Medieval and Early Modern
Literature and Culture

Challenging traditional notions of periodization, medievalists and early modernists at Iowa bring insights from contemporary theory to bear on the diverse literary and cultural history of Britain before 1700. We offer a wide range of courses that explore the clash of competing cultures, the development of a vernacular literature, the growth of national identity, the impact of new technologies, the effects of religious reform, and the rise of the commercial theatre. Students benefit from related courses in History, Art History, Theatre, Music, and the Center for the Book..

Links

• Early Modern Reading Group
• Center for the Book
• Newberry Library
• Folger Library
• Medieval Studies Program
• Medieval Studies Certificate

Selected Recent Courses

Early Modern Drama and Culture
Focusing on plays by Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, and Webster, this course explores the status and function of English Renaissance theater in early modern society, considering its aesthetic power, its social effects, and its role in forging a national identity. Graduate class.

Shakespeare
Through classroom performance and screenings of scenes from Shakespeare's plays available on film and video, the course examines the range of interpretation suggested by the text and embodied in the work of actors, directors and designers.

Honors Proseminar: Gothic
This course examines gothic literature from the undead corpse in the 14th-century poem St. Erkenwald to the close encounters of the third kind that occur on the X-Files and includes discussion of the externalization of the psyche in sublime environments, the politics of terror, and the representation of gender and family relations.

Literature and Culture of the Middle Ages: Sin & Confession
This survey explores representations of sin, secrets and confession, raising questions about both the nature of sin and manner in which one atones for it through analysis of shifting depictions of the secret, the private, and the sinful throughout the period.

Readings in 16th- and 17th-Century Literature: Nonfiction Prose
Before the novel, the reading public turned to sermons, conduct manuals, reports of voyages, natural history, essays, lives and Characters, political pamphlets, and works of philosophy and theology. The course samples a wide range of these forms. Graduate class.

Elementary Old English and Old English: Beowulf
These linked courses provide an introduction to Old English language and literature, and attend to questions of language and poetics, the cultural significance of Old English texts, the nature and meaning of their survival, and the way they both create and illustrate early medieval society. Undergradauate & graduate class.

Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
This course examines the Tales with an eye to questions of authorship and readership, nationalism and imperialism, social antagonisms and class rivalries, the individual’s relations to structures of authority; and Chaucer’s canonization as a “major author.”