Time:   Monday 4:15-6:15 pm
Room:   3308
E-Mail:   talarico@mail.csi.cuny.edu
Home Page:    http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/~talarico
Phone (CSI):   718-982-3701
Office Hours:   Monday 2-4 pm and by appointment. We will discuss the possibility of working on reading Old French during our first class meeting.

Description:

If there is a work that can be characterized as a "medieval best-seller," then that text is the Roman de la Rose. It is also recognized as the single most significant work in the Old French literary tradition. It was written between 1225 and 1275 by two different authors with two very different perspectives. Its success with medieval audiences was nothing short of extraordinary, with well over 300 extant manuscripts, covering nearly three hundred years. It had an important influence on works written in the late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, both in and outside of France. By the end of the fourteenth century, it had been translated into Italian, Dutch, and English, and had the (dubious?) distinction of being cited and glossed in learnèd treatises in the monasteries. It was also one of the few vernacular medieval works to have been printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was singled out for praise (rare praise) in the Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse of Joachim du Bellay.

This course will focus on a close reading of this text which has remained controversial since the time it was written. We will focus on the "medieval controversies," including the famous debate about the Rose which attracted writers such as Christine de Pisan and Jean Gerson and, more importantly, on the literary debates that have been sparked over the last century. The Rose has been the subject of some of the most innovative and lively scholarly debate during the last thirty years, representing some of the most important scholarship in medieval studies and emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinarity and a variety of critical approaches and methodologies necessary to study this text. Some of these approaches have been: neo-patristics, the history of ideas, intertextuality, reception theory, and manuscript study. Students will have an opportunity to explore a wide variety of theories and approaches during the course of the semester.

There will be access to the manuscript concordances of six of the most important Rose manuscripts housed at Johns Hopkins University.

Students are not expected to enter the course knowing Old French: for French Program students (and others who may be interested) we will work on this in class and in special sessions prior to our class meeting time. While this course is given in English, students are expected to read and understand modern French.

Students will do oral presentations and there will be a research paper required.

2) Oral Presentations: Beginning on November 14, students will begin in-class oral presentations of their research paper topics--with printed bibliographies for all members of the class. Presentations are not to last more than ten minutes each.

3) Research Paper: You must discuss a topic with me. No papers will be accepted without prior approval of the topic. Thinking about a research project early in the semester will help to focus your readings and bibliographical work all our work in class.

The following dates are signaled on the syllabus:
Tuesday October 1: Term paper topics with preliminary bibliography of primary and secondary
sources due.
October 31:Draft of term paper due.
December 12: Last day to hand in final version of term paper (along with draft. You may, of course, submit your paper earlier! No papers will be accepted if they are not accompanied by a draft.

More mundane matters: If you have questions or concerns about the course, please get in touch with me.
E-mail is the quickest way to get my attention and we can arrange a meeting that way. I am in my office at the
GC on Mondays during my office hours, and you can reach me at CSI on other days.
Please do not come to me on the day something is due to tell me that you are not prepared (or worse,
announce it to me in class). I know that life has a way of interfering with the best of plans for us all, but please
make an effort to be prepared.

  Books:
Text to purchase:
Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose (in the collection Lettres Gothiques. This is a bilingual edition: Old French and Modern French translation).

Background readings you are required to consult:
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

Chaucer, The Wife of Bath's Tale
Christine de Pisan, Le Dit de la Rose; L'Epistre au Dieu d'Amours; Epistres sur le débat sur 'Le Roman de la Rose
Ovid, The Art of Love (and the Remedy)
Jean Renart, Le Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole
In addition, there is a very extensive list of primary and secondary texts on reserve in the GC Library.

Course Calendar:

Our primary focus will be a close reading of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose. Ovid and Boethius should be read before our October 11 class. The others should be completed before November 11.

The Fall 2005 Calendar of classes is a rather complex one, with many holidays and conversion days. In order for us all to show up on the correct days/times, here is our schedule:

1. Monday, 29 August: Classes after 4 pm are in session.

Monday, September 5: Labor Day: No classes

2. Monday, September 12

3. Monday, September 19

4. Monday, September 26

Monday, October 3: No classes AFTER 4pm

Monday, October 10: No classes

5. TUESDAY, October 11: Classes follow a MONDAY SCHEDULE in CUNY-land!

Term paper topics due (see #3, above, under "Requirements"). Have you finished Ovid and Boethius?

6. Monday, October 17

7. Monday, October 24

8. Monday, October 31 (costumes "fairly welcomed . . . !")       Term Paper drafts due

9. Monday, November 7

10. Monday, November 14

11. Monday, November 21

Thursday, November 24: Thanksgiving

12. Monday, November 28

13. Monday, December 5

14. Monday, December 12         Term Papers due

Bibliography & Web Links:

Students are required to check the Reserve Reading list in the library for books that have been set aside for this course. The bibliography for the Roman de la Rose is very extensive. The bibliographies in the following two studies of the Rose contain excellent (and relatively recent!) sources:

Brownlee, Kevin and Sylvia Huot, ed. Rethinking the Romance of the Rose: Text, Image, Reception. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1992.
Huot, Sylvia. The 'Romance of the Rose' and its medieval readers: interpretation, reception, manuscript transmission. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1993.

Web Links for the Roman de la Rose (New website finds--good, bad, and ugly--are always welcome):

Rose Manuscripts Digital Project at Johns Hopkins University (Password protected)

Christine de Pisan and Feminist Historiography (with further links to sources)
Early Medieval French Women Writers (E-texts of Christine's L'Epistre au dieu d'amours and Le Dit de la Rose.

University of Glasgow manuscripts and illuminations (including links to Chaucer manuscripts)

The Roman de la Rose and the 13th Century Prohibition of Homosexuality (at the Labyrinth site)

Getty Museum: Selected folios of Rose manuscript holdings

BNF article on the Rose with links to edited versions (BNF Gallica)

Illuminations (Euroweb)

British Library on-line manuscripts

For students whose experience with medieval literature./medieval studies may be limited, there are some starting points to help sort out this vast corpus of material:

Getting Started, in the Broadest Sense:

The MLA International Bibliography. Updated yearly and available through research libraries on-line. It has a searchable index and often an abstract of the article.

Bibliography of the International Arthurian Society. More specialized, but an excellent starting point for matters Arthurian. In print form only.

Encomia. The bibliography of the International Courtly Literature Society. Deals with non-Arthurian literature. In print form only.

Many reliable websites offer excellent bibliographies and links to either faculty pages or the pages of "official sites" of professional organizations.

Two of the most wide-ranging sites:
The Labyrinth at Georgetown University: http://www.labyrinth.georgetown.edu
The ORB: On-line Reference Book for Medieval Studies: http://the-orb.net

Linking to my own website: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/modlang/talarico/talarico.htm
will get you to many of the general sites on the net that have reliable bibliographic and general information.

Some basics (some "classics" in medieval studies are included here):

Bethurum, Dorothy, ed. Critical Approaches to Medieval Literature: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1958-1959. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1960.
(This series of essays gives the essentials of the "Robertsonian controversy.")

Bloch, Howard R. Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Bolgar, Robert R. The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries. New York: Harper and Row, 1964 [1954].

Busby, Keith, ed. (with Terry Nixon, Alison Stones and Lori Walters). The Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993, 2 vols.

Busby, Keith. Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002, 2 vols.

Chance, Jane. Woman as Hero in Old English Literature. Syracuse: Syracuse U. Press, 1986.

Chenu, Marie Dominique. Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on the New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West. Pref. Étienne Gilson. Selected, edited, and translated by Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little. Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1968.

Clanchy, Michael. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1979.

Coleman, Janet. Medieval Readers and Writers: 1350-1400. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1981.

Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1973 [1953].

Dronke, Peter. Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1968, 2 vols.

____ . Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (203) to Marguerite Porete (1310). New York: Cambridge U. Press, 1984.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Ferrante, Joan. Woman as Image in Medieval Literature from the Twelfth Century to Dante. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1975.

Foley, John Miles. "Literary Art and Oral Tradition in Old English and Serbian Poetry." Anglo-Saxon England 12 (1983): 183-214.

Frappier, Jean. Chrétien de Troyes. Paris: Hatier, coll. Connaissance des Lettres, 1968.

__________. Chrétien de Troyes: L'homme et l'oeuvre. Paris: Hatier, 1957. English translation by Raymond Cormier, Chrétien de Troyes: The Man and His Work. Athens, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 1982.

_________. Chrétien de Troyes et le mythe du Graal: Étude sur ‘Perceval ou le conte du Graal.' Paris: SEDES, 1972.

__________. Étude sur La Mort le roi Artu. Geneva: Droz, 1961.

Gilson, Étienne. A History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages. New York: Random House, 1956.

Hanning, Robert W. The Individual in Twelfth Century Romance. New Haven: Yale U Press, 1977.

Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1969 [1924].
Revised under the title: The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Trans. R. Payton and U. Mammitzsch. Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1996.

Jewers, Caroline. Chivalric Fiction and the History of the Novel. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2000.

Kaeuper, Richard. Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe. NY: Oxford U Press, 1999.

Keen, Maurice. Chivalry. New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1984.

Krueger, Roberta L., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2000.

Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge U. Press, 1967 [1964].

Loomis, Roger Sherman. Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1949.

____. Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance. New York: Columbia U. Press, 1927.

____. The Development of Arthurian Romance. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1963.

Morris, Colin. The Discovery of the Individual: 1050-1200. Toronto: U. of Toronto Press in association with the Medieval Academy of America, 1987 [1972].

Muscatine, Charles. Chaucer and the French Tradition. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1957.

Paris, Gaston. La Littérature française au moyen âge. Paris: Hachette, 1914.

Patterson, Lee. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: U. Wisconsin Press, 1987.

Robertson, D.W. A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives. Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1962.

Southern, Richard William. The Making of the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell U Press, 1953.

__________. Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages. Harmondsworth, England and New York: Penguin, 1970.

Stevens, John. Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches. London: Hutchinson, 1973.

Stock, Brian. The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1983.

Stuard, Susan Mosher, ed. Women in Medieval Society. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1976.

Vitz, Evelyn Birge. Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology. New York: NYU Press, 1989.

__________. Orality and Performance in Medieval French Romance. Boydell and Brewer, 1999.

Zumthor, Paul. Essai de poétique médiévale. Paris: Eds. du Seuil, 1972.