Medieval Studies
Term 1
TTh, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
King Arthur and the figures and objects associated with him – Lancelot, Guenevere, Merlin, Galahad, Excalibur, the Holy Grail – are embedded in our popular culture. This course will look at where the myth began, by studying the medieval British texts that created the King. We’ll begin with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, which was the first text to present a whole career for Arthur. We’ll look at the fragmentary and mysterious medieval Welsh poems that might have given Geoffrey some of his material. We will read two great Middle English alliterative poems, The Alliterative Morte Arthure and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; in the first, Arthur goes to war with Rome, and in the second, it’s one of Arthur’s knights, Gawain, who pursues the harrowing challenge brought to the court by a supernatural green knight. Finally, we will read selections from Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthure, the 15th-century prose text that attempts to arrange the whole world of Arthurian myth into one sequential narrative. As the inspiration for Victorian painters and poets, not to mention T.H. White (who wrote The Sword in the Stone), Malory is the link from the British Arthurian past to our present. We’ll forge other links through things like workshops on medieval writing; visits to Rare Books and Special Collections to see medieval manuscripts and related books; and clips from movies and television adaptations, all to learn how it is that Arthur became “the Once and Future King.”
