Kommentar |
Knights were eminently social figures. In opposition to the modern cliches of singular knights or the imagination influenced by a lonely Don Quijote roaming the central Spanish plains with nobody else for company than Sancho Panza, knights were not only associated with sociability and a variety of social obligations, but were the prime embodiment of a hierarchically organised and oriented set of values supposed to govern society. In later medieval times, the heyday of the knights had waned, the ‘great’ campaigns of the crusades were over and feudalism was threatened by tendencies toward a more centralised power at the royal court as well as the economic and social rise of the merchant class. This module will focus on how late-medieval literary representations of knights, ranging from the Pearl poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, via Chaucer’s knight from the Canterbury Tales to Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, negotiate social value schemes while at the same time ever more consciously transferring the waning social reality of ‘real’ knights into decidedly literary figures and representations. In this latter sense, the representation of knights and their values also serves as a way of literary self-reflection and self-positioning in such literary paradigms as courtly love or the Arthurian romances.
The module consists of two seminars. While the first seminar will focus on the cultural-historical issues of the texts discussed and also intends to provide an introduction to basic concepts of medieval literature; the second seminar will deal in more depth with methodological and theoretical issues and with questions concerning the development and structuring of a research project/essay. |