EN2M7/EN3M7 Special Topic: The Deep Dive
This is a 15 CAT open module, the topic of which will change annually depending on the convenor.
Teaching:
Term 2 Only
Course Contact:
Contact hours:
1.5 hour weekly seminars
Assessment:
See the assessments page
Overview:
The topic for 2024/25 is “The Global Middle Ages in Literature” and takes place in term 2 only.
Typically, we understand the period of the "Middle Ages" through a distinctively Euro-centric framework. After all, the "middle" means that period between "classical antiquity" and the "renaissance,": markers of time that distinguish particular epochs in European history. This module is an invitation to disrupt that Euro-centric tendency by examining texts of the “Middle Ages” period (roughly 500-1500 CE) that demonstrate the interconnectivity of peoples, cultures, and landscapes from many vectors in the world at that time.
We will look at stories that thematise the interconnectivities—the “globalism”—of the medieval world. On the one hand, this means examining narratives of people encountering lands and inhabitants foreign to their own as well as the cultural, political, and literary reverberations of their encounters. For instance, the Vinland Sagas that tell of Icelandic travellers taking advantage of climate change to explore North America, and Abu Zayd al-Sirafi’s Accounts of China and India that later inspired the Tales of Sinbad the Sailor in Europe. On the other hand, examining “global” texts in this period also means considering texts which have themselves been “globalized” as they were adopted, altered, and recirculated among and for different societies and cultures: a mysterious letter from a mythical King of the East "Prester John" that perhaps began as a political hoax but turned into a global phenomenon to the famous One Thousand and One Nights—a collection of tales co-created by tellers, writers, and travellers from Egypt to Syria to Greece.
These works illuminate not only voices and lives from a multifarious medieval world but also the necessary intermeshing of those lives through factors still prescient today—commerce, diplomacy, war, pilgrimage, marriage. These works force us to reflect on the factitiousness of our periodizing chronologies, the porousness of geographical borders, and the fluidity of literary genres when tales and tellers are transferred, translated, and transformed intergenerationally and spatially across time.
This term 2 module can be paired with EN2F4-15/3F4-15 Medieval Tales (taught by Dr. Sarah Wood, term 1) to make a coherent 30 CATS two-term option that overviews medieval literature both in England (term 1) and abroad (term 2). By taking the modules together, students will see how texts of the “Middle Ages” relate to and differ from each other across regions, enriching their understanding of what “literature” in this period and beyond might be said to comprise.
Syllabus
Introduction. In the first week, we use images of medieval maps and their descriptions to define some of the questions governing our entire course of study—what interconnects peoples in the early world? How did medieval subjects understand the wider world and what drove them to engage with a world beyond their own? We will also consider a short case study of (to be handed out in class) of the tale of Barlaam and Josaphat--a story of two Christian saints that actually originated from the Buddha's life. In this first week, we will also introduce and consider some of the key terms necessary in our module and how they are currently used in scholarship: "global", "Middle Ages", "race".
Week 1: Mapping the Global Middle Ages
Class work (to be provided on the day): Selections of medieval maps, including the Hereford Mappa Mundi, Isidore of Seville’s T and O map, and Muhammad al-Idrisi’s Tabula Rogeriana map; Geraldine Heng, “A Global Middle Ages,” in A Handbook of Middle English Studies, ed. Marion Turnor (2013).
Unit 1. Travelling Fictions: Tales, Legends, and Conspiracy Theories. In this unit, we will examine texts that were co-created and variously adapted by tellers across geographical and temporal realms. By investigating varying fictions that witness the animating forces of globalism in their time, we will see the significance of literature as a crucial tool for representing, theorizing, and ultimately realizing early globality.
Week 2: The Letter of Prester John. We begin with a fascinating political hoax: a letter purportedly from a mythical Eastern priest king "Prester John" promising European rulers his aid in their crusades--a letter that swept throughout Europe, inspiring songs, romances, and international geo-political decisions only to turn into a false dream.
Reading: "Letter of Prester John", in Michael Uebel Estatic Transformations: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages, pp. 155-160; selections from Keagan Brewer, Prester John: The Legend and Its Sources (approx. 20 pages); and passages from John Mandeville's Book of Marvels and Travels on Prester John (approx. 20 pages).
Week 3: Romances of Alexander the Great. From a mythical priest king from an undiscoverable "Eastern" realm, we turn to Alexander the Great from the locatable region of Macedonia. Yet even though Alexander appears to be historical traceable, his romances--circulating across Indo-Europe--translate him variedly for different audience, in almost unrecognizable forms: for some, he was a crusading warrior furthering the Christian cause, for others, he was a legend written in the Qur'an, an early avatar for the spread of Islam.
Reading: Selections from Richard Stoneman, trans. Legends of Alexander the Great (2011); and sections from Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (2006).
Week 4: The Thousand and One Nights (I). In the final two weeks of Unit 1, we focus on the Thousand and One Nights: a collection of tales co-created by tellers, writers, and travellers from Egypt to Syria to Greece. In this first week, we will consider more closely the tales' frame narrative, their historical background, and the first thirteen nights.
Reading: The Arabian Nights: foreward, prologue, and the first thirteen nights (pp. 1-41), from The Arabian Nights, selected and edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen, trans. Husain Haddawy (Norton, 2010). And read, Josef Horovitz, “The Origins of the Arabian Nights,” in the same Norton edition (pp. 386-408)
Week 5: The Thousand and One Nights (II). In this second week with the Thousand and One Nights, we will read the tale of Sinbad the Sailer (surprisingly not told by Shahrazard) with the tale of Jullanar—a tale similarly replete with seaside adventures but with an undertone of matriarchal power instead.
Reading: The Arabian Nights: The story of Jullanar (pp. 260-302) and Sindbad the Sailer (pp. 303-50), from The Arabian Nights, selected and edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen, trans. Husain Haddawy (Norton, 2010).
Week 6: Reading Week
Unit 2. Fictionalizing Travel: Global Encounters from West to East. Building on the questions and ideas of narrative-making, memorialization, and imaginary world-building from the previous unit, this unit introduces texts that use many of those same strategies to present “true” accounts of people encountering habitats and inhabitants differing to their own. The texts are organized roughly as a progression from the West to East. When reading these accounts, we will consider their narrative forms and the complex interplay between historicity and embellishment they evidence. We will also investigate the textual strategies they used to present the foreign and alien as well as the role of those strategies in the construction of national history and identity.
Week 7: The Vinland Sagas. We begin with the Vinland Sagas that witness how early climate change (the Medieval Warm Period) motivated Icelandic exploration in North America. In these sagas, we’ll consider the presentation of the first encounters between Native Americans and Norse travellers and the inevitable violence that occur when colonial tendencies are justified in the name of trade, exploration, and divine rights.
Reading: The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America, trans. Magnus Magusson and Hermann Pálsson (Penguin, 1965)
Week 8: Mission to the Volga. As we continue in our travel accounts, we turn to the first of two Arabic travelogues in this unit: Ibn Fadlan, as we read his short account of journeying from Baghdad to the Volga (modern-day central Russia) on a mission to help the king of the Volga Bulgars (a Turkic semi-nomadic tribe) convert his people to Islam. Whereas last week we read from the Norse travellers’ perspectives, this week we see an adventurer from the Middle East describing his encounter the Norse.
Reading: Ibn Fadlan, Ahmad, Mission to the Volga, ed. and trans. James E. Montgomery (2011). Please read the whole account (70 pages). Watch The 13th Warrior (1999), film directed by John McTiernan. This Touchstone/Disney film is a westernized adaption of Ibn Fadlan’s Mission
Week 9: Accounts of China and India. Our second Arabic travel account is that of Abu Zayd al-Sirafi and his Accounts of China and India. Detailing a collection of eye-witness testimonies of travels, trade, and adventures up and down and silk road, al-Sirafi’s narrative reads almost like something out the Thousand and One Nights.
Reading: Abu Zayd al-Sirafi, Accounts of China and India, ed. and trans. Tim Mackinstosh-Smith (2011), Books I and II; Examine the details of the Tang-Belitung Shipwreck exhibition hosted in the Asian Civilisations Museum, considering the artifacts and how the cargo was discovered.
Week 10: Marco Polo. We end this module with Marco Polo’s famous account of his travels that detail his experiences in the Mongol empire and the courts of Kublai Khan. Replete with detailed taxonomies of tourist spots and traps, commodities and oddities, and new modes of communication, transport, and currency, Marco Polo describes for the West an Eastern pre-modern world from a mercantile perspective that reads like a herald of modernity itself.
Reading: The Travels of Marco Polo, ed. and trans. Nigel Cliff, Prologue and Chapters 1-5 (pp. 3-224).
Acknowledgements
The increasing focus in the global within medieval studies in recent years arose not only from scholarly interest but also from an imperative to challenge and disrupt the predominantly Eurocentric focus of this field. This imperative applies at once to research and, just as importantly, to the ways the “Middle Ages” is taught within higher education today. Aligning with the broader call to decolonialise the curriculum and to expand the current pre-modern canon, scholars of the global Middle Ages developed toolkits for making the literature of that wider world accessible as teaching texts and methods for how to teach these texts affectively, encouraging medievalists of all interests to incorporate them into their classrooms. My syllabus, then, builds on conversations, suggestions, and syllabi disseminated by these scholars, as well as by others keen to bring the global Middle Ages into higher education. I am especially grateful to Barbara Newman, Susie Phillips, and Rebecca Johnson (Northwestern University) for ongoing conversations about the global Middle Ages, the sample syllabi found in Geraldine Heng’s Global Middle Ages Project (https://globalmiddleages.org/content/teaching), and finally the numerous contributors to the invaluable teaching volume, Teaching the Global Middle Ages, ed. Geraldine Heng (New York: Modern Languages Association, 2022).