Literary History has traditionally accentuated the insular qualities of English writing; the white cliffs of Dover have been typically invoked as a bulwark against further European encroachment (following the unfortunate business of 1066). More recent critics, maintaining Victorian initiatives, have labored to trace geneaologies of nationalism back to Middle English texts. This course will test such assumptions by reading English medieval writings within and as part of greater European networks of production: international religious institutions, pilgrimage industries, cross-Channel trade, the money markets centered on Paris and Bruges, the art markets that grew up around them, the movements of mercenary soldiers, the triangular dealings in wool, cloth, and finance that connect London, Flanders, and northern Italy.

In the first two weeks of the course, we'll probably work with Alexandra Barratt's anthology _Women's Writing in Middle English_, beginning with some treatises on obstetrics translated from Trotula of Salerno; we'll then consider figures such as Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, and Julian of Norwich. We'll then spend several weeks with Margery Kempe, following her journeys to Lincoln and Canterbury, to Rome, the Holy Land, and (in Book II) to Danzig. The peculiar geography of Lynn projects its trade and cultural links northwards and eastwards to the Hanseatic ports; the European itineraries of Chaucer (who crossed the Channel to Calais) bring us to quite different spaces. France and Flanders might be explored not as "foreign" cultures, but as part of Chaucer's "native ground;" Italy, as an everyday part of Thameside working life and as amply represented in Chaucerian writings, lies closer to home than Wales, Ireland, or Scotland.

For the later eight weeks or so of the course, then, we'll consider various Chaucerian texts in conjunction with the networks of capital, warfare, and wool extending from London, Canterbury and Calais (a French port in English hands) to Bruges, Ghent, Florence, and "the Barbary coast." Consideration of pressured effects associated with the increasing division of labor and incipient urbanization bring us to Bosch; new interests in representing peasantry (and in appropriating peasant discourses) lead on to Bruegel. We might also consider the Hundred Years' War, alchemy, Roger van der Weyden, the relationship of the body to its clothes, Boccaccio's _Decameron_, the Italian slave trade (and its relationship to Italian humanism), (and its relationship to Italian humanism), Ireland, and Venice.

Traditional historicist concern with time (organization through periodization) will be balanced against a new interest, now finding belated theoretical expression, in space. Students will have a free hand in finding and elaborating a research paper within this large and unruly complex of issues; there will be a series of short in-class reports.