English
Chaucer and nationhood; multilingualism and medieval linguistic
identities; the literatures and music of France and England from the thirteenth to
the fifteenth centuries; continental and insular vernacular manuscripts and
the relationships between them; city writing; the medieval lyric.
English and French literature of the
thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries; manuscripts produced in England in
this period; later medieval English literature, including Lydgate and Malory;
interactions between clerical teaching and Middle English literature.
Old English
prose literature and language, especially those of King Alfred's court in the last part of
the ninth
century; late Old English
manuscripts and
their implications for literary activity in English in the
transitional
period between Old and Middle English; the use of rhetoric
in Old
English poetry.
Old English semantics, Old English elegiac
and heroic poetry, including Beowulf, Old Icelandic pre-Christian
Eddic
and Skaldic poetry, including Haustlǫng and Thórsdrápa,
Anglo-Saxon paganism and Old Norse mythology, Sagas of Icelanders,
including Víga-Glúms
saga, the world of Faerie in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Middle English literature, especially Piers Plowman and
other religious texts; allegory, the
social
and historical contexts of late medieval literature, editions, and the
history
of criticism.
History
Medieval marriage;
preaching; papacy; rationalities.
Medieval cultural history, especially the occult sciences (magic,
astrology and alchemy) and their relationships to mainstream religion,
natural philosophy, medicine and cosmology; the history of animals.
Space and memory, monastic chronicles, the destruction of documents, physical representations of rulers and medieval identities.
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries; dialogues; accountability; how institutions think.
Palaeography and codicology; medieval vernacular chronicles; genealogical chronicles and diagrams.
Late medieval English ecclesiastical history,
especially the Lollard heresy; medieval and early modern taxation; monastic archives.
Monastic archives in England and France
(formation, dispersal and interpretation); the law and its
practitioners, in
medieval England.
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Hebrew & Jewish Studies
Medieval Jewish thought, including biblical interpretation, philosophy, and
mysticism; and medieval Hebrew manuscript study. In particular: Hebrew
scribality in medieval Italy and the possibility of institutionally organised
copying; relations between Jewish and Christian biblical interpretation in text
and in art.
Institute of Archaeology
The archaeology of early medieval societies in
north-western Europe.
Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the early middle ages,
landscape archaeology and state formation.
French
Medieval French and English literature, especially narrative;
constructions of identity; Narcissus, mirrors, doubles and the uncanny;
comparative literature; literary theory, especially gender, queer
theory,
anthropology, psychoanalysis.
Renaissance literature and cultural history;
gender studies; literary and cultural exchanges between France and the Muslim
East (Turkey and Persia) from the sixteenth through the eighteenth
centuries.
German
Short comic narratives of the later Middle Ages;
laughter, jest and ridicule in courtly and urban culture; medieval
drama; Wolfram von Eschenbach's 'Parzival'.
Italian
Dante’s Commedia and minor works; the
vernacular lyric from the
Sicilians to Petrarch; medieval urban culture, political literature and
chronicles; the theme of exile in early Italian verse.
Medieval and Renaissance philosophy (particularly Marsilio
Ficino and Giordano Bruno); Renaissance humanism, rhetoric, pedagogy,
cosmology and Copernicanism.
Dante; Italian literature and medieval
philosophy and theology.
Scandinavian Studies
Old Norse language and literature; Norse
mythology; early Christian writing in old Norse; religious change and
conversion; theoretical approaches to mythology; and textual criticism.
The history and culture of Scandinavia
between c. 900 and c. 1300; the Christianization of Scandinavia;
cultural interaction between the British Isles and Scandinavia.
Spanish
Literature, culture and history of early modern Spain and Latin America.
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