MEDVL 2400

Cultures of the Middle Ages

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2014-2015.

This course introduces students to one of the major concerns of the literature, art, and religious thought of western Europe between roughly 400 and 1400 AD: transformation. We'll begin with Ovid and Apuleius, the classical and late-classical myth-makers who literally wrote the books on metamorphosis. We'll then look at Augustine's  Confessions - where Christian conversion  becomes an even more startling kind of transformation - before proceeding to the stories of shape-shifters gathered together by the twelfth-century French poet Marie de France.  Then we'll take a look at Dante's account of metamorphosis as retribution in Inferno, as well as the kinds of transformations fantasized in the margins of medieval manuscripts, as Michael Camille describes them in Image on the Edge. We'll finally take the time to engage with both the transfiguration of Christ in medieval thought and its close analogue, stigmatization, as undergone most famously by Francis of Assisi. In the process, we'll ask what happens when the human is transformed into the divine.

When Offered Spring.

Breadth Requirement (HB)
Distribution Category (LA-AS)

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