MA in Medieval Studies

This unit provides technical training in key skills through intensive exposure to and analysis of primary source materials. The main areas covered are palaeography, codicology, textual editing, diplomatic and bibliographic skills. You also learn how to learn how to handle and describe manuscripts using the teaching collection in the Arts and Social Sciences Library. The unit comprises a series of integrated two-hour seminars led by academic staff from different departments. Experience of a broader range of material is gained by visits to local archives (currently the archives of the Cathedrals of Wells and Hereford). You are also introduced to the terminology used by art historians describing medieval buildings.

Taught weekly in Teaching Block 1, this unit is suitable for students with no previous knowledge of the language and aims to provide competence in essential grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Those who are already sufficiently qualified in Latin may join a more advanced group or substitute the study of another language.

This unit is designed to introduce you to interdisciplinary working in medieval studies and to model good practice by encouraging you to reflect on the research practices of a wide range of senior mediaevalist scholars, both those based in Bristol and a range of distinguished visitors. It will thus look at important texts and issues from the mediaeval period, and contemporary currents in research on the Middle Ages. Teaching will be by attendance at research seminars, where you prepare in advance to participate in debate, recording their reflections on the speaker's paper, supported by occasional tutorials with the programme director.

This unit is devoted to the Arthurian legend, as imagined and re-imagined by the major writers of the medieval and post-medieval period. Beginning with the first biography of King Arthur, by the twelfth-century writer Geoffrey of Monmouth, we move from the earliest Arthurian romances (by Chrétien de Troyes) to Middle English adaptations and thence to Malory's vast (and most influential) Arthurian epic, The Morte Darthur. The similarly ambitious Arthurian cycle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, itself based on Malory, provides us with one angle in our exploration of post-medieval Arthuriana. Another is provided by a selection of Arthurian novels, including Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, which takes Arthurian themes and characters into the modern industrial world.

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The course follows Dante's personal, theological and poetic journey in the Divine Comedy by covering major episodes from Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. The comedy is located within the context of Medieval history, philosophy and literature and related to the poet's other works (Vita Nova, Convivio, De Vulgari Eloquentia, Monarchia). Central to the discussion of Dante's masterpiece are issues such as autobiography and conversion, language (as a dialect between words and the Word), intertextuality (both with classic and contemporary authors), authority and authorship, the body and soul, and theories of love and desire.

The unit will give a reading knowledge and basic grammatical understanding of Old and Middle French (from the earliest texts to the fifteenth century). It will be taught using short extracts from a range of texts. Grammatical principles will be explained as they occur, and the challenges presented by different genres will be explored. Half of the course will focus on French of the 12th and 13th centuries and will offer opportunities to explore the peculiarities of Old French dialects; the second half will concentrate on the development of Old French into the Middle French period.

In this unit students will explore a particular culture of literacy and religiosity. They will also approach history as an essentially interdisciplinary enterprise, drawing on insights from history and art. This option investigates how the description of the end of the world in the Book of Revelation (or Apocalypse) has been used in different historical social and religious contexts. The course draws mainly on illustrated apocalypse manuscripts which combine commentary with visual representations. The surviving material is substantial, rich and geographically widely spread. We will sample manuscripts mostly from the central middle ages to consider how and why illustrated apocalypses circulated during the medieval period, especially in the Anglo-Norman realm.

This unit explores the manner in which historians since 1970 have portrayed and refashioned the English Reformation, the greatest religious upheaval in England and Wales during the past millennium. It examines the achievements and limitations of revisionist historiography and its critics, and the continuing power of confessional loyalties in directing perception. It draws the attention of participants to the overwhelming importance of differing contexts and bodies of source material in the reaching of conclusions. Participants are challenged to determine for themselves how far an objective history of these events can ever be written, and to what extent it must continue to be dominated by polemic. They are invited to consider how far particular forms of history - cultural, political, intellectual and social - are equipped to tackle the problems of the subject, and whether new theoretical constructs will open the way to any genuine further progress in knowledge of it.

Traditional accounts of the late medieval and early modern periods have tended to emphasise the extent to which hostility characterised interactions between groups which differed in belief, behaviour or outlook. More recently, however, scholars have begun to show an interest in irenic and ecumenical tendencies in this period, and to identify some of the positive aspects of encounters between different cultures and faiths. Drawing upon a wide range of contemporary primary sources, and a growing body of secondary literature, this unit seeks to examine attitudes towards, and the treatment of, various groups, including Jews, Muslims, heretics, foreigners, witches and homosexuals. In particular, it seeks to build up a sensitive and nuanced interpretation of these relationships. Furthermore, the use of a series of case-studies will allow for comparison between groups, as well as shedding light on the broader themes, as relevant today as then, of persecution and toleration.

Ireland is often been described as 'England's oldest colony', yet the usefulness of applying colonial interpretations to its past is a hotly contested issue amongst historians. The period between 1200 and 1600 saw two waves of migration from Britain to Ireland, and it is the similarities and differences between these two movements of people which this unit sets out to explore.

Old English (sometimes also known as Anglo-Saxon) is the form of English that was spoken and written in Britain before about 1100. Unlike later forms of English, which are heavily influenced by French, it is an entirely Germanic language, and it is strikingly different from modern English in terms of both its grammatical structure and its vocabulary. Accordingly, the language is taught from scratch in this unit. Students will be given instruction in the basic elements of Old English grammar, vocabulary and verse form so as to enable you to read a selection of works from the period in the original. These include some of the major examples of 'heroic' verse, such as excerpts from the epic Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, as well as riddles, elegies, and 'Christian-heroic' verse such as The Dream of the Rood.

Religious cultural production of all kinds (including architecture, art and music) was created with a function in mind: it was shaped by the twin demands of liturgy and devotion, the public ceremonial and spectacle of the church community, and the private prayer and contemplation of the religious individual. Much of the appearance of the medieval church exterior and interior was dictated not just by visual imperatives but by the demands of movement and sound, by liturgical procession and the music of the daily Offices and Mass. Through an examination of some key buildings, objects and music, this unit will consider contextual themes such as attitudes to life and death, power and patronage, ritual and commemoration, against the background of the visual and aural culture of medieval religious observance. Other types of spectacle and ceremony, particularly royal processions and the ceremonial surrounding coronations, will be considered also.

This unit introduces students to the cultural impact of the Reformation and the translation of the Bible into the English vernacular through literary works. Students will explore the new doctrines of salvation that Protestants espoused and their effect on the construction of individual identities. Issues considered will include class, national and gender identities. We will also consider the ways in which the language of the Bible informed such debates and the ways in which writers appropriated biblical texts. The issues will be explored primarily through various literary works including two of the earliest English autobiographies (in Scripture Women ed. Naomi Baker), Marlowe's Dr Faustus, Milton's Paradise Lost, and the Swetnam Controversy (a pamphlet debate including a misogynist tract by Joseph Swetnam and defences by Ester Sowernam, Rachel Speght and Constantia Munda).

St. Anselm of Canterbury is one of the most important theologians in the western tradition of Christianity, and one of the seminal thinkers of the Central Middle Ages. In this unit we shall examine some of his key treatises in English translation. This course will equip students in theology or medieval studies more broadly construed, with a grounding in Anselm's corpus, the emphasis being on making sense of Anselm's idas and considering their relevance in later theology and contemporary thought.

This option will examine the relationship between academic and mystical approaches to God from the late eleventh century to the late fourteenth century. A key issue will be whether the approaches were complementary or opposed. We will also consider the extent to which two different groups existed and whether different polemics were consciously developed at the time. The significance of the development of schools and universities will be assessed. We will analyse the different ways in which key authorities like Pseudo-Denys and Aristotle were handled. We will look at the dichotomy between faith and reason, and the dichotomy between knowledge and love. We will then ask how these dichotomies were handled in relation to each other. These issues will be explored through a study of the following authors: Anselm, Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Saint-Thierry, Hildegard of Bingen, Hadewijch, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Marguerite Porete, Eckhart and the Cloud Author. The texts may be studied in English, though Latin texts will also be available and should provide good practice.

Bristol was one of England's greatest medieval towns and certainly one of its most precocious. From its foundation sometime before 1000 it grew to become one of the largest urban centres in the kingdom, with a port that was second only to London. This unit charts and analyses its development from its foundation to the mid sixteenth century, when the great changes brought about by the Reformation were to result in it becoming a cathedral city. The unit examines why Bristol was so successful, why it took the physical form that it did, and what role it played in national social and economic structures. The analysis draws on both archaeological and documentary material, making use of the rich materials available in the city, ranging from standing buildings to the extensive manuscript materials in the Bristol Record Office.

This unit will examine eye-witness chronicles of the Third and Fourth crusades along with imaginative literature from the early 12th century on. We will explore the depiction of the 'Saracen' in factual and fictional texts, considering the relationship between the factual and fictional genres addressing such questions as: how useful are the chronicles as evidence? what is the status of the chansons de geste of the Crusade Cycle? There will be an opportunity to explore the crusading theme in lyric poetry and as an exotic element in romance. The impact of genre theory and post-colonial theory on our understanding of these texts will be considered. While a few texts are prescribed the student will be expected to read a range of material giving a more complex picture of the literature of the crusades and its depiction of the Other than can be derived from a few canonical texts.