Courses

Courses by semester

Courses for Fall 2023

Complete Cornell University course descriptions are in the Courses of Study .

Course ID Title Offered
MEDVL1101 FWS: Aspects of Medieval Culture
MEDVL1660 The Vikings and their World
Globalization may seem like a recent hot topic, but it was already very much in vogue 1000 years ago when Norse explorers burst out of Scandinavia to journey as far as North America, Azerbaijan, the Mediterranean and the White Sea. This course will introduce students to the Norsemen and women of the Viking Age and the centuries following it, weaving together literary, chronicle, archaeological and other sources to tell the remarkable stories of these medieval entrepreneurs and of the many people and places they encountered. Along the way, students will also pick up crucial historical thinking skills: assessing change and continuity over time, learning the basics of source criticism, and gaining an appreciation for interdisciplinary research. This course qualifies for credit towards the undergraduate minor in Viking Studies. 

Full details for MEDVL 1660 - The Vikings and their World

Fall.
MEDVL2170 Early Modern Iberian Survey
This course explores major texts and themes of the Hispanic tradition from the 11th to the 17th centuries. We will examine general questions on literary analysis and the relationship between literature and history around certain events, such as medieval multicultural Iberia, the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492; the encounter between the Old and the New Worlds; the 'opposition' of high and low in popular culture, and of the secular and the sacred in poetry and prose. Readings may be drawn from medieval short stories and miracle collections; chivalric romances, Columbus, Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, among others.

Full details for MEDVL 2170 - Early Modern Iberian Survey

Fall, Spring.
MEDVL2655 Introduction to Islamic Civilization
At the beginning of the 7th century, a new religion, Islam, appeared in Arabia and by the end of the century, Muslims had defeated the Byzantines and Persians and created an empire that stretched from Spain to India. For the next millennium, Islam glittered. Its caliphs, courts, and capitals were grander, more powerful, and more sophisticated than those of any medieval king, duke or prince. In this course, we will trace the emergence and development of Islamic civilization from the birth of Muhammad ca. 570 to the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. We will read the Qur'an and listen to its recitation; examine the career of the Prophet Muhammad; follow the course of the Arab conquests; explore the nature of the conflict between Sunnis and Shi'is; learn about the five pillars of Islam, sharia law, theology, and Sufism; and assess the achievements of Muslim intellectuals in literature, art, architecture, science, and philosophy.

Full details for MEDVL 2655 - Introduction to Islamic Civilization

Fall.
MEDVL3110 Old English
In this course, we will read and discuss some of the earliest surviving English poetry and prose. Attention will be paid to (1) learning to read the language in which this literature is written, (2) evaluating the poetry as poetry: its form, structure, style, and varieties of meaning, and (3) seeing what can be learned about the culture of Anglo-Saxon England and about the early Germanic world in general, from an examination of the Old English literary records. We will begin by reading some easy prose and will go on to consider some more challenging heroic, elegiac, and devotional poetry, including an excerpt from the masterpiece Beowulf. The course may also be used as preparation for the sequence ENGL 3120/ENGL 6120. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for MEDVL 3110 - Old English

Fall.
MEDVL3245 Revolution or Reform?
This course explores the relation between literary and utopian Enlightenment cultures in Western history.  For each moment of rapid change, from Plato to the Communist revolutions of the twentieth century and beyond, we will focus on two texts: one which promoted the enlightened and revolutionary utopian social blueprint; and one offering an alternative model of transformation or a dystopian account of the utopian model. You will come away from this course having a chronologically wide and intellectually deep immersion in 2500 years of European philosophical and literary history. Throughout, you are encouraged to think about what resources we use to imagine social transformation and to ask if revolution is in fact the best way to effect social transformation. This class may be used toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

Full details for MEDVL 3245 - Revolution or Reform?

Fall.
MEDVL3315 Old Norse I
Old Norse is a collective term for the earliest North Germanic literary languages: Old Icelandic, Old Norwegian, Old Danish, and Old Swedish. The richly documented Old Icelandic is the center of attention, and the purpose is twofold: the students gain knowledge of an ancient North Germanic language, important from a linguistic point of view, and gain access to the medieval Icelandic (and Scandinavian) literature. The structure of Old Norse (Old Icelandic), phonology, and morphology, with reading of selections from the Prose-Edda, a 13th-century narrative based on the Eddaic poetry. 

Full details for MEDVL 3315 - Old Norse I

Fall.
MEDVL4050 The Art of Love
"Is love an art? Then it rquires knowledge and effort," writes Erich Fromm in the first chapter of The Art of Loving. His question (from 1956) is not a new one. This course engages with the long tradition of thinking about love as an art, not merely something one falls into or out of, but something one does or fails to do.  We'll start with Plato's Phaedrus Ovid's ironic Art of Love before proceeding to three great medieval depictions of love: Andreas Capellanus' On Love, Bernard of Clairvaux's On Loving God, and Chrétien de Troyes Lancelot. We'll also look at some of the more provocative modern arts of love, from Fromm to Foucault, Barthes to Gillian Rose.

Full details for MEDVL 4050 - The Art of Love

Fall.
MEDVL4295 Premodern Literature and Media
This course introduces the canon of premodern German literature, including lyric poetry (Minnesang), Arthurian romance (Gottfried's Tristan, Wolfram's Parzival, Hartmann's Iwein), and the heroic epic (Nibelungenlied). With a focus on medieval manuscript culture, we will investigate problems of form, genre, and representation, as well as post-medieval approaches to materiality, hermeneutics, and textuality. Our larger questions, centering on the mediation of words, images, and sounds, will address the contested legacy of the premodern period in German modernity.

Full details for MEDVL 4295 - Premodern Literature and Media

Fall or Spring.
MEDVL4310 Methods in Medieval
Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students—really, all humanists…okay, all writers—find to be the greatest struggle: "Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite." Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.

Full details for MEDVL 4310 - Methods in Medieval

Fall.
MEDVL4420 Tang Poetry: Themes and Contexts
Through guided readings in Chinese of selected poems of the Tang dynasty (618-907) on various themes and in different styles, students develop the essential analytical skills for reading Tang poetry while gaining an understanding of its social, cultural, and historical contexts.

Full details for MEDVL 4420 - Tang Poetry: Themes and Contexts

Fall.
MEDVL4761 Albion: Post-Roman, Pre-Norman
The people who invaded the isle of Britain after the withdrawal of Roman government in the early fifth century, and who dominated it until the establishment of Norman rule in the late eleventh century, are responsible for some of the best-known and most enduring legacies of the Middle Ages: Beowulf and Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the archbishoprics of Canterbury and York, Alfred the Great and Æthelred the Unready. This course examines the Anglo-Saxons in their early-medieval context, focusing especially on the cooperation between history and its sister disciplines – archaeology, literary criticism, and others – that is so vital for shedding light on this distant, opaque era. 

Full details for MEDVL 4761 - Albion: Post-Roman, Pre-Norman

Fall.
MEDVL6020 Latin Philosophical Texts
Reading and translation of Latin philosophical texts.

Full details for MEDVL 6020 - Latin Philosophical Texts

Fall, Spring.
MEDVL6050 The Art of Love
"Is love an art? Then it rquires knowledge and effort," writes Erich Fromm in the first chapter of The Art of Loving. His question (from 1956) is not a new one. This course engages with the long tradition of thinking about love as an art, not merely something one falls into or out of, but something one does or fails to do. We'll start with Plato's Phaedrus Ovid's ironic Art of Love before proceeding to three great medieval depictions of love: Andreas Capellanus' On Love, Bernard of Clairvaux's On Loving God, and Chrétien de Troyes Lancelot.  We'll also look at some of the more provocative modern arts of love, from Fromm to Foucault, Barthes to Gillian Rose.

Full details for MEDVL 6050 - The Art of Love

Fall.
MEDVL6110 Old English
In this course, we will read and discuss some of the earliest surviving English poetry and prose. Attention will be paid to (1) learning to read the language in which this literature is written, (2) evaluating the poetry as poetry: its form, structure, style, and varieties of meaning, and (3) seeing what can be learned about the culture of Anglo-Saxon England and about the early Germanic world in general, from an examination of the Old English literary records. We will begin by reading some easy prose and will go on to consider some more challenging heroic, elegiac, and devotional poetry, including an excerpt from the masterpiece Beowulf. The course may also be used as preparation for the sequence ENGL 3120/ENGL 6120.

Full details for MEDVL 6110 - Old English

Fall.
MEDVL6191 Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm: Late Medieval to Early Modern
Fear of idolatry is a recurrent feature of Western culture. The Christian image threatens to short-circuit the flow of spirituality between humans and God, just as images of the ancient, pagan gods threaten dangerously to preserve the energies of those lascivious and vengeful deities. And images, whether secular or religious, are always potentially threatening to literate culture: they compete with words, and seem to possess a much more immediate power to mesmerize the imagination. The Protestant Reformation in particular targeted images as the enemy to a true religion of the Word. Legislation in England determined the wholesale destruction of religious images (iconoclasm) between 1538 and 1644. On the other hand, many writers and artists, both secular and religious, look to the image for salvation of sorts. Guided by these perceptions, we will be looking to a range of pre- and post-Reformation texts and contexts. The course will be equally divided between late medieval and early modern texts. Students without Middle English should feel entirely at ease to take this course: all texts will be presented in reader-friendly editions.

Full details for MEDVL 6191 - Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm: Late Medieval to Early Modern

Fall.
MEDVL6221 Judeo-Arabic
This seminar presents an introduction to Judeo-Arabic through the study of selected classical texts and the study of its grammar and lexicon. Because Judeo-Arabic combines elements of Hebrew and Arabic the course will also study aspects of the two classical languages in comparative perspective and examine how the development of classical Arabic grammar established the study of classical Hebrew grammar.

Full details for MEDVL 6221 - Judeo-Arabic

Fall.
MEDVL6285 Premodern Literature and Media
This course introduces the canon of medieval German literature: lyric poetry (Minnesang), Arthurian romance (Gottfried's Tristan, Wolfram's Parzival, Hartmann's Iwein), and the heroic epic (Nibelungenlied). With a focus on twelfth-century courtly culture, we will investigate medieval problems of form, genre, and representation, as well as post-medieval approaches to materiality, hermeneutics, and textuality. Our larger questions, centering on the controversial concept of medieval alterity, will address the contested legacy of the Middle Ages in German modernity.

Full details for MEDVL 6285 - Premodern Literature and Media

Fall or Spring.
MEDVL6310 Methods in Medieval
Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students—really, all humanists…okay, all writers—find to be the greatest struggle: "Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite." Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.

Full details for MEDVL 6310 - Methods in Medieval

Fall.
MEDVL6761 Albion: Post-Roman, Pre-Norman
The people who invaded the isle of Britain after the withdrawal of Roman government in the early fifth century, and who dominated it until the establishment of Norman rule in the late eleventh century, are responsible for some of the best-known and most enduring legacies of the Middle Ages: Beowulf and Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the archbishoprics of Canterbury and York, Alfred the Great and Æthelred the Unready. This course examines the Anglo-Saxons in their early-medieval context, focusing especially on the cooperation between history and its sister disciplines – archaeology, literary criticism, and others – that is so vital for shedding light on this distant, opaque era.

Full details for MEDVL 6761 - Albion: Post-Roman, Pre-Norman

Fall.
MEDVL8010 Directed Study - Individual
This course gives students the opportunity to work with a selected instructor to pursue special interests or research not treated in regularly scheduled courses. After getting permission of the instructor, students should contact the department to request access to an instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes.

Full details for MEDVL 8010 - Directed Study - Individual

Fall, Spring.
MEDVL8020 Directed Study - Group
This course should be used for an independent study in which a small group of students works with one member of the graduate faculty. After getting permission of the instructor, students should contact the department to request access to an instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes.

Full details for MEDVL 8020 - Directed Study - Group

Fall, Spring.
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