- Department: History
- Module co-ordinator: Dr. Danielle Park
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: M
- Academic year of delivery: 2022-23
The medieval imagination encompasses the religious and the spiritual which was not only expressed through Church discourse, but through encounters with pilgrimage, crusade, and the miraculous. We will examine understanding of these encounters and how medieval audiences interpreted and interacted with these ideas. Encounters with the supernatural were not confined to the miraculous. Medieval romances describe encounters with other worlds where the very frontiers between the real and the other could be crossed. On the other side was the realm of the fantastical populated by fairies, ghosts, and werewolves. Such creatures could also populate the real world. Missionaries to the Mongols expected to see ‘monstrous races’ - including dog-headed men and men with faces in the middle of their chests. These ideas translated into map-making; real and imagined places sat alongside each other on medieval world maps (mappae mundi).
This module explores how medieval Europeans constructed the world around them taking a thematic approach that encompasses both spiritual and secular spheres. We will begin by examining broad concepts of medieval wonder before moving onto consider how medieval men and women imagined the worlds around them encompassing religious experiences, and fantastic encounters with ghouls and demons. Our sources include not only written accounts of miracles and visions but also material culture including tapestries depicting the apocalypse and maps depicting heaven looking down on a world populated by man and myth. We will use these materials to consider the medieval world view, and what these sources can tell us about medieval mentalities.
Occurrence | Teaching cycle |
---|---|
A | Autumn Term 2022-23 |
The module aims to:
After completing this module students should have:
Teaching Programme:
Students will attend eight weekly two-hour seminars in weeks 2-9.
The provisional outline for the module is as follows:
Task | Length | % of module mark |
---|---|---|
Essay/coursework 4,000 Word Essay |
N/A | 100 |
None
Students will complete a 2,000-word formative essay, due in week 6 of the term. They will then submit a 4,000-word assessed essay for summative assessment in week 1 of the following term.
For further details about assessed work, students should refer to the Taught Masters Degrees Statement of Assessment.
Task | Length | % of module mark |
---|---|---|
Essay/coursework 4,000 Word Essay |
N/A | 100 |
Following their formative assessment, students will receive oral feedback at a one-to-one meeting with their tutor and written feedback consisting of comments and a mark within 10 working days of submission. Tutors are also available in their student hours to discuss formative assessment. 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.
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:
Arnold, J.H., Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005), ch. 1
Le Goff, J., The Medieval Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), Introduction
Watkins, C., History and the Supernatural in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Chapter 1
D’Avray, D., Medieval Religious Rationalities: A Weberian Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Preliminaries