Middle English literature exclusive of Chaucer studied in the original language.

The grisly martyrdom of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury—the tragic hero of T.S. Eliot’s 1935 Murder in the Cathedral, whose bodily remains are famously the final destination of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims—on the altar-steps of his own cathedral in 1170, followed by his quick canonization in 1173, had major consequences for English (and European) literature. In the historical consciousness of most twelfth-century Christians, the “age of martyrs” had ended centuries before, with the Emperor Constantine’s fourth-century conversion and the rise of a Christian Rome. Despite the promise of absolution for militating against a Muslim enemy beginning in the First Crusade, martyr-making was not, for reasons we shall explore, a ready result of this notorious confrontation with a new “infidel”—except, perhaps, in the imaginative fiction after Becket’s murder. However, following Becket’s death, we see preserved in the literary record a compulsion to reimagine and contextualize Becket’s martyrdom in romances and great hagiographical anthologies which draw the line from the obscure reaches of time to the present moment and beyond—most notably in grand-scale compilations such as the thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend)—effectively reopening the question of who martyrs are and how they are made. A peculiarly Englished version of this work will be the primary object of our study: the South English Legendary surviving in a remarkable thirteenth-century manuscript now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Through close study of this medieval manuscript and the texts it contains we will not only learn how and why the death of a single man can shift historical perception and literary imagination for centuries; we will also decode medieval manuscripts and the motivations of the scribes who composed them, read Middle English at a crucial point in its linguistic development, and engross ourselves in the gory “pulp fiction” of medieval England!

This class satisfies the Pre-1800 English major requirement
https://english.berkeley.edu/major-requirements

Book List:
Materials for this course will be provided electronically.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills