Università Roma Tre

Feasts and banquets in medieval England

Through the reading of a selection of passages from works of poetry of the Old (Beowulf and other texts) and Middle English literary tradition (Chaucer and the Gawain’poet), the main features of the conventions of hospitality in medieval English literature will be identified. Banquet scenes - to be interpreted as visible signs of magnificence, power and idealized order- will also be addressed through references to other works of the Germanic world, mainly German and Norse.

The philological-literary analysis of these texts will be combined with an outline of the fundamental changes of the English language through the centuries.

- Brunetti, Giuseppe, ed., Beowulf, Roma: Carocci, (selection of passages)
- Fulk, R. D., Robert Bjork and J. D. Niles, ed., Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008)
- D. Benson, Larry.D, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, Boston, Houghton Mifflin 1987 (selection of passages)
- Andrew. Malcolm and R. Waldron, Ronald, edd., The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript. Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Exeter: Exeter University Press 2007 (selections of passages)
- Barber, Charles, The English Language: a Historical Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993
- Wallace, David, The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002 (chapters 1,2,6,21,26)
- Fadda, Anna Maria Luiselli, Tradizioni manoscritte e critica del testo nel Medioevo germanico, Roma-Bari: Laterza 2004 (Parts Two and Three)