Gillian Adler

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 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.

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.