Università Roma Tre

The ‘Fall of Angels’ in Middle English Literature. The module will analyse the theme of the fall of angels through the reading of excerpts from texts in the Old and Middle English literary tradition. In particular, works in poetry (such as Genesis A and B and Christ Satan, contained in ms Junius 11), and in prose (Aelfric) for the Anglo-Saxon period and Piers Plowman for Middle English will be considered. The subject matter will make it possible to address the relationship that the texts entertain with the socio-cultural environment in which they saw the light of day (the use of legal language is interesting in some of them), to emphasise how the treatment of the theme is clothed with particular nuances and poignancy as the nature of the works varies, to highlight the main lines of development of the English language from the ancient to the middle English sentence, to examine the interaction between the written text and the iconographic text, and to address the main aspects of the historical recovery of the text. Seminar activities with final written assignments are planned.