Community is a key term in thinking about the Middle Ages in Europe and beyond. Characterised by multilingualism, intellectual endeavour, affective bonds, and artistic innovation, medieval communities were constantly forming and reforming; and this dynamism is both reflected in texts and artefacts and prompted by them. Medieval texts were often produced by and for specific communities (religious orders, courts, universities, or cities), and thereby reinforced the bonds of belonging and exchange that constituted those communities. Developments in knowledge, belief, or technology could bind a community together or lead to fractious disagreement, and art and literature could be ways to reinforce orthodoxy or to reimagine its strictures. Artefacts and texts also circulated between communities – those characterised by distinct linguistic or regional identities, for example – so that translation in all its forms (interlinguistic and intermedial as well as transnational) is central to the understanding of contact between communities throughout the Middle Ages. As medieval authors and scholars scrutinised the created world, they conceived of communities that reached beyond the human, creating contact with the divine and with the nonhuman animal world through imagination, investigation, and innovation. We will also attend to the ways in which literary texts and artefacts become nodes in transtemporal networks, as readers across the centuries find contact, challenge, and community in the medieval.

In these seminars, we aim to reflect the best aspects of medieval senses of community in our teaching practice. Several sessions will be co-taught, and the reading list will offer students a range of options with which they can engage to discuss the themes we propose. These themes will include:

· Hybrid communities

· The saint and the community

· Translation within and between communities

· Gender, reading, and community

· Communities of the more than human

· Affective, imagined, and transtemporal communities.

Preliminary Reading:

● Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (eds), History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person (Columbia UP, 2007) (read the introduction and explore the essays)

● Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern (Duke UP, 1999) or How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Duke UP, 2012)

● Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell UP, 2006)

● Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy (Princeton UP, 1987) (Part II: ‘Textual Communities’)

● Sarah Powrie and Gur Zac (eds), Textual Communities, Textual Selves, (PIMS, 2024) (read the introduction and explore the essays)

● Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006)

● Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (UMN Press, 1991) (at least Chapter 1)