Proseminar: Legends of Good and Bad Women
A Proseminar course primarily for 2nd and 3rd year BA students.
In his Canterbury Tales, Chaucer imagines the husband of his Wife of Bath reading daily from a book about wicked women.The material from which such a book could select was extensive: a misogynistic tradition drawing on the Bible, the Roman satirists, the Church Fathers, which informed fictional and non-fictional representations of women in Old and Middle English. There was also, however, a counter-movement of texts which, while not all perhaps fully 'feminist', nonetheless tried to represent women more sympathetically.
This course will examine some of the texts which created a language for talking about women, their experiences, their vices and virtues, and will culminate in a consideration of Chaucer's Legends of Good Women, a text which deliberately reads against the grain, turning familiar female villains into heroines.
Learning outcomes:
- An appreciation of issues of gender in relation to medieval texts
- An understanding of the development of English as a written vernacular
- Increased familiarity with late-Middle English and early-Modern English language
- Teacher: Elisabeth Dutton