This paper is available for 2022-23.

To be embodied is to take up space, to exist in time, and to be part of a community. In this paper we explore a series of medieval texts and artefacts which shed light on how bodies were interpreted, imagined, included, and excluded in the Middle Ages. The lectures and supervisions are organised into four themes: Race in the Middle Ages; Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory; Gender and Space; and Animal and Human.

Figures and narratives from the European Middle Ages have recently become misrepresented and appropriated by groups who wish to portray that era as a time of “purity”: in Race in the Middle Ages, we show how misguided this move is by looking at the development of racializing discourse in medieval French literature. The portrayal of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory enables reflection on spaces which lie beyond mortal temporality and yet shape human life. While medieval literature may often seem to depend on fixed ideas of binary gender, we will look at texts and traditions which open spaces to trouble that binary. And in Animal and Human, we explore stories, artefacts, and images which remind us how much human bodies share with animals.

A course which encompasses romances, saints’ lives, lais and chansons de geste from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, Fr7 offers a chance to explore a broad range of medieval literature, as well as looking in detail at some aspects of medieval literary culture.