universit ä tbochum seminarinternes vorlesungsverzeichnis ba-st

Medieval Bodies, 4 CP
2 st. mo 14-16 GABF 04/613 Süd
Description:
In a post made on the medieval blog In the Middle in 2008, scholar Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen poses the question: 'Was there ever a time when people were not interested
in bodies?' In philosophical discussions from Aristotle to St Thomas Aquinas through
to Jacques Derrida and beyond, the physical body has been central to answering
questions about what it means to be human; so too has the body long been a
touchstone in discussions of gender, race, sexuality, politics and religion; and the
stuff of narrative and story is arguably built of bodies, both literal and metaphorical. If
interest in bodies is transhistorical, ideas about the body are not: this course will
explore beliefs about and representations of the body in Old through to Middle
English literature (c.1000-1500), in texts ranging from the medical and pastoral to the
academic and poetic. We will focus, for example, on the ways in which the body
plays a part in posing and answering philosophical questions as they appear in
learned, 'scientific' texts like Bartholomew the Englishman's De proprietatibus rerum,
or advice literature, like that of Giles of Rome's De regimine principum (both
translated into Middle English by John Trevisa in the fourteenth century) and 'popular'
vernacular literature like The Life of Saint Margaret (Ashmole Codex 61) and Havelok
the Dane.
The primary texts required for this course will be made available through Blackboard.
Assessment: Further to attendance and active participation in class, this course will
be assessed through an essay (Hausarbeit) submitted at the end of the course.
Übungen
050 633 Walter, K.
French Connections: The French of England in the Later Middle Ages, 3 CP
2 st. di 10-12 GABF 04/253 Nord
Description:
In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer's Pardoner (one member of the group of pilgrims
travelling to Canterbury), comes in for some abuse: 'I wolde I hadde thy coillons in
myn hond', Harry Bailey says to the Pardoner - that is, 'I wish I had your testicles in
my hand'. Coillons is a borrowing from French, and we would not have to search
long or hard to find ample evidence for the polyglot nature of Chaucer's poetry or