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The Measly Middle Ages? Wretchedness & Relief 1100-1400 - HIS00023I

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  • Department: History
  • Module co-ordinator: Dr. Danielle Park
  • Credit value: 30 credits
  • Credit level: I
  • Academic year of delivery: 2022-23

Module summary

This module trains its eye on the marginalised and the needy of medieval society. On the face of it, our challenge is a creative one – for these were not the people who wrote (or kept) records. But when we look, we can find them, for medieval people worried about the suffering they saw every day. Through their efforts we can think about how medieval people gave voice (and language) to human suffering, and how medieval society noticed, ignored, or tried to help.

To find those pushed to the edges, we look at a range of historical and human problems. In miracle stories, we find experiences of disease, wounds, and disability, as well as the responses of family and neighbours. Medical texts, charters, chronicles, and the customs of welfare institutions (including hospitals) open the door to medieval ideas of mental illness and leprosy (a disease which transfixed and appalled contemporaries), as well as to questions of who deserved welfare, and how to care for the sick and elderly.

We explore, too, relationships between sickness, poverty, and migration (and urbanisation) and new ways of thinking about exclusion or how a human body is shaped by its time. Important, too, are institutional responses, through monasteries, leprosaria, and hospitals. They reveal not only how contemporaries identified and responded to human suffering but also the political implications of the relationships that were forged between the powerful and the desperate.

All sources are provided in translation.

Module will run

Occurrence Teaching period
A Spring Term 2022-23 to Summer Term 2022-23

Module aims

The aims of this module are:

  • To provide students with the opportunity to study particular historical topics in depth;

  • To develop students’ ability to examine a topic from a range of perspectives and to strengthen their ability to work critically and reflectively with secondary and primary material; and

  • To combine seminar preparation and discussion of the topic being studied with extended independent work on a project devised by the student.

Module learning outcomes

Students who complete this module successfully will:

  • Have acquired a deep knowledge of the specific topic studied

  • Have developed their ability to use and synthesise a range of primary and secondary sources

  • Be able to evaluate the arguments that historians have made about the topic studied

  • Have developed their ability to study independently through seminar-based teaching

  • Gain experience of working collaboratively through an assessed group project

Module content

Teaching Programme:

This 30-credit module is taught through a weekly two-hour seminar run from weeks 2-10 in the spring term and a four week period of project work undertaken in weeks 1-4 of the summer term. Students will complete their group project work within that period and tutors should arrange to be available for consultation with students twice during that time. There will be no formal seminar teaching during this period.

Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:

  1. Human experience in miracle stories

  2. Rethinking miracles: new approaches

  3. How might we understand medieval ‘madness’?

  4. Outcast? The problem of leprosy

  5. Changing ideas of the poor & almsgiving (or, who gets what)

  6. The question of care

  7. Welfare institutions: how to help, who to help, and why?

  8. Running an institution: hospital, monasteries and old age homes

  9. A new world: charity after the plague

Project work will deal with the following :

In group projects, students will explore relationships between the haves and have-nots in a particular city or region (and its sources). Group project work will involve any text from the field of natural philosophy broadly interpreted by an author other than those dealt with in the seminar.

Assessment

Task Length % of module mark
Groupwork
Group Project		 N/A 33
Online Exam - 24 hrs (Centrally scheduled)
Open Exam - The Measly Middle Ages?		 8 hours 67

Special assessment rules

None

Additional assessment information

Formative assessment will be a group presentation between weeks 5 and 7 of the spring term.

For summative assessment students take a 24-hour open exam in the summer term assessment period, usually released at 11:00 on day 1 and submitted at 11:00 on day 2. For those taking two Explorations modules the 24-hour open exams are held on consecutive days, with both papers released at 11:00 on day 1 and both due for submission on 11:00 of day 3.

Students also submit a piece of written work for their group project of no more than 3,000 words in week 5 of the summer term.

The exam carries 67% of assessment and the project element 33% for this module.

Students who need to be reassessed in the project component of this module (for example due to Exceptional Circumstance) will be required to submit in the summer reassessment period a shorter individual project (2,000 words) which should include a short reflection (500 words max) on group work, considering how this project could be expanded if a team of three to four people were working on it. Students should consider how they would divide up the research tasks, and reflect briefly on problems which might arise and how they would manage them. Module tutors will advise on the content and design of this project.

Reassessment

Task Length % of module mark
Groupwork
Group Project		 N/A 33
Online Exam - 24 hrs (Centrally scheduled)
Open Exam - The Measly Middle Ages?		 8 hours 67

Module feedback

Following their formative assessment task, students will typically receive written feedback that will include comments and a mark within 10 working days of submission.

Work will be returned to students in their discussion groups and may be supplemented by the tutor giving some oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their procedural work with their tutor (or module convenor) during student hours. For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.

For the summative assessment task, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 20 working days of the submission deadline. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see the Statement of Assessment.

Indicative reading

For term time reading, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:

Farmer, Sharon, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor. Ithaca, NY. Cornell University Press, 2001.

Rubin, Miri, Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Rawcliffe, Carole. Leprosy in Medieval England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006.


The information on this page is indicative of the module that is currently on offer. The University is constantly exploring ways to enhance and improve its degree programmes and therefore reserves the right to make variations to the content and method of delivery of modules, and to discontinue modules, if such action is reasonably considered to be necessary by the University. Where appropriate, the University will notify and consult with affected students in advance about any changes that are required in line with the University's policy on the Approval of Modifications to Existing Taught Programmes of Study.