Course No: 350:532
Index #: 19050
Distribution Requirement: A1, A2
Thursdays - 10:20 am
MU 207
Sexuality, Gender, and Literary Form, 1160-1611
Scanlon, Larry
Contrary to long-standing received opinion, the Middle Ages were intensely interested in problems of sexuality and gender identity. (This interest took a wide variety of forms: developing the rudiments of companionate marriage; invention of the term sodomy and the association of homoeroticism with unspeakability; the creation of the ideal of the “natural body”; reimaginations of Christ as female and/or non-binary.) This course will trace that multifarious interest as it would be refracted by many of the most important literary works of later medieval England, as well as their sources in Latin and French, and the continuity of that interest into early modernity. We will focus in particular on the tension between what the culture took to be “natural” modes of sexual behavior and gender roles and “unnatural” ones; on the formative influence such tension had on the formal shape of genres and traditions; and on the interplay between the continuities of literary tradition and the institutions regulating sexuality and gender. Works to be studied include The Complaint of Nature by Alain de Lille, Marie de France’s Lanval, The Romance of the Rose, Cleanness, Sir Gawain and Green Knight, The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Early modern texts include John Bale’s The Three Laws of Nature, Moses, and Christ, Wyatt’s poetry, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Aemila Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, and Ben Jonson’s Epicoene. With these texts we will be interested as much in the continuities with their medieval antecedents as with the obvious differences. Finally, we will also spend some examining key pieces of intellectual and institutional context, including penitential tradition and ecclesiastical and civil legislation.
Two short papers and a presentation.