Università Roma Tre

Reading the Bible in Medieval England: The Fall od Adam and Eve
The course aims at giving students the ability to translate and discuss critically Old English texts and to relate them to their cultural and linguistic context. Passages from prose and poetic texts rendering the Bible into the vernacular will be analyzed considering the main features of Old English literature: style, symbolism, peculiarities of poetic language, of manuscript transmission and of the unity of word and image. Relationships between insular and continental texts will be considered.

1.Texts
- B. Mitchell - F. C. Robinson, A Guide to Old English, Blackwell, Oxford 2008.
-A. N. Doane, The Saxon Genesis. An Edition of the West Saxon Genesis B and the Old Saxon Vatican Genes University of Wisconsis Press, Madison 1991.

2. Old English Literature.
One of the following texts:
- F. C. Robinson, Old English, in B. Murdoch - M. Read (edd.), Early Germanic Literature and Culture, Camden House, Rochester-New York 2004, PP. 205-233;
- M. Francini, La letteratura anglosassone, in M. Battaglia (ed.), Le civiltà letterarie del Medioevo germanico, Carocci, Roma 2017;
- M. Godden-M. Lapidge, The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1991 (a selection of chapters);
- M. Amodio, The Anglo-Saxon Literature Handbook, Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, MA: 2014 (a selection of chapters) .

3. Textual criticism
- A.M. Luiselli Fadda, Tradizioni manoscritte e critica del testo nel Medioevo germanico, Laterza, Bari-Roma 2010 (Parte I).

4. Grammar
- R. Lass, Old English: a Historical Linguistic Companion, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993.


Further material will be given at the beginning of the course.

Students are advised to attend classes. Those who cannot attend them are requested to contact the teacher at the beginning of the course.