Systems of Knowledge in Late Medieval Literature - Detailseite

When Chaucer’s Wife of Bath proudly claims that she speaks from experience in order to go on and challenge the received knowledge of a misogynist male tradition, her discursive self-empowerment not only brings to the fore issues of authority that are crucially informed by gender and class, but also indicates a major shift in the conception and organisation of knowledge. Traditional, authoritative knowledge that derived from classical antiquity and took the form of exempla that were trans-historically valid is confronted with a proto-empirical knowledge that is based on particular experiences. This kind of knowledge does not only have temporal and circumstantial markers, it foregrounds problems of legitimacy and authority, while at the same time differentiating systems of knowledge and posing questions about the way they organise what counts as knowledge. This seminar will focus on the important role of literature in these cultural negotiations as both an important medium for the transmission of knowledge and a space where the organisation of knowledge is self-reflectively performed and alternative forms of knowledge are being tested. By looking at such different and crucial genres as late-medieval dream visions and mystical texts, we will investigate the entanglements of knowledge(s) with questions of textual representation as well as gendered understandings of interpretation and discursive authorisation. Primary texts will include Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and House of Fame, Lydgate’s Temple of Glass, the anonymous mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations.

Please be aware that this course will be held as a three-hour class, so that we will have both the seminar (2 hours) and the reading course (1 hour) every week.