Module overview
Monsters lurk at the edges of the medieval map and imagination. These creatures repulse, fascinate, disconcert, and challenge humans in many of medieval Europe’s most intriguing and compelling texts from Beowulf to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This module will look in detail at the roles that monsters and monstrosity play in literature, culture and thought from Early Medieval England to the fifteenth century. The module will equip you to think about how medieval people thought not just about physical monsters, but about the intersections and distinctions between medieval notions of monstrosity and constructions of gendered, racial and religious difference. You will learn to analyse how medieval texts and cultural artefacts deployed representations of monstrous -- and uncannily human -- others to define, interrogate, and trouble notions of identity and community.
Aims and Objectives
Learning Outcomes
Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills
Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:
- Bring appropriate theoretical and methodological reading into dialogue with literary and cultural texts
- Define and research your own essay topic on a relevant subject
- Identify appropriate critical and theoretical reading for a research topic
- Analyse representations of monsters, monstrosity and otherness across a range of literary and visual media
Knowledge and Understanding
Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:
- A range of key texts and cultural artefacts from medieval England and the European Middle Ages
- The rhetorical and cultural uses of representations of otherness and monstrosity
- Relevant theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of monstrosity and other forms of otherness in the Middle Ages
- Intersections and distinctions between monstrosity and other forms of otherness in the Middle Ages
Transferable and Generic Skills
Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:
- Design and plan a research essay
- Work with feedback to complete a project of your own design
Syllabus
The precise syllabus will vary from year to year but will always include a selection of the following texts and themes:
1. Theorizing Otherness and Monstrosity in the Middle Ages: Key thinkers
2. Monstrosity and gender in early medieval Britain: Beowulf and Judith
3. England's monstrous neighbours: otherness and colonization in Gerald of Wales' Topography of Ireland
4. Mapping worldly diversity: the Hereford World Map, the Ebstorf World Map and Mandeville's Travels
5. Chaucer's proximate others: the Man of Law's tale and the Prioress's Tale
6. Monstrous mothers: Melusine
7. Translating the Monstrous: re-imagining Beowulf in the twentieth and twenty-first century
Learning and Teaching
Teaching and learning methods
1 lecture per week
1 discussion-based seminar per week
1 student-led learning support hour per week
This module includes a Learning Support Hour. This is a flexible weekly contact hour, designed to support and respond to the particular cohort taking the module from year to year. This hour will include (but not be limited to) activities such as language, theory and research skills classes; group work supervisions; assignment preparation and essay writing guidance; assignment consultations; feedback and feed-forward sessions.
| Type | Hours |
|---|---|
| Guided independent study | 70 |
| Assessment tasks | 50 |
| Seminar | 10 |
| Lecture | 10 |
| Practical classes and workshops | 10 |
| Total study time | 150 |
Resources & Reading list
Internet Resources
Digital Mappa - Old English Poetry project.
Different Visions: New Perspectives on Medieval Art, vol. 2: Monstrosity (Special Issue).
Textbooks
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (1996). Monster Theory: Reading Culture. University of Minnesota Press.
(1999). Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages. University of Minnesota Press.
Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (2003). The Monstrous Middle Ages. University of Wales Press.
Asa Simon Mittman (2006). Maps and Monsters in Medieval England. Taylor and Francis.
Asa Mittman and Peter Drendle (2013). The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Routledge.
Assessment
Summative
This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.
| Method | Percentage contribution |
|---|---|
| Essay proposal | 10% |
| Essay | 90% |
Referral
This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.
| Method | Percentage contribution |
|---|---|
| Essay | 100% |
Repeat
An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.
| Method | Percentage contribution |
|---|---|
| Essay | 100% |
Repeat Information
Repeat type: Internal & External