2023-24 Academic Catalog

Exploring chivalric romances, Crusades epics, fantastic tales, and the Grail legend, this course invites students to develop their knowledge of French literature in the Global Middle Ages. How do medieval texts stage encounters between social groups, between different cultures, between species? And how do we encounter these texts, and what do we encounter in them? With texts available both in the original Old French and in modern French translations, we will investigate what encountering the Other in medieval texts has to say to us regarding cultural hybridity, gender, religious conflicts, racial difference, political formation, and sharing the world with others. Prerequisite: One French course beyond French 204 or instructor permission