Università Roma Tre

After Eating the Forbidden Fruit: How the poets of the Germanic Middle Ages interpret the Fall of Man.


The course will analyze from an interdisciplinary perspective the different ways in which various authors of the English and German Middle Ages dealt with the complex theme of temptation and its consequences. Works (including the poetic rewriting of Genesis from the Anglo-Saxon period, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Langland's Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Otfrid von Weissenburg's Liber Evangeliorum, Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan) will be examined from a literary, philological and linguistic perspective, with particular attention to such problems as the identification of sources and recurring motifs, inter-textual relations, the relationship between word and image, and the allegorical and metaphorical aspects of the Garden of Eden. The analysis of the texts will enable students to gain insight into some features of the linguistic evolution of English and German, and to face topics of textual criticism. Students will carry out individual and group research that will be presented and discussed during seminars..

Texts.
A selection of chapters from the following texts:

- B. Smalley, Lo studio della Bibbia nel Medioevo, Bologna: Il Mulino 1972.
- N. Frye, Il grande codice. La Bibbia e le letterature, Torino: Einaudi 1986

- A. M. Luiselli Fadda, Tradizioni manoscritte e critica del testo nel medioevo germanico, Roma-Bari: Laterza 2004 (Parte II).

- D. Wallace, The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002 .
- D. Kartschoke, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im hohen Mittelalter, München: DTV 1990.

- D. Crystal, The Stories of English, Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2004.

- P. von Polenz, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, Berlin: De Gruyter 2009.
Additional bibliographical material (critical editions, glossaries, critical essays etc.) will be provided by the teacher at the beginning of the course.