Love and Hate in the Time of Dragons

Catalog description

The European Middle Ages remains a common subject in popular culture, often as a setting for fantasy, romance, Arthuriana, warfare, and adventure. This fascination endures, in large part, because the period in question captures our imaginations with its mythical creatures, legends of chivalry, codes of honor, and damsels in distress. But at the heart of this reimagined world that has become so central to a collective cultural consciousness are the literature and events that inspired it. In medieval literature we find much more than dragons, manticores, King Arthur and his knights: we find the foundations for love, sexual relations, marriage, as well as the seeds of bias, exclusion, and persecution that endure into the twenty-first century. And while the Middle Ages did not invent these concepts, we can clearly trace a direct line back from the present to the shape they took during the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries in the medieval West. This course begins with troubadour poetry as the foundation of ‘courtly love,’ a literary topos that continues to be proliferated in television, film, novels, and popular song. It examines the troubadours’ role in shaping and gendering sexual desire, passion, and fin amor. We then turn to chivalric romance, where the concept of courtly love flourished in the adulterous adventures of knights and ladies–for true love and passion could only exist outside of marriage. In the second half of the course, we turn to another vestige of the medieval past by examining what the scholar Robert I. Moore has called “the formation of a persecuting society.” We will look at how the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils sought to marginalize Jews, Muslims, and lepers, among others. We will read crusade chronicles, memoirs, and poetry that reflect and contribute to the growing culture of categorization and exclusion that emerged. Through class discussions…