Edmund Leighton's 1882 oil painting, Abelard and his Pupil Heloise.

Alumni Sequence: The Middle Ages Year II

Cost
500.00

This course was available in the past and may be presented again as part of the Basic Program of Liberal Education curriculum.

The seminar takes us on a tour of some dramatically different conceptions of love. The scandalous affair between the 12th century scholastic Abelard and his brilliant student Heloise is memorialized in their letters, in which they struggle to understand that affair in the context of their religious lives ten years later. Abelard’s intellectual and ideological rival Bernard interprets the erotic poetry of the Song of Songs as an allegory of love between God and the soul. In the poetry of the Sufi Muslim Rumi, the love of the speaker for his fellow mystic and teacher is bound up with a conception of spiritual ascent via love of the divine. Petrarch’s Canzoniere records the narrator’s obsessive love for a woman named Laura, his restless self-qualifications challenging both idealizations of eros and penitential moralizing about it. Finally, the narrator of Nabokov’s still controversial novel Lolita recounts his tortured desire for and lunatic cross-country journey with a 14-year-old “nymphet.”

In the tutorial we make our way through the 13th century allegorical dream vision The Romance of the Rose. By means of a host of allegorical characters, some of whom deliver extended monologues on a wide range of topics, this immensely popular and influential text skirts the distinction between seemingly straightforward erotic narrative and encyclopedic meditation on the psychology of desire.

Course Outline

Reading List:

  • The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice, Penguin, 2004. ISBN 978-0140448993
  • Rumi, Swallowing the Sun, trans. Franklin Lewis, One World Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1851689712
  • The Poetry of Petrarch, trans. David Young, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. ISBN 978-0374529611
  • Nabakov, Lolita, Vintage, 1989. ISBN 978-0679723165
  • De Lorris and de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan, Oxford World’s Classics, 2009. ISBN 978-0199540679
  • Bernard de Clairvaix, Sermon 1 on Song of Songs (PDF provided on Canvas)
  • Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies and Other Writings, trans. Ineke Hardy (Hackett, 2018)  978-1624667299

Notes

Online registration deadline: Thursday, December 29 at 5 pm CT