MDVL 500

Spring 2016 All Classes

All Classes

Seminar in Medieval Studies

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Credit: 4 hours.

Team-taught, interdisciplinary seminar on varying topics in Medieval Studies drawing on faculty from UIUC and invited scholars from other universities.

Approved for letter and S/U grading. May be repeated to a maximum of 12 hours.

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MDVL 500 class schedule data for spring 2016
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	63839	Lecture-Discussion	E	1:00PM -2:50PM	F	135 English Building	Barrett, R	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/19/16-05/04/16 Section Title: Premodern Plants Section Info: Taking its cues from the emerging field of critical plant studies, this course in ecocriticism explores the literary productions of those arbores inversae or “inverted trees” known as medieval men and women. The seminar rejects plant blindness (the zoocentric treatment of vegetal life as backdrop) to focus instead on plants as active agents in the multispecies assemblages of the global Middle Ages. We’ll look at medieval plants from a variety of authors, genres, and cultural traditions: the ash in Marie de France’s Le Fresne, the cherry of Zeami’s Saigyozakura, the holly of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the laurel of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and the mugwort of the Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm are just a few of the species we may consider in the course. We’ll also discuss more fantastic plants: e.g., the three-in-one-tree species of the Cross of Christian apocrypha, the vegetable lamb of Mandeville’s Travels, and the barnacle tree of Gerald of Wales. Because this class is aimed at graduate students across the entirety of the Illinois medieval studies program, all texts —including Old and Middle English—will be taught in Modern English translation. (Since we’ll also be reading some key theoretical texts from ecocriticism and critical plant studies, non-medievalists interested in the environmental humanities will also find much of relevance in the seminar.) Students will work with me to develop research paper projects relevant to their academic disciplines and fields of origin.