Gillian Adler

The saint was the celebrity of the Middle Ages. The rise of pilgrimage, the fascination with relics, and sensational tales of martyrdom and miracle popularized individual saints across Europe and England. This course will focus on texts interested in the heroism, intercession, and sacrifice of saintly figures, as well as spiritual biographies and autobiographies that made bold claims to mystical authority and described fearless navigations of a shifting religious landscape. We will consider how the paradox of saints—disembodied yet concretely present between Heaven and Earth—transformed conceptions of the spiritual life. Special attention will be given to narratives of female mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, as well as the lives and records of heroic women saints including Joan of Arc and St. Katherine of Alexandria. Other works, such as The Life of Christina of Markyate and Chaucer’s “saintly romances,” will ask us to challenge the generic distinction between literature and saint’s life. To complement our study of the textual remains of saints, this course will encourage visits to local collections of reliquaries and other saintly artifacts, as well as explorations of digitized illustrations of medieval religious subjects.

Allegory was integral to the composition and interpretation of stories in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. As a narrative form, allegory implied the original sense of allegoresis, “speaking otherwise,” and engaged readers with the literal and symbolic senses of a story. This course will examine a range of allegorical works from the sixth century to the 16th century, including poetic and prose narratives by William Langland, Boethius, Guillaume de Lorris, Christine de Pizan, Dante, Petrarch, Mary Wroth, and Edmund Spenser. By examining the specific category of personification allegory in which characters interact with personified concepts—such as philosophy, love, time, truth, and reason—we will see how this literary technique helped authors unveil, as well as complicate, the moral, political, romantic, social, and spiritual questions of their time. While some of the assigned works are available in translation, students are expected to read Middle English texts in the original language.

This course examines, through medieval texts and manuscripts, the complex imagination of animals and animality in the Middle Ages. Critical theories of the Animal Turn seek to reevaluate the relationship between animals and human beings, envisioning the history of the animal as not only environmental but also intellectual, cultural, technological, economic and as a history of marginalization. Integrating our interdisciplinary study of medieval culture with these theories, we will consider textual and visual materials that recognize the essential, varied, and often surprising roles that animals play and that question an anthropocentric vision that has often otherized animals and animality. Online archives and other digital resources will help us navigate portrayals of animals found in bestiaries, romance narratives, and saints’ lives. In addition, students will learn about the critical importance of animal studies to current environmental justice issues. This course will participate in the Spring 2025 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and an involvement with local organizations. The semester will include two interludes during which students will engage in collaborative projects across disciplines and in partnership with students from Bronx Community College. Students will have the opportunity to develop field-based conference projects.

Geoffrey Chaucer is well-known today as the “Father of English Poetry” for his innovative use of Middle English in verse. During his lifetime, however, his reputation was political and social and his presence, local and international. Chaucer’s career as a London civil servant and diplomat was paramount to his poetic vocation. In the House of Fame, he even mocks himself for sitting at his desk after work to compose poetry each day. This course will investigate Chaucer’s works in a biographical and insular context, reading his poetry in relation to his 14th-century urban milieu and to significant late medieval events such as the Black Plague and the Great Rising of 1381. We will study not only the dream vision poems, Troilus and Criseyde and the Canterbury Tales, but also the works of other so-called Ricardian Poets of Chaucer’s age to explore more broadly the thematic preoccupations of London writers. Such topics include authority through authorship, dreams and the imagination, sexuality and the tradition of antifeminism, as well as hierarchies of power and the changing class structure. Examining these topics through a range of critical lenses, we will see how Chaucer and his friends dramatized controversial conversations of the time through the vernacular tongue—not only staking a new claim for English literariness but also making those conversations available to us as modern readers.

Dante’s Divine Comedy is, perhaps, the most creative encyclopedic work of the Middle Ages. Presenting the story of a unique religious pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, this epic poem envelops readers in a comprehensive education on everything from philosophy and theology to astronomy and geometry. The work teems with information on virtue and vice, as a reader of medieval spiritual texts might expect, but also surprises with debates on secular and sacred love, political theory, local and universal histories, and inquiries of ethics, epistemology, and ontology. This course will explore Dante’s “circle of knowledge” as it emerges through the aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual dimensions of his poem. The study of intertextual figures will help to illuminate the subtle ways in which Dante promotes his understanding of the world. Works—including not only the three canticles of Dante’s Comedy but also excerpts from his New Life (Vita Nuova), Monarchy (De Monarchia), On Eloquence in the Vernacular (De Vulgari eloquentia), and The Banquet (Convivio)—will be read in translation.

Dante’s The Divine Comedy is, perhaps, the most creative encyclopedic work of the Middle Ages. Presenting the story of a unique religious pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, this epic poem envelops readers in a comprehensive education on everything from philosophy and theology to astronomy and geometry. The work teems with information on virtue and vice, as a reader of medieval spiritual texts might expect, but also surprises with debates on secular and sacred love; political theory; local and universal histories; and inquiries of ethics, epistemology, and ontology. This course will explore Dante’s “circle of knowledge,” as it emerges through the aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual dimensions of his poem. The study of intertextual figures will help to illuminate the subtle ways in which Dante promotes his understanding of the world. Works—including not only the three canticles of Dante’s The Divine Comedy but also excerpts from his New Life (Vita Nuova), Monarchy (De Monarchia), On Eloquence in the Vernacular (De Vulgari eloquentia), and The Banquet (Convivio)—will be read in translation.

Dante’s The Divine Comedy is, perhaps, the most creative encyclopedic work of the Middle Ages. Presenting the story of a unique religious pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, this epic poem envelops readers in a comprehensive education on everything from philosophy and theology to astronomy and geometry. The work teems with information on virtue and vice, as a reader of medieval spiritual texts might expect, but also surprises with debates on secular and sacred love, political theory, local and universal histories, and inquiries of ethics, epistemology, and ontology. This course will explore Dante’s “circle of knowledge,” as it emerges through the aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual dimensions of his poem. The study of intertextual figures will help to illuminate the subtle ways in which Dante promotes his understanding of the world. Works—including not only the three canticles of Dante’s The Divine Comedy but also excerpts from his New Life (Vita Nuova), Monarchy (De Monarchia), On Eloquence in the Vernacular (De Vulgari eloquentia), and The Banquet (Convivio)—will be read in translation.

The course will examine representations of exile and diaspora in literary texts from ancient epic to Renaissance drama. We will examine authors who were displaced from their communities, such as the antique Roman poet Ovid and the medieval Italian poet Dante, and explore how they expressed anxieties about ostracism and distance through both autobiographical and fictional forms. We also will discuss how they used their works to leverage the physical experience of exile into more empowering perspectives and positions of distance. Reading epics—including Virgil’s Aeneid, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, and Milton’s Paradise Lost—we will consider the possibilities of freedom, discovery, and transformation in exile. In these narratives, exile has the potential to instigate political foundation, creative production, and spiritual discovery. Finally, this course will look at the metaphors of exile used by early female authors, including Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe, both to articulate and to subvert positions of gendered marginalization. Through the study of a range of literary texts, then, we will see how authors found ways of legitimizing themselves or their characters in the face of ostracism and displacement. In the process, students will develop their ability to analyze literature and cultivate a sense of literary history, especially “genealogies” traceable across ancient and medieval texts. Students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences on a biweekly basis over the course of the year. During the first semester, individual conferences will also alternate with biweekly group conference meetings, in which students will find opportunities to hone their research skills and study course material within different theoretical frameworks that complicate and develop close readings of texts. Individual conference projects should be semester-long; therefore, students will complete two projects over the course of the year. Possible conference topics include the study of a particular ancient, medieval, or Renaissance author or literary text pertaining to the course and of interest to the student. Conference topics may include the adventures of medieval romance, the symbolic landscapes and seascapes of early British and European literature, utopia and dystopia in early modern literature, gendered understandings of exile as marginalization, religious interpretations of exile, and travel narratives—including the works of Ibn Battuta and John Mandeville.

The course will examine representations of exile and diaspora in literary texts from ancient epic to Renaissance drama. We will study authors who were displaced from their communities, including the antique Roman poet Ovid and the medieval Italian poet Dante, and explore how they expressed anxieties about ostracism and distance through both autobiographical and fictional forms. We also will discuss how they used their works to leverage the physical experience of exile into more empowering perspectives and positions of distance. Reading epic narratives, including Virgil’s Aeneid, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, we will consider the possibilities of freedom, discovery, and transformation in exile. In these narratives, exile has the potential to instigate political foundation, creative production, and spiritual discovery. Finally, this course will look at the exilic metaphors used by female authors, including Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe, both to articulate and to subvert positions of gendered marginalization. The study of a range of literary texts will demonstrate how authors found ways of legitimizing themselves or their characters in the face of ostracism and displacement. In the process, students will develop their ability to analyze literature and cultivate a sense of literary history, especially “genealogies” traceable across ancient and medieval texts. Students are required to attend individual conferences on a biweekly basis. During the first semester, individual conferences will alternate with biweekly group conference meetings, which will focus on cultivating research skills and theoretical frameworks. Individual conference projects should be semester-long; therefore, students will complete two research-length essays over the course of the year.

What did it mean to be an author in medieval England? The author was not necessarily the person putting pen to page. In fact, many of the greatest medieval English works survive by virtue of oral poets and professional scribes, whose control over the creation of an authentic text was often limited or, at least, concealed. Furthermore, the Latin term auctor primarily referred to the ancient poets and Latin Church fathers, whose writings were revered as authoritative, rather than to the men and women who composed literary works in the Middle Ages. The ambiguity of the author is the starting point for this course, which considers medieval texts in the contexts of composition and transmission. We will think about the role of the scop, or poet-singer, in our study of Old English poetry and the role of both monastic and professional scribes in the preservation of texts throughout the Middle Ages. At the same time, we will examine a growing tendency to celebrate the creator of a text in later medieval literature. Authorial self-awareness and self-fashioning especially pertain to the development of mysticism and to courtly culture. Examining these diverse contexts of composition, we will discover how literary form, the original manuscripts, and the editing tradition interact to shape our sense of medieval literary history. Applying critical theories on the concept of the author, we will read works including, but not limited to, Beowulf, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This course will involve group conferences for students who take it for five credits, but students will have the option to take the lecture for three credits, omitting the conference requirement.

The saint in the Middle Ages fostered a cult of celebrity. The rise of pilgrimage, the pervasive fascination with relics, and sensational tales of both martyrdom and miracle popularized saints across England and the Continent. This course will focus on stories interested in the heroism, intercession, and sacrifice of saintly figures, with readings to include Latin, Old English, and Middle English saints’ lives, as well as devotional narratives. We will consider how the paradox of saints—disembodied yet concretely present, at a liminal position between Heaven and Earth—might have transformed conceptions of the spiritual life. Taking a gendered approach, we will pay special attention to the narratives of heroic women saints and their reading communities. This course will encourage visits to see reliquaries and other saintly artifacts housed in New York to complement our classroom study of the textual and material remains of saints.

In dream books and visionary narratives from antiquity to the Middle Ages, characters travel through imaginative alternate worlds that test the boundaries of ordinary human experience and provide insights into their own realities. Such narratives of mental adventure and wonder inspired elaborate dream theories and attributed great authority to the poet’s subjectivity. This course will examine the tradition of literary visions, from Cicero’s Dream of Scipio to the late medieval poem Pearl, using an interdisciplinary method that situates texts within their historical, theological, and manuscript contexts. Our study will highlight the formal conventions of the vision genre but also will reveal how many authors resisted a circumscribed form to explore various contentious political, social, and religious ideas.

Some say our idea of romantic love was invented in the Middle Ages. In the 12th century, cultural transformations were prompted by Church reforms in favor of mutual consent and loving marriage, as well as the rise of an aristocracy that valued courtship and chivalry. Contemporary literary works only reinforced new ideals and forms of love. The courtly “love languages” of the medieval era then influenced a phenomenon of Renaissance love poetry. This course will examine the development of amorous lyric and narrative from the High Middle Ages to the Renaissance, focusing on the burgeoning discourses of amour courtois and the rapid popularization of the sonnet form as a medium for declarations of desire—from Dante and Petrarch in Italy to Sir Philip Sidney and Shakespeare in England. The love that emerges in the selected texts may be secretive and illicit but also liberating and empowering, reflecting the author’s complex and sometimes contradictory visions of romance and marriage. We will examine themes of love-suffering, service to the always-distant beloved, and obsessive devotion but also consider the works of female authors who undermine these traditional attributes of courtship and highlight female subjectivity. The idealization of lovers and the emphasis on self-sacrifice in these literary works will indeed prove problematic to our modern understandings of gender roles in relationships in ways that will demonstrate the otherness of the medieval and Renaissance periods. Yet, they also will stress the familiarly transcendent and ennobling effects of love. The belief in the enduring nature of personal bonds will pertain to our discussion of how authors sought to ensure their immortal celebrity through love poetry.

In 12th-century France, the term romanz, or romance, was more linguistic than literary, referring to the vernacular writings that emerged as an increasingly popular alternative to Latin works. Yet, romance quickly developed into an expansive and fluid genre of fiction encompassing marvelous subjects, from monstrous knights and axe-bearing green men to holy dogs and shape-shifting heroes. In this course, the focal point of the quest in medieval romance will invite us to travel with knightly characters beyond familiar society and into magical or uncanny worlds. We will consider how romances provided literary entertainment to readers across a social spectrum, blurring traditional scholarly boundaries between courtly and popular forms, and how they examined contemporary conflicts of religious faith, courtship and marriage, ethical conduct, political authority, and national identity. Texts will include Middle English and Old French texts in translation. Reading stories shared across the Channel, we will think about the importance of translation, adaptation, and intertextuality in medieval literary culture.

This course will introduce students to Middle English (c. 1100–c. 1500) and to various Middle English literary works. We will study the vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and dialectical variations of the language. To understand the rise of vernacularity in England, we will also consider linguistic change against the backdrop of social, political, cultural, and intellectual events—from the Norman Conquest to the arrival of the printing press. Readings will include popular and courtly romances, the saints’ lives that sometimes circulated alongside such romances in manuscripts, and Middle English translations of the Bible. This seminar will not include conferences.

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales were two of the defining literary works of late medieval England. In this course, we will read these works (in Middle English) closely, exploring Chaucer’s complex interlacing of medieval genres, forms, and traditions. Studying Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales will reveal the diverse preoccupations of medieval literary culture: dreams and the imagination, sexuality and antifeminism, religious morality and clerical corruption, and the transcendent possibilities of love. Our examination of some contemporary writings will help us consider how the historical developments of 14th-century London, such as the changing class structure, influenced the social, economic, and political dimensions of Chaucer’s works.

Human history has always been characterized by the forced or voluntary migration of individuals or groups of people. In this lecture, we will analyze the dialectical relationship between the concepts of “home” and “exile” in a series of works ranging from the Bible and medieval poems to German literary texts of the 20th century, a century whose upheavals led to different waves of voluntary or forced migration. Essays by Edward Said will provide us with some critical vocabulary to speak and write about the interconnectedness of notions of home, flight, diaspora, migrants, and refugees, while the primary works will invite us to analyze these themes in various fictional and autobiographical forms. Our historical range will help us uncover the voices of those who were displaced from their communities but also the modes through which many authors transformed the punitive experience of exile into more empowering perspectives and positions of distance. We will begin with selected stories from the Old Testament (Pentateuch) and Old English exile poems, while later readings will include works by Ovid, Dante, Goethe, and Herman Hesse. We will conclude with Anna Segher’s novel about the dilemma of refugees being stuck in Marseille in 1942 and a story of four emigrants by the preeminent writer Sebald.

“What then is time?” St. Augustine wrote. “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” Time is elusive. The ticking clock and the calendar visualize the present moment becoming a future one, yet this arrow-like time conflicts with Augustine’s notion that time exists within the mind. If time is not an external phenomenon but, instead, our memories, sensations, and anticipation, then how real is time, and how can we measure it? Is it then possible to obstruct or delay the passage of time? Literary narratives can help us explore these questions and think about various ideas of human time. While we read our watches to determine where we exist in relation to current or prospective events, we often read narratives to learn about human experience and, thus, about human time. In them, we can discover diverse categories—sacred time, social time, and performative time, to name a few—that imagine experience as anything but neat, linear, and sequential. This course will consider the forms and concepts of time as they are represented in the Middle Ages and beyond. Reading medieval romances and dream visions, we will grapple with the temporality of subjective and imaginary worlds but also ponder how the different pauses, suspensions, compressions, accelerations, and simultaneities of medieval texts connect with later physical and metaphysical notions of time, including Virginia Woolf’s “moments of being” and Joycean epiphanies. Analyzing time-related critical texts, including Paul Ricoeur’s prodigious Time and Narrative, we will see how these concepts form an essential framework in which to read literary narratives from the Middle Ages to Modernism.

Where do we turn to understand the human experience of time? Science and technology might tell us about the physical flow of time or how the units of seconds, minutes, hours, and days might help to order time. Philosophy and literature, however, broaden the question of what time really is, emphasizing its inscrutability and elusiveness. Works in these disciplines demonstrate not only the mystery of human temporality but also the ways in which language and art attempt to capture, represent, or escape time. This course will examine the abiding concern with time and the complexities of temporal experience by examining a range of philosophical and literary writings, from antiquity to the present, as well as several films. Readings will include works by Augustine, Nietzsche, Kant, Kristeva, and Heidegger, as well as literary texts by Boethius, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Woolf.