Spring 2025

Alexander the Great in Manuscript Arts from the Medieval to the Early Modern Periods

mlillywhite@middlebury.edu — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 14:52:30 +0000

Alexander the Great in Manuscript Arts from the Medieval to the Early Modern Periods HARC 0701 mlillywhite@mi… Mon, 07/15/2024 - 10:52 Tutorials Classics History History of Art & Architecture Autumn 2025 Spring 2025 Spring 2026

This tutorial course is going to dwell on a single figure—Alexander the Great, or Iskandar Maqdūnī (the Macedonian) as he is known in Persian—in select manuscripts produced across Central Asia and Central Europe in the medieval (1000-1500) and early-modern (1450-1750) periods. Alexander was significant in different ways to different dynasties administering different regions and in different eras. Different versions of his biography had different appeal, and at different times. By associating themselves with the hero, different rulers emphasized different facets of Alexander in their patronage of manuscripts.

In addition to being a part of popular culture and common knowledge for millennia, Alexander’s recounted exploits have particularly resonated with royals and nobles sitting in English through Indonesian courts. The course highlights a few select illustrated texts—produced between the 13th through 16th centuries—in Greek, French, Latin, Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. It is essential to consider each text within its own tradition, but placing them together also allows for a broader geographic and chronological scope that can also produce interesting comparisons of cross-cultural and trans-imperial significance.

Sessions will explore the interplay of a narrative’s ancient (often imagined) past taking place in the Greek Empire (ca. 4th century BCE), with the accreted layers of time periods in which the illustrated text is produced, read, or seen. Dwelling on Alexander’s reception in various courts and dynasties professing Christian and Islamic confessions (Franco-Flemish, Italian, Byzantine, Mongol, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, Abu’l-Khairid [Uzbek]), the course challenges the binaries of east and west, Christianity and Islam, through the universal appeal of the famous world conqueror. It will be of interest to students of literature, art history, religious history, culture and translation studies, medieval and early modern cultures, European and West/Central/South Asian history.

Sample Topics

Alexander as interpreted in the oldest texts and contexts: Greek, Syriac, Latin language sources, Biblical and Qur’anic versions.
New Persian and Old French—European Medieval traditions (13th-14th centuries) and early Persian literary versions (in the Shahnama, ca. 1010)
Alexander in the Byzantine and Mongol realms (13th-14th centuries.
Alexander in the Islamicate (Ottoman, Iranian, and Central Asian) realm (15th century), Turkish and Persian versions.
Alexander in the Islamicate (Ottoman, Iranian, and Central Asian) realm (16th century), Turkish and Persian versions.
Why Alexander? The appeal of superheroes.
Trip to the Weston Library to view manuscripts ((European and Turco-Persianate copies of the Alexander Romance).
Trip to British Library in London to view Old French Alexander manuscripts owned by Henry VIII, and Persian manuscript versions.

Social and Sexual Transgressions in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Literature (1200‒1700)

mlillywhite@middlebury.edu — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 14:40:45 +0000

Social and Sexual Transgressions in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Literature (1200‒1700) CMLT0030 / GSFS 0030 mlillywhite@mi… Fri, 01/20/2023 - 09:40 Tutorials Comparative Literature Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies Autumn 2023 Autumn 2024 Autumn 2025 Spring 2023 Spring 2024 Spring 2025 Spring 2026

The literature of late medieval and early modern Europe is replete with social and sexual transgressors who have often been overlooked by scholars. This course explores a range of characters on the margins of social and sexual acceptability in order to re-evaluate preconceptions held about matters of gender, sexuality, and social roles in the period 1200–1700. It places particular emphasis on issues of homosexual desire, sexual trickery and seduction, and progressive female characters and writers. Students may choose to study a selection of literary texts in the areas of prose, the short story, poetry, and drama.

Sample topics:

Saints and Sinners in Alfonso X’s Songs of the Virgin Mary.
Sexual Escapades in Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron.
The Outspoken Wife of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
Forthright Women in Gil Vicente’s Farce of Inês Pereira.
Sexual Seduction and Trickery in Juan Ruiz’s The Book of Good Love.
Go-Betweens and Sorceresses in Fernando de Roja’s Celestina.
Transgenderism and Transvestism in António Ferreira’s Bristo.
Sexual Misbehaviour and Deceptions in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron.
Homosexual Desire in Richard Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepherd and Cynthia.
The Female Rogue of Francisco López de Úbeda’s The Lives of Justina.
Swindlers and Tricksters in Francisco de Quevedo’s The Swindler.
Immorality Exposed in Francisco de Quevedo’s Dreams and Discourses.
Female Agency in María de Zayas’s Amorous and Exemplary Tales.
The Strong-Willed Nun of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s The House of Trials

These texts are available in English translations. However, if you do have some of the relevant language skills then the course can also be taught using the original texts: contact the Senior Tutor to discuss this.

Epic Tales of Rivalry. Non-European Encounters in Iberian Epic Poetry and New World Plays (1500‒1700)

mlillywhite@middlebury.edu — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 14:26:03 +0000

Epic Tales of Rivalry. Non-European Encounters in Iberian Epic Poetry and New World Plays (1500‒1700) CMLT 0020 / SPAN 0020 / PGSE 0020 mlillywhite@mi… Fri, 01/20/2023 - 09:26 Tutorials Comparative Literature Portuguese Spanish Autumn 2023 Autumn 2024 Autumn 2025 Spring 2023 Spring 2024 Spring 2025 Spring 2026

The early modern Spanish and Portuguese literary traditions contain a wealth of epic poems inspired by the classical Greek and Latin epics of the likes of Homer, Virgil and Ovid and by recent historical events related to crusade, conquest, and empire building. There are also a number of Spanish and Portuguese plays by Gil Vicente, Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Ricardo de Turia and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz that deal with the relationship between the Iberian Peninsula and the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in India, Africa, and the New World. Collectively, these works explore aspects of cultural exchange and conflict that arose from the encounters of conquistadors, pioneers and governors with other cultures, races and religions. By choosing to study a selection of these texts, students will explore how early modern Spain and Portugal related to the peoples that they encountered, and they will discuss the multiple perspectives held on issues relating to crusade and conquest. The module aims to challenge some of the long-standing assumptions made about colonization and empire building and re-evaluates the texts through a postcolonial lens where appropriate.

Sample topics:

Race and Religion in Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas.
Confrontation between the Portuguese and Ottaman Empires in Jerónimo Corte-Real’s Segundo cerco de Diu.
Patriotism and Sympathy in Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga’s Araucana.
Portrayals of the Indigenous in Pedro de Oña’s Arauco domado.
The Exploits of Hernán Cortés in Gabriel Lasso de la Vega’s Mexicana.
Non-European Encounters in the Final Voyage of Sir Francis Drake in Lope de Vega’s La Dragontea.
European Quarrels in a New World Context in Lope de Vega’s Brazil restituído.
Medieval Religious Conflict in Gaspar García Oriolano’s Murgetana.
Allegory and Symbolism in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s El divino Narciso.

A good number of the texts to be studied are available in English translations and, therefore, knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese is not a prerequisite for the course. However, if you do have the relevant language skills then it should be taught using the original texts: contact the Senior Tutor to discuss this.

Bestiaries: The Medieval Book of Beasts

mlillywhite@middlebury.edu — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 08:15:50 +0000

Bestiaries: The Medieval Book of Beasts ENAM 0990 mlillywhite@mi… Thu, 02/18/2021 - 03:15 Seminars English & American Literature Literary Studies Spring 2024 Spring 2025 Spring 2026

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. Have you ever suspected someone of crying crocodile tears? Or perhaps you have heard of halcyon days? Or have a belief that elephants are afraid of mice? All of these ideas, and so many besides, have their origin in the medieval bestiary, and its source, The Physiologus. The bestiaries are an influential genre of medieval writing that instructs readers to look at the natural world like a book and to interpret animal characteristics as symbols of spiritual truth. Upwards of fifty different bestiary manuscripts survive, widely translated into vernacular European languages (especially Middle English and Middle French), as well as Latin. Each of these is a catalogue of real and imaginary beasts, trees and stones, providing morals on the basis of their characteristics. Bestiaries vary in richness of illumination, some made as intricate devotional tools, some for private display of wealth, and some appear to have been illustrated with illiterate audiences in mind. The images accompanying the text are part of the fundamental function of these books, and many of these narrative images were copied and survive on their own in other places, such as carvings, statues and buildings across Europe (one famous example being the London Underground Station, Elephant & Castle).

Bestiaries can be fascinating because of their illuminations (which are often fantastical and glorious) or the strangeness of the moralistic stories they tell about animals. In this course we will see how their influence goes far deeper than this, exploring the workings of nature as sign in medieval culture, the social history of ‘animal stories’, the bestiaries as a window into the intricacies of medieval textual transmission, and the influence of the bestiary on the forms in which natural scientific knowledge is expressed. Whilst the ‘heyday’ of the Latin bestiary in Western Europe (especially England) was in the 12-13^th centuries, they depended upon earlier sources, especially the Physiologus (Alexandria translated into Latin c. 2-4^th Century) and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (8^thCentury), and new bestiaries were made throughout the later medieval period. Through weekly seminars focusing on specific bestiary manuscripts and related texts, this course will examine the evolving bestiary across the full medieval period and provide an opportunity to consider its echoes today. We will approach the bestiary with a global perspective and encourage intersectional consideration of these texts in relation to contemporary identities.

Students will work with bestiaries in many languages, including Latin, Old and Middle English, Middle French. This course will also make use of the rich resources of the special collections of the Oxford college libraries and Bodleian collections, including detailed digital facsimiles.

Political Philosophy II