Dr Katie L. Walter

Description: This course aims to offer an overview of Medieval English literature from around 800 to 1500 AD. Students will read a selection of important Old English and Middle English texts, ranging from Beowulf to The Canterbury Tales. Most texts will be studied in Modern English translations. A reader will be provided and will be made available via Blackboard. The set texts must have been read and studied before class.

Aims: An introduction to the literature of the English Middle Ages from 500 to 1500. This course provides the basis for the study of the literature of the later periods and touches upon such important genres as epic, romance, lyrics, and drama. The texts will be presented in their cultural and historical contexts. As well as providing insights into medieval literature, history, and thinking, the course provides students with a basis for further medieval courses as well as for the study of English literature from later periods.

Description: In this course we shall try to answer such questions as What is language? What are the origins of the English language? How does it fit into the Germanic language family? When did English become English? How did it change over the years? What caused the changes? What causes language change in general? What is the state of the language now?

Aims: The aim of this lecture course, which is part and parcel of the compulsory linguistics module, is to provide an introduction to the history of the English language. Apart from providing an insight into how the English language developed over the centuries it should serve as a basis for other courses on historical linguistics, as well as those that deal with the Old and Middle English literature.

Description: Of the 44 items preserved in the Auchinleck Manuscript, made in London around 1330 and possibly known to Geoffrey Chaucer later in the century, 18 are romances; of these, 8 are unique versions and all (except one) are in their earliest copy. It is, in other words, a remarkable collection, important, not only for our knowledge of Middle English romance, but also for our understanding of the development of writing in English. The genre of romance is notoriously resistant to definition: the Auchinleck Manuscript offers an insight into this richness and variety, treating heroes from England, France and antiquity, and incorporating the supernatural, devotional, epic and the didactic. This seminar therefore focuses on the Auchinleck manuscript in order to introduce Middle English romance more generally. However, since the manuscript provides the earliest example of lay, commercial book production in England, we will also use the seminar to think about manuscript culture, English book production and the significance of the Auchinleck manuscript as a whole. We will read 8 romances found in the Auchinleck, including Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, Sir Degare, Otuel a Knight, and The King of Tars in the course of the semester. Further to gaining knowledge of medieval romance, this course also offers the opportunity to develop skills in reading Middle English.

Description: ‘Hwelcne cræft canst thu?’ (from Ælfric’s Colloquy on the Occupations). Looks strange, doesn’t it? Well, that’s Old English for you – the ancestor of Modern English. The people who spoke Old English were the ‘Anglo-Saxon’s, i.e. Germanic tribes who settled in Britain after the Romans (c. 450 A.D.). Most of our records of the Old English language date from the period between 850 A.D. and about 1100 A.D. and they offer a fascinating insight into Anglo-Saxon history, literature and culture.

Aim: What can you expect from this course? In this course participants will acquire a basic knowledge of the Old English language and of the literature of Anglo-Saxon England. If you have an interest in language, what English looked and (to some extent) sounded like in the early Middle Ages, if you are curious about the past, and about experiencing cultures that are different from you own, then you might enjoy this course.

Description: When William Caxton publishes a printed edition of Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur in 1485 he claims to be publishing a ‘history’. Recalling in his preface a conversation he has with a ‘noble gentleman’, Caxton sceptically points out that ‘some chronicles make no mention’ of Arthur and his knights: the evidence the noble gentleman gives in response, however, persuades Caxton that he ‘could not well deny but that there was such a noble king named Arthur’. This sort of anecdote demonstrates that Caxton might have very different notions of what constitutes history from our own. Ways of thinking about the past are rich and varied in the middle ages, and can include both the fictional and the properly historical. What, then, is history in the middle ages? How do different authors write about history? What are its meanings and functions? This course aims to introduce students to some of the main forms of historical writing (chronicles, romance and hagiography) and its subject-matter (biblical, classical and medieval) in medieval England. We will do so by exploring, for example, the historical-romance figures Havelok the Dane and King Arthur, the Anglo-Saxon saints Edmund and Erkenwald, the classical city of Troy, and the medieval crusades.

Description: The letter, writes Jacques Derrida in La Carte Postale, ‘is not a genre but all genres, [it is] literature itself’. This course explores the relationship of letters, both historical and fictional, to literature in medieval England. Beginning with Ovid, who claims to have invented the epistolary genre in his Heroides (Letters of Heroines), we will read a variety of letters in the course of the semester: individual letters, such as those of the Rebels circulating during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; interpolated letters, which, like Criseyde’s letter to Troilus in Chaucer’s poem, play a central role in narrativity; and epistolary literature, exampled in the work of Christine de Pisan and Thomas Hoccleve, where poems are ‘sent’ out and invite, indeed demand, an answer. Further to establishing medieval ideas about and uses of the epistolary form, this course also aims to think about the cultural meaning of letters and explore contemporary critical theories of letters and letter-writing: letters, for example, are addressed to someone in particular but might be read by others; they are sent but might not be received; they are private and intimate (between lovers, between friends) but also public and open (not least since they can be intercepted and circulated). Letters, in other words, raise urgent questions about readership and reception that have far-reaching reverberations for medieval (and, indeed, modern) literary culture as a whole.

Description: Famous even in his own day, Geoffrey Chaucer (a1343-1400), author of The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde among other works, was praised and imitated in the fifteenth-century and hailed in literary histories as a Renaissance light in a dark medieval age from the sixteenth-century on. If Chaucer’s reputation as the Father of English poetry persists, his poetry takes on a curious life of its own: the work of other writers is sometimes attributed to Chaucer and integrated into Chaucer’s own poems; later poets write in response to or as a continuation of Chaucer’s work. So too do writers of literary and medieval history deploy an idea of Chaucer to create an idea of the medieval, which in some way is positioned against ideas of the ‘Renaissance’ or the ‘modern’. This course will trace some of the ghosts of Chaucer and his work in the years following his death through into the seventeenth century in both poetic an political contexts.

Aims: This course aims to explore, not so much the work of Chaucer itself, but the responses of readers, writers, editors, and literary critics to it. We will therefore consider a wide range of texts, including John Lydgate’s The Siege of Thebes (a1402), Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid (a1470), the plays of William Shakespeare, and an ‘Answer to the Sompner’s Prologue of Chaucer’ by John Gay (1685-1732). We will also look at the role of printed editions in shaping Chaucer’s work (for example, those of William Caxton, Richard Pynson and William Thynne). More broadly speaking, in response to the growing scholarly interest in ‘medievalism’, the course also aims to explore the ways in which ideas about Chaucer are bound up with ideas about the medieval.

Description:  What is a text?  What is an author?  What is a reader?  We might think the answers to these questions are transhistorical and universal; a closer inspection of medieval literary theory suggests otherwise.  Medieval ideas about the acts of writing, reading and interpretation are, for example, expressed metaphorically (but also, in some ways, literally) as acts of eating, digesting, and assimilating.  So too are books thought to have a remedial function: writing books and reading them can bring about both physical and spiritual healing.  An exploration of medieval theories about literature shows that, far from being the preserve of an esoteric intellectual and aesthetic tradition, ideas about books, since they intersect with and are shaped in response to discourses as varied as those of theology, ethics, and medicine, have broad implications for our understanding of medieval culture.

Aims:  This course aims to provide an introduction to some literary theory of the Middle Ages, with a particular focus on vernacular English literature from the later-medieval period.  We will look both at some examples of medieval literary theory and at some literary texts which put the theory into practice (for example, Fragment VI of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and Thomas Hoccleve’s Series).  All the reading materials will be made available on Blackboard.  The seminars will be structured to allow the opportunity for the development of skills in reading and understanding Middle English, as well as for discussion and debate about how we understand ‘literature’ and the act of ‘reading’.

Description:  In the late-medieval period, ‘physicality’, in the words of Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘becomes opportunity’.  This course will introduce ideas about and representations of the body across a range of medieval texts and consider the various ‘opportunities’ (for empowerment, subversion, control, inclusion, exclusion, etc.) they participate in.  The importance of the body to late-medieval culture is best exemplified by the Body at its centre – that of Christ, which is the subject of ‘affective piety’ and becomes the litmus test for orthodoxy.   We will therefore focus, in particular, on the religious literature of fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England.

Aims:  The course aims to consider divine, human, and diabolic bodies and the experiences of pain and pleasure, sin and suffering, gender and sexuality they give insight to.  It also aims to situate these bodies both within medieval ideas about confession, salvation and damnation, orthodoxy and heresy, and within modern theories of the body.