Department of English

For the first time ever, we are combining to teach a class on the two greatest poets of medieval England: Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. These two titans walked the same streets of London, but may never have met; they wrote in quite different styles, and yet their works were copied by the same scribe. We know little about Langland, other than that he presents himself as an itinerant cleric railing against the Church and championing the poor, wielding like a staff the popular verse form of his day, the alliterative long line. He may have struggled to make a living and tries to justify the many decades he spent revising his masterpiece, the allegorical dream-vision Piers Plowman. Chaucer, from a family of Thameside wine merchants, worked his way into royal service and wrote courtly poetry; but he mastered other genres, too, since he remained a commoner among aristocrats. He travelled widely on diplomatic missions, absorbing French and Italian influences which revolutionized his poetics. Langland appears to have stayed home, pursuing a pilgrimage of the imagination, and riffing on a native poetic tradition that looks back to Beowulf (and forwards, with its alliterative style, to Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889). Both Langland and Chaucer rode out cataclysmic events, such as the Bubonic Plague of 1348 (that killed half the population), the Hundred Years’ War (with France), the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and acrimonious religious divides presaging the Protestant Reformation. Amazingly, however, their poetic worlds are not pessimistic, but phenomenally energetic, full of curiosity, empathy, and forward drive. This course will appeal to anyone interested in poetry, ethics, the premodern, and (as in our own time) creative responses to hierarchy, oppression, and catastrophe.

Come one, come all - no previous knowledge of medieval literature is necessary to succeed in this course.