on your presentation topic is due to Dr. Schwartz as an emailed .docx attachment no later than midnight on Sunday, October 18 (worth 10% of course grade).
• Your Paper Prospectus and Working Bibliography will be due to Dr. Schwartz as an emailed .docx attachment no later than midnight on Sunday, October 25. NOTE: if your prospectus follows assignment guidelines and is submitted on time, it will be considered an ungraded exercise designed soley to provide feedback to help you write a stronger final paper.  But if the prospectus submitted does not fulfill the requirements of the assignment, it will be graded and will count for 10% of your final course grade, reducing the weight of the final paper to 20%. (Failure to submit a prospectus means that 10% of your course grade is an F.)
  
• You will sign up for an individual, 1-hour Prospectus Conference with Dr. Schwartz to discuss your paper project during weeks 7 and 8.  Failure to attend this meeting will be the same as not submitting the prospectus:  10% of your course grade will be an F, and the weight of the final paper will be reduced to 20%.
  

• Summer Lichtenberg: The dialogue between Guillaume and Jean in the two texts of the Romance of the Rose
   
  

Required Background Readings:

• Online Reading:  ENGL 203 / ENGL 439 Gender in Medieval Lit. Composite Rose Study Guide.  NOTE:  this guide covers three packets of  e-reserve readings used in ENGL 203 / 439 Gender in Medieval Lit. that are taken from a different translation of the Romance of the Rose than the REQUIRED FRANCES HORGAN TRANSLATION used in our class.  But while the page numbers and translations of  passages will differ, the points are still relevant to our class.  (For your convenience, the three packets of ENGL 203 Rose selections are available on e-reserve in the Recommended Readings folder on Canvas.)
• Maxwell Luria, "Analytical Outlines of the Roman de la Rose" (.PDF file, 3 pp., is on e-reserve in the Required Readings folder on Canvas). This short summary offers a bare-bones overview of what happens in Guillaume de Lorris's and Jean de Meun's texts of the Romance of the Rose.
  
• Maxwell Luria, "Narrative Summary of the Roman de la Rose"(.PDF file, 14 pp, on e-reserve in the recommended readings folder on Canvas.).  This more detailed summary will help you situate assigned passages in the text of the Romance of the Rose in the whole and allows you to identify other passages that are of interest to you.
  
• Ruth Mazo Karras, "Sharing Wine, Women, and Song: Masculine  Identity Formation in Medieval European Universities" (.PDF file, 9 pp., on e-reserve in Recommended Readings folder in Canvas).  NOTE: This essay provides a useful context that helps explain the misogynistic mindset of clerics like Andreas Capellanus and Jean de Meun.  

Required Primary Readings:

• Guillaume de Lorris's Romance of the Rose (pp. 3-61 in required Oxford World Classics textbook The Romance of the Rose, translated by Frances Horgan). Skim the WHOLE TEXT, paying particular attention to pp. [ADD PAGES].  NOTE: you MUST use the Oxford World Classics translation by France Horgan, a REQUIRED TEXTBOOK for this class, available from El Corral bookstore, or you can find it on Bookfinder.com (choose a US bookseller for faster delivery).
• Selections from Jean de Meun's continuation of the Romance of the Rose (required textbook, pp. 62-64, 154-167, 233-36, 241-45, 319-335).
     

• Heather Arden, "The Authors and Their Rose," a chapter from her book The Romance of the Rose (Twayne's World Author Series), available in Kennedy Library Collections under the call number PQ1528.A89 1987.  NOTE: I will see if I can get a copy of this chapter scanned by the library to put on e-reserve, but if you work on the Rose, you might consider purchasing a copy of this useful and very readable book, available on Bookfinder.com. 
• Also useful if you work on the Rose: other chapt ers of Maxwell Luria's book A Reader's Guide to the Roman de la Rose (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1982); this book is available in Kennedy Library collections under the call number PQ1528.L8 1982.

•  Ashley La: Beatrice in the Vita Nuova
  
•  Erika Perez: Christine de Pizan's The God of Love's Letter
  

• Online reading (to refresh your memory): Medieval Allegory
• Introduction to Christine de Pizan, first part of .PDF file (13 pp.) on e-reserve in the Required Readings folder on Canvas.  This reading is found pp. xi-xvi in the RECOMMENDED textbook, The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, ed./tr. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee (Norton Critical Edition); copies of this RECOMMENDED textbook, should be available from El Corral bookstore under ENGL 203 or ENGL 439, or you can find it on Bookfinder.com. 
• ENGL 203 Study Guides on Dante's love for Beatrice 1: the Vita Nuova and on Christine de Pizan's Reactions to the Rose 
  
• Brian Stone's Introduction to Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women from his Penguin Classic translation of Chaucer's Love Visions (first 4 pages of 12-pg. .PDF file on e-reserve in Canvas)
  

• Selections from Dante's Vita Nuova, translated by Mark Musa, found pp. 589-649 in the REQUIRED TEXTBOOK, The Portable Dante (which you may have used in ENGL 203).  This required textbook should be available for purchase from El Corral Bookstore (it was ordered for both ENGL 203 and ENGL 439), or you can find it on Bookfinder.com. Assigned readings (skim, using the Study Guide!): Vita Nuova sections 1-3, 11-12, 19, 23-25, 28-30, 39-42.
• Chaucer, Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (last 8 pages of .PDF file, 12 pp., on e-reserve in Canvas. NOTE: we are interested in Chaucer's encounter with the God of Love; you can ignore the rest.
  
• Christine de Pizan: excerpt from the Debate on the Romance of the Rose (pp. 41-45 in the recommended textbook, The Selected of Christine de Pizan, or find it in the 13-page .PDF file on e-reserve in the required readings folder on Canvas).
• Christine de Pizan, The God of Love's Letter (pp. 15-29 in the recommended textbook, The Selected of Christine de Pizan, or find it in the 13-page .PDF file on e-reserve in the required readings folder on Canvas).

Recommended Primary Readings:

• Symbolic autobiography: On becoming a woman writer and on defending women from clerical misogyny (i.e. books written about BAD women): selections from The Book of the City of Ladies (recommended textbook pp. 116-37 and 147-9, or in a .PDF file, 17 pp., on e-reserve in the Recommended Readings section of Canvas).  The Book of the City of Ladies is an allegorical frame narrative with autobiographical and Dream Vision elements written in French Prose in 1404-1405.
• Autobiographical passages in other writings: excerpts from The Book of Fortune's Transformation (recommended textbook, pp. 88-95,  99-107) and from Christine's Vision (recommended textbook, pp. 173-201), available on e-reserve in the Recommended Readings folder on Canvas.

• Sylvia Huot, "Seduction and Sublimation: Christine de Pizan, Jean de Meun, and Dante" (available from JSTOR; Cal Poly log-in required)
   
  

• Kevin Brownlee, "Discourses of the Self: Christine de Pizan and the Romance of the Rose" (available from JSTOR Books; Cal Poly log-in required)

• The Romance of the Rose is an allegorical dream vision written in two parts that was the "Best Seller" of the 13th and 14th centuries.  The first part consists of 4000 lines written by Guillaume de Lorris in the early 13th century (ca. 1230); it is courtly in character, respectful of women, and was clearly written for an aristocratic audience. While Guillaume probably considered his poem to be complete, it was picked up and continued in the late 13th century (ca. 1275) by Jean de Meun, whose continuation of over 18,000 lines dwarfs and totally changes the character of the original poem.  While Guillaume's Rose is courtly in character, respectful to women, and and imbued with the spirit of "courtly love,"Jean's continuation contains many crude and highly misogynistic passages.  Because Jean's poem is more concerned with mocking the conventions of courtly literature and showing off his erudition than with seriously continuing Guillaume's poem, it is believed to have been written for an (exclusively male) audience of clerics in the university milieu rather than for a court audience.
• Dante (lived 1265-1321) is an Italian poet best known for his three-part epic, the Divine Comedy (Commedia), parts of which we will read later this quarter.  His Vita Nuova ("New Life") was written ca. 1292-1300 in a mix of Italian prose and verse.  It consists of a series of lyric poems Dante wrote about a beloved lady he calls Beatrice which are embedded in a sort of frame narrative that is both fictional autobiography and an (equally fictional) account of their own composition, or razo (a genre Dante found in manuscripts of the troubadour love poets he admired and whose poems he imitated).
• The Divine Comedy or Commedia (ca. 1307-21) is an Italian epic made up of three canticles (or books), Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, which together number one hundred cantos (analogous to chapters, from the Italian for "chant" or "song"). Each canticle has its own tripartite structure (see Dante study guide for details).  Our selections explore Dante's conception of both erotic and spiritual love by tracing the roles played by Beatrice (passages drawn from all three canticles) and St. Bernard of Clairvaux (passages from the end of Paradiso), Dante's two "teachers of love" (recalling Ovid's praeceptor amoris).
  
• Chaucer's Legend of Good Women is a Dream Vision followed by a collection of narratives of women who were unjustly victimized by the men they loved.  It was written in the mid-1380s (ca. 1385-1386), after Troilus and Cressida, since it supposedly was written in atonement for his alleged portrayal of Cressida as a treacherous woman who betrays and victimizes Troilus, and for his alleged condemnation of women in his translation of parts of the Romance of the Rose. It is the first of Chaucer's major works to be written in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets (the form, also, of the majority of the Canterbury Tales).
• Christine de Pizan (ca. 1363/4-ca. 1430), the first professional woman writer, was born in Italy but grew up and and spent her life at the court of France. She was well read in Latin, Italian and French but wrote her works in French for the French court.
  
• The God of Love's Letter (written in 1399) is a fictional letter or epistle in French rhyming couplets which purports to be the God of Love's response to complaints made to him by women about men who pretend to be his subjects (i.e. who claim to "love") but deceive, defame and slander women as no true lover would ever do.  It offers a radical reimagining of the God of Love, rewriting the "God of Lust" created by Jean de Meun and reestablishing Cupid's commandment in Guillaume's Rose to honor and respect women.  Christine's God of Love is an eloquent defender of women against those "disloyal men, who blame, defame and deceive" women (Christine de Pizan, God of Love's Letter, p. 16).
• Between 1400 and 1402, Christine played a prominent role in a polemical literary debate on the Romance of the Rose, that best seller of the 14th century.  Our reading from this exchange of real (not fictional) letters in French prose is Christine's final letter, written to Pierre Col in 1402.  The pro-Rose faction consisted of Pierre Col, who was Canon of Paris and Tournai (so: a high-ranking ecclesiastic official); his brother, Gautier Col, secretary to the King of France (a high-ranking political official); and another high-ranking ecclesiastic, Jean de Montreuil, the provost of Lille.  Christine was joined on the anti-Rose side by Jean Gerson, a prominent theologian who was the chancellor of the University of Paris (so, a high-powered ally for Christine).
   
  

• The first paragraph(s) must offer a reaction to at least one of the assigned scholarly essays (Ruth Mazo Karras on misogyny in medieval universities AND/OR Sylvia Huot on Christine de Pizan, Jean de Meun, and Dante ( bonus points for responding to both!) 
  
• The final paragraph(s) must offer a reaction to at least one of the assigned medieval texts (one or both texts of the Romance of the Rose AND/OR assigned primary readings by Dante, Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan-- bonus points for responding to more than one medieval text!)
   
  

• In lieu of a midterm exam, your Annotated Bibliography on your presentation topic is due to Dr. Schwartz as an emailed .docx attachment no later than midnight this Sunday, October 18 (worth 10% of course grade).

• Your Paper Prospectus and Working Bibliography will be due to Dr. Schwartz as an emailed .docx attachment no later than midnight on Sunday, October 25. NOTE: if your prospectus follows assignment guidelines and is submitted on time, it will be considered an ungraded exercise designed soley to provide feedback to help you write a stronger final paper.  But if the prospectus submitted does not fulfill the requirements of the assignment, it will be graded and will count for 10% of your final course grade, reducing the weight of the final paper to 20%. (Failure to submit a prospectus means that 10% of your course grade is an F.)
  
• You will sign up for an individual, 1-hour Prospectus Conference with Dr. Schwartz to discuss your paper project during weeks 7 and 8.  Failure to attend this meeting will be the same as not submitting the prospectus:  10% of your course grade will be an F, and the weight of the final paper will be reduced to 20%.

• Jen Marinov: The eroticization of chastity in works of the Katherine Group (Hali Meidheid , the Wooing of Our Lord, and/or Ancrene Wisse)
• Caleigh Smith: Divine and Earthly Love in the works of the women mystic(s) Julian of Norwich and/or Margery Kempe.  (Because Julian was an anchoress, you may also point to connections between her Revelations of Divine Love and the Ancrene Wisse, "Guide for Anchoresses")
  

• ENGL 203 Study Guide for Bernard of Clairvaux;
  
• Introduction from Medieval Prose for Women (about Hali Meidhad and Ancrene Wisse; .PDF file on e-reserve in Canvas)
• ENGL 330/512 Study Guides for Hali Meidhad and Ancrene Wisse; 
• Information on Hagiography (genre of Second Nun's Tale) on ENGL 330/512 Study Guide for Seinte Margarete;
• Norton Anthology headnotes included with the Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe text selections in the .PDF file on e-reserve in Canvas)
• ENGL 330/512 Study Guide for Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe
     
  

• Opening of the biblical (Old Testament) Song of Songs (.PDF file, 2 pp., on e-reserve in Canvas).  NOTE: I have provided the full text of this (very short) book from the Old Testament of the Bible for those who may be unfamiliar with its beautiful love poetry.  St. Bernard's eighty-six sermons focus exclusively on the second verse, "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine"), and are based on allegorical interpretation of the speaker (the Bride) and her beloved ("him," and "thy," the Bridegroom); 
• SKIM selections from St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs to see how St. Bernard interprets the Bride and the Bridegroom (.PDF file,  16 pp., on e-reserve in Canvas)
• Hali Meidhad (pp. 223-243), The Wooing of the Lord (pp. 245-257), and selections from Ancrene Wisse (pp. 47-49, 86, 189-198) in the .PDF file on e-reserve in Canvas.  If you prefer books to .PDFs, Anchoritic Spirituality, the recommended textbook from which these pages were scanned, is available from Bookfinder.com or Amazon.com;
• Norton Anthology selections from Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love and The Book of Margery Kempe (.PDF files on e-reserve in Canvas)
  

• Brooke Stickney
    
  

Required Background Reading:

• Marie Boroff's introduction to Pearl, on e-reserve in Canvas (PRL vii-xxi , PDF file, 10 pp.).
  
• Online readings: The Alliterative Revival and study guide for Pearl. Also review online readings Introduction to Medieval Allegory and Courtly Love.
   
  

• Pearl: full text of MARIE BOROFF TRANSLATION, which you may access in the .PDF file (16 pp., on e-reserve in Polylearn) or in one of the two recommended textbooks: The Gawain Poet: Complete Works, trans. Marie Boroff (Norton), available at Bookfinder.com or Amazon.com; OR, Marie Boroff's stand-alone translation of Pearl (the volume from which our e-reserve readings were scanned), available at Bookfinder.com or Amazon.com.
  

• The biblical Song of Songs is a beautiful piece of erotic love poetry from the Old Testament. Also known as the Song of Solomon (because it was purportedly written by King Solomon) or as the Canticle of Canticles, it comprises eight chapters of erotic love poetry recounting the love between a Bride and her Bridegroom
• In the mid-twelfth century, the Cistercian monk St. Bernard of Clairvaux (lived ca. 1090/1-1153) wrote a series of eighty-six sermons on the first two verses of the Song of Songs, the Sermones super Cantica canticorum ("Sermons on the Song of Songs"). He began work on them in 1135 and left them unfinished at his death in 1153. These sermons offer allegorical readings of the love affair between Bride and Bridegroom in the Song of Songs, suggesting that the ecstatic union of the human soul with God is analogous to the marital bliss of wife (soul) and husband (God). Note that St. Bernard will be Dante's final guide and teacher in Paradiso.
• Hali Meidhad (literally "Holy Maidenhead" [=Virginity]; sometimes called "A Letter on Virginity") is a didactic letter based primarily on Latin sources but written in Middle English prose by an unknown author, probably a Dominican monk, in the early 13th century.  It aims to persuade young girls to choose the spiritual path (life as an Anchoress or religious recluse) over the worldly life (as a real-life wife and mother), by drawing comparisons between two potential "bridegrooms": the clearly superior spiritual husband is Jesus Christ, who will make her Queen of Heaven -- a far more pleasant life than that of a typical, real-life 13th-century wife. Like Ancrene Wisse, it is part of a group of texts collectively referred to as the "Katherine Group."
  
• The Ancrene Wisse, ("Wisdom/Knowledge for Anchoresses"), also called the Ancrene Riwle ("Rules for Anchoresses"), is an early 13th-century work in Middle English prose by an unknown author, probably a Dominican monk, and possibly also the author of the associated works from the so-called "Katherine Group," including Hali Meidhad (the works were certainly written for the same target audience).  It presents a set of rules to govern the lives of Anchoresses, with primary focus on their spiritual life (the so-called "Inner Rule") rather than their physical existence (behavior, dress, diet, activities, etc., the so-called "Outer Rule").
• Geoffrey Chaucer (lived ca. 1343-1400) was a contemporary of the Pearl poet. The Second Nun's Tale, our first selection from the Canterbury Tales, actually predates that project, as we know from a reference to his "St. Cecelia" in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (ca. 1385).  He evidently liked this poem enough to incorporate it into his frame narrative collection (ca. 1386-1400), where he gave it to the Second Nun, since its genuine piety didn't seem appropriate to the superficial and vain Prioress. 
• The Second Nun's Tale is a hagiography or Saint's life (from "hagio," holy, and "graph," writing). Unlike our other selections from the Canterbury Tales, it is written in rhyme royal stanzas (seven iambic pentameter lines rhyming ABABBCC), a form it shares with Troilus and Cressida).
• Typical characteristics of a hagiography include the account of an eye-witness supposedly able to guarantee the authenticity of the events.  The saint is typically presented without attention to psychological verisimilitude; the point is not to make her seem realistic, but to point out precisely how very different she is from you and me. This difference is what makes her special, able to intercede on our behalf with God and thus help us obtain salvation, sinners though we are. In addition to the fantastical events of her life, the "signs" that point to and guarantee her efficacy as an intercessor--i.e. her sanctity--are a series of miracles, which typically begin during her martyrdom (signs of God's favor sent to encourage her and discourage her enemies--e.g. the magical wreaths brought by an angel; the saint's ability to withstand terrible torture) and increase at the moment of her death. 
• Julian of Norwich lived from 1342 to ca. 1416. The Book of Showings, written in English prose, dates from ca. 1390.  It is an account of sixteen mystical visions she says she received in 1373 and meditated on over the course of almost twenty years as an Anchoress, or religious recluse.  The text exists in both shorter and longer forms.  It is an important piece of late medieval religious mysticism and in certain respects a spiritual autobiography.
• The Book of Margery Kempe is a work of spiritual autobiography dating from 1436-8.  Its author, Margery Kempe, was an illiterate housewife who lived ca. 1373-1438; she dictated her book to two priests who served as her scribes (and may have helped edit her book, but who were NOT its authors).
• Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are thought to be the work of the same poet, commonly referred to as the Pearl Poet, who was active ca. 1375-1400 (and, along with William Langland, was the most important English poet of the Alliterative Revival.)  His/her work is preserved in a single manuscript which also contains two biblically inspired poems thought to be the work of the same author. Pearl is an allegorical dream vision in which a father mourns the death of his two-year-old daughter whose soul appears to teach him important spiritual lessons. While there is alliteration in some lines, the poem is not written in alliterative verse; the complex rhyming structure links 12-line stanzas of rhymed verse in a complicated circular form using concatenation, or overlapping repetition. The poem contains twenty sections, all of which contain five stanzas, with the exception of section 15, which has six stanzas.
    
  

• Your WK 6 PR must consist of at least one paragraph that offers your personal response to one or more of the medieval readings assigned this week (bonus point for responding to more than on medieval text!)
• Your two Wk. 6 CRs must consist of (at least) one paragraph responding to your classmates' thoughts on one or more assigned medieval text(s).

• Your Paper Prospectus and Working Bibliography will be due to Dr. Schwartz as an emailed .docx attachment no later than midnight on Sunday, October 25. NOTE: if your prospectus follows assignment guidelines and is submitted on time, it will be considered an ungraded exercise designed soley to provide feedback to help you write a stronger final paper.  But if the prospectus submitted does not fulfill the requirements of the assignment, it will be graded and will count for 10% of your final course grade, reducing the weight of the final paper to 20%. (Failure to submit a prospectus means that 10% of your course grade is an F.)

• You will sign up for an individual, 1-hour Prospectus Conference with Dr. Schwartz to discuss your paper project during weeks 7 and 8.  Failure to attend this meeting have the same effect on your grade as not submitting the prospectus:  10% of your course grade will be an F, and the weight of the final paper will be reduced to 20%.
  
• Your Final Research Paper (12-15 pages not counting Works Cited) is due to Dr. Schwartz as an emailed .docx attachment no later than midnight on Sunday, 11/21/20. The final paper counts for 30% of the final course grade (unless weight is reduced to 20% by failure to submit Prospectus or attend Prospectus Conference).
  

• Garrett Jenkins: Beatrice and/or love in the Divine Comedy:
   
  

Required Background Readings:

• Review section of online Dante study guide on Beatrice and the Vita Nova (assigned week 5)
• Review ENGL 203 Study Guide for Bernard of Clairvaux;
• Read sections of online Dante study guide on the Commedia as a whole as well as beginning of section on Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso (links lead to appropriate section of the same Dante study guide)

NOTE: we are reading Mark Musa's translation in the REQUIRED TEXTBOOK, The Portable Dante; read the summary at the start of every canto (including those we skip), and then read the following cantos, looking for references to Beatrice and to Love (divine, erotic, etc.).  The online Dante study guide can help you zero in on key details.

• Inferno, cantos 1-2, 5, and 24.
  
• Purgatorio, cantos 1, 4, 6, 9, 13, 17-20, 24, 26-27, 30-33.
• Paradiso: cantos 1-3, 10, initial summary (only) for cantos 15-16; cantos 17, 18 (initial summary and lines 1-21), 23, 25, canto 27 (esp. lines 88-114), note in passing the hierarchies of angels at the end of canto 28 (lines 98-126), cantos 30-33.
   
  

• Recall that Dante (lived 1265-1321) wrote the treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia ("Of Literature in the Vernacular") in Latin between 1304-1306 to defend his choice of writing literary works in his mother tongue, Italian.  It is possible that he wrote this treatise in part because he was not satisfied with the response to his first major Italian work, the Vita Nuova.
  
• The Vita Nuova (ca. 1292-1300) was written in a mix of Italian prose and verse.  It consists of a series of lyric poems Dante wrote about a beloved lady he calls Beatrice which are embedded in a sort of frame narrative that is both fictional autobiography and an (equally fictional) account of their own composition, or razo (a genre Dante found in manuscripts of the troubadour love poets he admired and whose poems he imitated).
• The Divine Comedy or Commedia (ca. 1307-21) is an Italian epic made up of three canticles (or books), Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, which together number one hundred cantos (analogous to chapters, from the Italian for "chant" or "song"). Each canticle has its own tripartite structure (see Dante study guide for details).
  
• The Commedia is written in terza rima, a complex form of interlocking tercets or terzine (English and Italian terms, respectively, for three-line rhyming stanzas) which Dante invented.  In terza rima, the first and third line of each terzina rhyme, while the middle line rhymes with the first and third lines of the next terzina, so that the rhyme scheme follows the pattern:  ABA BCB CDC DED EFE etc.  Dante provides closure to each canto of the Commedia by adding a final line after the last terzina which rhymes with the "orphaned" line in the middle of the terzine.  Thus, the final stanzas of a given canto follow the rhyme scheme ABA BCB CDC D. Refer to the first canto of Inferno in the original Italian (on e-reserve) to see how the terza rima rhyme scheme works.
  
• The meter Dante uses in the Commedia is the hendecasyllabic line, an eleven-syllable line in which the accent falls on the tenth syllable.  This meter is not unique to Dante; it was commonly used in medieval Italian poetry, just as octosyllabic lines were commonly used in French poetry and iambic pentameter (10-syllable) lines in much (but not all) medieval English poetry (including all of our Canterbury Tales selections). 
  
• Additional information on the poem's structure is found in the online Dante Study guide.
  

• Your WK 7 PR must consist of at least one paragraph that offers your personal response to one or more of the medieval readings assigned this week (bonus point for responding to more than on medieval text!)
• Your two Wk. 7 CRs must consist of (at least) one paragraph responding to your classmates' thoughts on one or more assigned medieval text(s).
   
  

• Don't forget to attend your one-hour Paper Prospectus conference with Dr. Schwartz at the time you signed up for this or next week!  Failure to attend this meeting have the same effect on your grade as not submitting the prospectus:  10% of your course grade will be an F, and the weight of the final paper will be reduced to 20%.

• Our next scheduled class meeting is on Tuesday, November 2, Election Day.  Because it may be hard to keep our minds on Chaucer, I am cancelling that class meeting.  Instead, I will schedule one-hour, individual Prospectus Appointments throughout the day. 
• Your Final Research Paper (12-15 pages not counting Works Cited) is due to Dr. Schwartz as an emailed .docx attachment no later than midnight on Sunday, 11/21/20. The final paper counts for 30% of the final course grade (unless weight is reduced to 20% by failure to submit Prospectus or attend Prospectus Conference).
  

• Tim Martins: Mystical marriage in Chaucer's hagiography (Saint's Life), the Second Nun's Tale

• Consult Dr. Schwartz's Study Guide for a hagiography (Saint's life) from the Katherine Group, Seinte Margarete 
• Consult discussion of hagiography in the Introduction to Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works, trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (Paulist Press); these pages are on e-reserve in the required readings folder on Canvas.  NOTE: this recommended textbook is available for purchase from Bookfinder.com or Amazon.com.

• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale.  This text is not included in PC; follow link to access it electronically on the Kennedy Library website (login required).  If you choose to purchase a copy of this Oxford World Classics volume, David Wright's translation of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, you will find the Second Nun's Prologue and Tale on pp. 420-436. Inexpensive used copies available at Bookfinder.com.
   
  

• Your WK 8 PR must consist of at least one paragraph that offers your personal response to one or more of the medieval readings assigned this week (bonus point for responding to more than on medieval text!)
• Your two Wk. 8 CRs must consist of (at least) one paragraph responding to your classmates' thoughts on one or more assigned medieval text(s).
   
  

• Don't forget to attend your one-hour Paper Prospectus Conference with Dr. Schwartz at the time you signed up for this week!  Failure to attend this meeting have the same effect on your grade as not submitting the prospectus:  10% of your course grade will be an F, and the weight of the final paper will be reduced to 20%.

• Your Final Research Paper (12-15 pages not counting Works Cited) is due to Dr. Schwartz as an emailed .docx attachment no later than midnight on Sunday, 11/21/20. The final paper counts for 30% of the final course grade (unless weight is reduced to 20% by failure to submit Prospectus or attend Prospectus Conference).

•  Josette Teja
  

• Dr. Schwartz's Study Guide for The Knight's Tale
  
  

• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Knight's Tale (PC 76-123)
  

•  Talia DeMello
   
  

• Dr. Schwartz's Study Guide for The Miller's Tale
  
  

• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Miller's Prologue and Tale (PC 123-143)
  

• Recall that Geoffrey Chaucer lived ca. 1343-1400.  The Canterbury Tales (taken as a whole) is a "frame narrative" collection on which Chaucer worked during the last 14 years of his life (ca. 1386-1400). A "frame narrative" is a work in which a group of story-tellers tell stories to each other.  The individual stories that they tell are embedded within the narrative framework, which in the case of the Canterbury Tales is a pilgrimage to visit the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.
• All assigned Canterbury Tales readings (except the Second Nun's Tale) were originally in English rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter (ten-syllable lines consisting of 5 iambs, i.e., with an alternating pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables). An "iamb" is a two-syllable unit of verse in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed one; five such two-syllable units form an iambic pentameter line with the stress pattern "da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM."
  
• The Knight's Tale is a romance, but note that it was written in English, not French.  By the late 14th-century, the term "romance" no longer means "a narrative in the French vernacular"; it refers to a particular genre, a story which typically has a long-ago-and-far-away setting, aristocratic characters, plots involving both love and warfare, and a happy ending. Set at the court of Theseus, the Knight's Tale, like Troilus and Cressida, is set in the world of classical mythology and is therefore sometimes referred to as a "Romance of Antiquity."  Romances frequently draw on the conventions of "courtly love," depicting lovers who suffer from Ovidian lovesickness and express their feelings in flowery speeches.  A common plot line is the winning of a bride by a brave knight through deeds of chivalric prowess. 
• The Knight's Tale was originally written ca. 1384-5 as an independent work, before Chaucer began work on the Canterbury Tales collection. (In the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, written ca. 1385, he refers to this poem as Palamon and Arcite.) Its primary source is a 14th-century Italian poem by Boccaccio called Il Teseida (the "Story of Theseus"), but Chaucer also drew on other sources, most notably, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (a 5th-century Latin philosophical work which Chaucer had previously translated into English); the Thebaid (a Latin work about Thebes written by Statius in the first century); and the Romance of Thebes (a mid-twelfth-century French "translatio" of the Thebaid written, like the Romance of Eneas, by an unknown poet for the Anglo-Norman court of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II).  The specific sources Chaucer drew on are less important than the general principle that in writing the Knight's Tale, Chaucer was fully and self-consciously engaged in the ongoing poetic process known as translatio, borrowing elements from various classical (Latin) and vernacular (Italian and French) models and using them to craft his own "beautifully ordered composition" (to borrow the phrase used by Chrétien).
  
• Chaucer's Miller's Tale is a fabliau, a French genre most popular in the 13th century that is adapted into English by Chaucer.  These short humorous narratives are characterized by a "here and now" setting (not the "long ago and far away" of romance); middle-class characters (not the aristocrats of romance); earthiness of tone and subject matter; an emphasis on the body in all its physicality -- sex, defecation, farting, the appetites -- rather than the emotions or the spiritual; and coarse language (rather than the flowery language often used in romance). Fabliaux (plural form) tend to flout authorities of all sorts and are frequently subversive. Characters are often "tricksters" admired for their cleverness; a common theme is the gleeful adultery of a repressed wife and a clever cleric.

• Your WK 9 PR must consist of at least one paragraph that offers your personal response to one or more of the medieval readings assigned this week (bonus point for responding to more than on medieval text!)
• Your two Wk. 9 CRs must consist of (at least) one paragraph responding to your classmates' thoughts on one or more assigned medieval text(s).
  

 Submission Guidelines:

• Save your final research paper as a .docx file under the file name "[your Last Name]439bPaperF20.docx"
• NOTE:  a .docx text is required 1) so that your essay can be added to the database of previously submitted essays used to check for possible cases of plagiarism; and 2) to ensure that I can open and print out the file.
• Email me your final research paper as a .docx file attachment by midnight on Sunday, 11/21/20. The subject line of the email should read "ENGL 439b Final Paper." (No need to include your name on subject line unless you are emailing me from an account other than your Cal Poly email and your full name is not listed as sender.)
• Do NOT post your final paper to your Canvas research archive. Final Papers should be shared only with Dr. Schwartz.

•  Rachel Lasker
   
  

• Review the generic conventions of a romance on Dr. Schwartz's Study Guide for The Knight's Tale
• Review the generic conventions of a fabliau on Dr. Schwartz's Study Guide for The Miller's Tale
• NOTE:  As you review these generic conventions, consider how The Merchant's Tale, while more clearly resembling a fabliau than any other genre, violates some fabliau conventions and incorporates elements characteristic of other genres
  

• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Merchant's Prologue, Tale, and Epilogue (PC 264-291)
  

•    Tatum Moos
   
  

• Dr. Schwartz's online reading The Middle English Concepts of  "Trouthe" and "Gentilesse"
• Dr. Schwartz's Study Guide for The Franklin's Tale

• Chaucer's lyric poems "Nobility" and "Truth" (PC 602-604)
  
• The Squire's Epilogue (PC 291-293)
  
• The Franklin's Prologue and Tale (PC 293-314)

• Generically, the Merchant's Tale most closely resembles a fabliau (like the Miller's Tale), but the Merchant gets a number of details wrong (i.e. the setting is ancient Greece rather than the here and now; January is a noble) and the tale includes incongruous elements that would be more at home in a Romance of Antiquity (e.g. the intervention of Pluto and Proserpina) or a misogamous (anti-marriage) clerical diatribe. Since Chaucer presumably knew what he was doing, it is interesting to contemplate what he was up to in giving this odd hybrid tale to the unhappily married Merchant.
  
• The Franklin refers to his tale as a Breton Lai, and generically it has much in common with the 12th-century lais of Marie de France read earlier this quarter.  Like Marie's lais, it is a short narrative poem written in rhyming couplets with aristocratic characters, supernatural elements, a focus on male-female love relationships, and a potential adulterous love affair between an unmarried man and a married lady.  But in Chaucer's poems, the seemingly magical elements turn out to be a combination of 14th-century "science" and trickery rather than true enchantment.
    
  

• Your WK 9 PR must consist of at least one paragraph that offers your personal response to one or more of the medieval readings assigned this week (bonus point for responding to more than on medieval text!)
• Your two Wk. 9  CRs must consist of (at least) one paragraph responding to your classmates' thoughts on one or more assigned medieval text(s).
   
  

 Submission Guidelines:

• Save your final research paper as a .docx file under the file name "[your Last Name]439bPaperF20.docx"
• NOTE:  a .docx text is required 1) so that your essay can be added to the database of previously submitted essays used to check for possible cases of plagiarism; and 2) to ensure that I can open and print out the file.
• Email me your final research paper as a .docx file attachment by midnight on Sunday, 11/21/20. The subject line of the email should read "ENGL 439b Final Paper." (No need to include your name on subject line unless you are emailing me from an account other than your Cal Poly email and your full name is not listed as sender.)
• Do NOT post your final paper to your Canvas research archive. Final Papers should be shared only with Dr. Schwartz.

•  Vanessa Kao
   
  

Required Background  Readings:

• Read information on the "feminine" estates on the online reading The Three Medieval Estates; also review Translatio for implications of Wife of Bath's choice of an Arthurian tale.
  
• General Online Study Guide for the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale (used in ENGL 252) 
  
• Portion of ENGL 203 online WB Study Guide that discusses how Chaucer reworked source materials from the Romance of the Rose to create the Wife of Bath
  

• To better understand the clerical misogyny represented by the "Book of Wicked Wives," read Ruth Mazo Karras's essay on masculine identity formation in the medieval universities (.PDF file, 9 pp., on e-reserve in Canvas)

• The General Prologue portrait of the Wife of Bath (PC 65-66)
• The Shipman's Tale (originally intended for the Wife of Bath); because it is not included in PC, read it in the translation of David Wright on the Kennedy Library website in the Oxford World Classics Canterbury Tales  (log-in required) or download the 12-page .PDF file on e-reserve in Canvas.
  

• Chaucer, The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale (PC 206-240)

• The Wife of Bath's Prologue is a literary confession or "apology," a first-person narrative in which a character explains his or her character and motivation. (Note that despite the modern connotations, these terms do not imply the speaker's sense of guilt or regret about the behavior described.)

• The Wife of Bath's Tale is a miniature Arthurian romance, with a setting in the distant past, aristocratic characters, magical events, and a happy ending. The structure is circular, beginning and ending at Arthur's court, where a knight undertakes a quest, and to which he returns when the quest is complete.

• The Shipman's Tale is a fabliau that Chaucer apparently originally wrote for the Wife of Bath.  (Some details in the General Prologue portrait of the Wife of Bath connect more closely to a fabliau heroine than to the Alison of the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, while the Wife of Bath's Prologue contains details that contradict some of what can be deduced from her portrait in the General Prologue.)  Together, these texts offer evidence of Chaucer's evolving ideas about the Wife of Bath and what she represents.

• Your WK 11 PR must consist of at least one paragraph that offers your personal response to The Wife of Bath's Prologue and/or Tale (bonus point for responding to both!) Despite the Thanksgiving holiday, it is due, as usual, by midnight on Friday, 11/27/20.
  
• Your two Wk. 11 CRs must consist of (at least) one paragraph responding to your classmates' thoughts on the assigned medieval text(s).
  

• There is no written final exam in this seminar. In lieu of a written exam, there will be a REQUIRED Final Conversation during which students will (briefly) present their final projects to each other.  This brief Final Oral Presentation should cover the premise, central claims, and conclusions of your final research paper.  It should be no more than five minutes in length and should be presented conversationally, without reading aloud from your paper.
• The Final Conversation will take place via Zoom at a mutually convenient time during exam week, ideally earlier than our scheduled exam time, 4-7 PM on Thursday, December 3, 2020.  While I can't invite you to my house this virutal quarter for the usual celebratory Class Dinner (featuring my famous French Cheese platter!), I encourage you to procure something special to sip and/or munch during the Final Oral Presentation meeting!
• Please note that while it will be graded Pass/Fail, this "final conversation" -- the culmination of the collaborative work of the seminar -- is a required component of the class.  Failure to attend the Final Conversation will cause a 10% penalty to be incorporated into your final course grade.