| The English language, the university, and the book are all medieval inventions that are still central to our lives. Medieval Literature accounts for more than half the twelve-hundred year duration of the English literary tradition, beginning some time in the 700s C.E. and spanning about eight centuries. From the early epic Beowulf to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Langland’s Piers Plowman; from the Anglo-Saxons’ imaginative rewriting of the Bible to The Book of Margery Kempe and the Miracle Plays; from the scandalous riddles of the Exeter Book to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, from The Battle of Maldon to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur: As John Dryden said about Chaucer's pilgrims, "here is God’s plenty." |
Faculty
Daniel Donoghue
Joseph Harris
Nicholas Watson
James Simpson
Medieval English Studies at Harvard: A History
Doctoral Study, Colloquium, and Dissertations (1894-)
Courses
Fall 2006
English 90cp Performance of History: Medieval to Early Modern (New Course)
English 102e Anglo-Saxon Language and Culture: Introduction to Poetry
Medieval Studies 114 The Medieval Imagination: Visions, Dreams, and Prophecies (New Course)
English 201 Images, Idolatry and Inconoclasm, 1350-1600: Graduate Seminar
Spring 2007
English 90cm Mapping the World: Medieval Romance (New Course)
English 101 The History and Structure of the English Language
English 103e Anglo-Saxon Language and Culture: Beowulf and Elegy
English 112 Chaucer and the Invention of Middle English Literature"
Events
Colloquium (schedule)
Resources
Graduate Students
The "Brut"
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At
left is a page from a copy
of the Middle English prose "Brut", a popular 14th- century history of
England from earliest times onwards. The "Brut" is just one of many medieval manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard. Follow along as Prof. Dan Donoghue reads a passage from the "Brut" below. |
The Middle English Prose "Brut" chronicle begins with an extraordinary
myth: a Greek king marries off his thirty-three daughters, but the women resist
male hegemony, and under the leadership of the eldest, Albina, conspire to murder
their husbands; in punishment their father sets them adrift in a rudderless
ship, which is driven to the empty land later known as Albion. The new gynocratic
state supplies no sexual satisfaction, and the frustrated women mate with demons.
The resulting race of giants expands to fill the island until, 800 years later,
the Trojan Brutus arrives to establish order and rename the place Britain.
The "Brut" derives its name from Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas,
who lent another spelling of his name to the island (Britain) that he settled
with his Trojan followers. Much of the text concerns the court of King
Arthur (a descendent of Brutus) but its potent combination of fiction and history
also popularized stories like that of King Lear. Originally composed in
Norman-French in the thirteenth century, it was later translated into English
and Latin and became one of the most popular secular works in England.
Caxton published a version of it in 1480, and despite its fantastic elements
early Modern historians like Holinshed regularly turned to it as a source.
The Houghton Prose Brut was transcribed after 1430.
When the "Brut" was compiled, English history was already being synthesized into
a sinuous and continuous narrative of 'nation building.' The great ruptures,
such as the Norman Conquest and the displacement of the Anglo-Saxon ruling class
and its literary language that followed, are acknowledged in the text. But they
have become part of a sequence that, for all its quality of flux, is on the
largest scale divinely ordained, part of the process by which the many kingdoms
of the early Anglo-Saxons, united by the heirs of Alfred, were further centralized
around the post-Conquest monarchs and their capital, London.
