By Sarah Nim (Fall 2022) Geoffrey Chaucer was born somewhere in the early 1340s in the Middle Ages. Little of his life outside of his work with the Crown is known. He entered the world of aristocracy by marrying the daughter of a knight and is considered one of the […]
Medieval
11 posts
By Scott Williams (Fall 2022) The book of Judith was written originally in Hebrew. The poem was adapted from the Book of Judith in the “late 10th-century[by an] Anglo-Saxon abbot and writer” (Greenblat 109). The Hebrews in the poem are the good guys and the ones victorious against the Assyrians. […]
By Nick Dlugos (Fall 2022) The idea of a perfect hero, especially in medieval literature, often manifests itself in the ideas of knights like Sir Lancelot or many of the other knights of the roundtable. However, one knight of the roundtable, Sir Gawain, isn’t the same as his peers. When […]
By Melissa DeFabritiis (Fall 2022) The fourteenth-century poem The King of Tars by an unknown author tells the tale of religious and racial tensions between the white Christians of Tars and the Black Muslims of Damascus, and details the white Tarsians expressing feelings of superiority over their Black Damascan counterparts. […]
By Julia Dantzler (Fall 2022) In the 12th century, Marie de France wrote the lai “Bisclavret,” which is the story of a man who changes forms and disappears for days at a time from his wife and civilized life to be a wolf in the forest. This lai is one […]
By Jeremy Whitman-Kinghorn (Fall 2022) Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a work that offers an unrivaled glimpse into medieval life in 14th-century England. Written in Middle English in the 14th century, Chaucer wrote what was clearly from his perspective a quite accurate dissection of the social structure of the […]
By Ian Quinn (Fall 2022) It is only through time the most staggering warnings are proved to be perceived as such. And while The King of Tars is mere fiction among real-world events dealing with the same issues, its presentation of them successfully displays a story that is as grim […]
By Fengying Guo (Fall 2022) “The Lay of the Werewolf” is one of the twelve Breton lais written by Marie de France. Historians know very little about her and they believe that she is either a nun or an aristocratic woman because those are “the only literate women in medieval […]
By Ella Incantalupo (Fall 2022) Oftentimes, predominantly white nations use descriptors of what they are not, in order to define what they are. The result is othering different nations, cultures and religions, in order to be described as more English. This phenomenon is as prevalent today as it was over […]
By Claire Davies (Fall 2022) The Old English poem Judith is an adaptation of the Book of Judith, located in the Old Testament of Catholic Bibles as well as the Septuagint. Judith’s author is unknown; however, the poem is found in the same manuscript as Beowulf, so the two texts’ […]