Course learning outcomes and assessment criteria
This course offers an introduction to English literature of the later Middle Ages, placed within a broad historical and cultural context. A diversity of genres, styles, dialects and literary traditions may be explored. Among topics which students may study are: social satire; the Arthurian tradition and uses of the Arthurian myth; shifts in literary technique, genre and attitudes toward women; myths of social and literary decadence; ideas of society and the individual; high and low culture, spirituality and secularity; chivalry and the figure of the knight; literacy and education; art and architecture; magic and the supernatural; medieval Scotland and the Scottish Chaucerians.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the course you should:
- • be able to describe a range of genres and conventions in medieval writing and deploy critical concepts appropriate to the period in response to such conventions
- • be able to show some facility in reading texts in the original
- • be able to recognise some ways in which the writings articulate the period’s social and cultural assumptions
- • be able to discuss gender implications in the texts
- • be able to reflect critically on how texts articulate relations between individual and society.
Mode of assessment
One three-hour unseen examination
Assessment criteria
You will be assessed according to your ability to:
- • assimilate particular texts in the original and produce readings of them as period texts
- • respond to social, cultural, or gender formations in the texts
- • demonstrate familiarity with relevant genre conventions.
- •