MA Medieval and Early Modern Textual Cultures 1381 - 1688
Students must study the following modules for 180 credits:
Medieval and Renaissance Humanisms 1: Adaptation, Translation, and Imitation (20 credits)
The new approaches to the studia humanitatis (the study of the humanities – art, literature, history,
philosophy) pioneered by the self-styled humanists (umanisti) between the fourteenth and sixteenth
centuries are one of the most important and celebrated achievements of the Renaissance. They
defined the terms by which humanists themselves most often distinguished their own work from the
intellectual traditions of the medieval past and from the work of their (allegedly) more old-fashioned
contemporaries. Humanism brought with it a new attitude to classical culture, to history, to the
power and potential of literature, to the world and to our place within it, and yet it is characterised
as much by rich continuities with older medieval traditions as it is by new departures. This module
attends to these continuities as well as to the more well-known departures. It looks at the writings
of the most influential Italian humanists (Petrarch, Boccaccio, Pico della Mirandola), at the medieval
humanism of Chaucer and Henryson, at the development of humanism at the universities of Oxford
and Cambridge from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and at the early-modern humanism
of Erasmus and Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, Gavin Douglas and John
Bellenden, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Through close study of these authors' writings, the
module probes the new intellectual and literary praxes of the medieval and early-modern periods:
new and recurrent ways of approaching the past and of writing history, the differing imaginative and
intellectual possibilities of anachronism and antiquarianism, shifts in practices of adaptation,
translation and imitation and in the reception and transmission of ideas in manuscript and early
print culture, and the tensions of ‘Christian’ and ‘Civic’ Humanism.
Medieval and Renaissance Humanism 2: Historical Imaginings (20 credits)
One of the chief achievements which scholars have attributed to Renaissance humanism is the
discovery that the past is a foreign country, alien to our own times. This module explores how far
humanism does indeed lead to a new perception of history. And we will also ask: how far is this
suspicion of anachronism a good thing? What are the imaginative possibilities of the medieval
embrace of anachronism? At the same time, we will attend to the ways in which humanists rooted
their ideas and practices within the institutions of early-modern learning. For humanists, the past is
in need of the careful and minute reconstruction through the techniques of philology and
antiquarianism. These tools are not neutral: Lorenzo Valla used philology to attack the church's
encroachment into secular power in his On the Donation of Constantine. Geography, for Cicero, was
the 'eyes of history', and new historicism entails new practices of cartography and geography too.
These disciplines began to transform our relationship to the world around us, as did the enormous
sixteenth-century expansion of the known-world. The last weeks of the course explore two of the
main genres of humanist history: ecclesiastical history (reshaped by the pressures of
confessionalization) and civic humanism, especially the politicized reading of Livy. In the middle of
the module, we enable students to situate humanists within their places of study and their networks
of communication. From Duke Humfrey, Lydgate's patron onwards, libraries were transforming the
way the knowledge of the past could be stored and encountered. The universities were gradually
absorbing the new currents of learning, and pedagogues were drawing up methods of study
designed to produce good humanist students. And humanists themselves developed an idealised
space of international intellectual communication, in which scholars could communicate across
confessional boundaries: the respublica literaria, the republic of letters. Throughout, we will be
attending as much to continuities as discontinuities, and to the ways in which texts might resist
categorisations like 'humanist' or 'antiquarian' as well as exemplify them.
Conceptualizing the Medieval and the Renaissance (20 credits)
The division between the 'medieval' and 'renaissance' (or 'early modern') periods governs our
understanding of post-classical culture. These terms are far from innocent or neutral. They are
fundamental preconditions for any critical reading of the literature of the periods they describe:
understanding the genesis, history and modern critical usage of these terms is therefore vital. The
first three weeks of the course introduce students to three nineteenth-century conceptualizations of
the movement from the medieval to the early-modern period which remain fundamental today:
Hegel's argument that the Renaissance ushered in the religious inwardness of Luther; Burckhardt's
emphasis on Renaissance man's powers of self-display; and Marx's understanding of the transition
from feudalism to capitalism. Remaining weeks explore key twentieth and twenty-first century
thinkers. Running through many of these thinkers are twin and complementary conceptions of the
two periods: the medieval, on the one hand, is characterized as an age of organicism, in which
society, art and knowledge were integrated (Auerbach, Lewis), and the renaissance, on the other, as
an age of tragically alienated interiority (Greenblatt) and of a growing sense of historical dislocation
and isolation (Greene). Understanding the ways each of these periods is valued by critics, and the
politics that such valuations entail, will be crucial to this module. We will end with one influential
recent attempt to reverse the tendency to value the Renaissance at the expense of the medieval,
James Simpson's, and consider how far this attempt has been successful. Throughout the course, we
test critical arguments against texts from the period, by for example placing reformation religious
writings alongside Hegel, Petrarch alongside Thomas M. Greene, and Lydgate's visions of his society
against Heidegger's. How far do modern theoretical understandings of the medieval and
Renaissance divide inhere in texts from those periods? The course therefore aims to equip students
with the necessary means to understand modern critical debates about the medieval and earlymodern periods, and thereby to approach the literature of the periods afresh for themselves.
East Anglian Literature (20 credits)
Throughout the medieval and Early Modern periods Norwich was one of England’s most important
cities – probably second only to London – and East Anglia one of the country’s culturally liveliest and
richest areas. This module explores the literature of these periods in its material contexts (the
region’s prosperity and power may still be seen in its architecture and in the rich holdings of its
libraries and museums) and asks whether there was a specifically East Anglian cultural tradition. The
module explores East Anglia’s rich dramatic traditions (Mankind, The Croxton Play of the Sacrament,
the ‘N-Town plays’, Skelton’s Magnificence, Lydgate’s fifteenth-century mummings and the
spectacles that accompanied Elizabeth I’s progress through Norfolk in 1578), the remarkable writings
of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, the poems of Meir of Norwich, the first we have from a
Jewish writer in England, and the work of John Capgrave. It uses the incomparable resource of the
Paston letters to reconstruct the cultural networks of fifteenth-century East Anglia and considers the
importance of the cult of St Edmund and then turns again to Skelton, to the establishment of
England’s first provincial library in Norwich in 1608, and to the works of the seventeenth-century
polymath Thomas Browne. The module examines whether there is a distinctive relationship
between the social and cultural landscapes of medieval and Early Modern East Anglia and its
literature and asks what is the place of East Anglia within this literature. It considers verbal and
visual materials together, explores the production and transmission of texts, and tests the
possibilities of intellectual and imaginative geographies.
English Literature Dissertation (90 credits)
You will have the opportunity to work on a 15,000 word dissertation, bringing all the skills,
knowledge and critical understanding you have built up over the course to bear on a focussed
research project of your own choice, supervised by a member of the UEA Faculty. You are
encouraged to develop your own area specialist research interest (in consultation with your
supervisor), which could focus on any area of medieval or early-modern culture. A canonical figure
like Shakespeare or Chaucer might be your focus, or a slightly less familiar writer, like Gavin Douglas,
or you might choose to organize your research thematically, by focussing on a topic such as the
representation of the East Anglian landscape. Or you might want to pursue an archival project: the
circulation of poetry in manuscript, for instance, or of classical texts, or of writing by women, are all
currently attracting major academic research.
Research and Methodology Training Seminar (10 credits)
Alongside all these modules there is also an important skills component, which is designed to equip
you with the knowledge you need to carry out your own research on original medieval and earlymodern documents. Palaeographical skills, the reading of medieval and early-modern handwriting,
are particularly important here. This module is specifically designed to allow you to make the most
of the East Anglian archival landscape.