This MA, offering Old English, Middle English, and Renaissance modules, explores the full variety and contexts of writing from the islands of Britain and Ireland across the period circa 700 to circa 1700. We concentrate on interactions between texts in English from these islands, examining the beginnings of Anglo-Irish writing, as well as the cultural transmissions and transformations between classical, European, and insular intellectual and literary traditions before 1700. We also have a particular interest in interrogating traditional period boundaries, such as medieval and Renaissance. Our work is stimulated by exceptional contexts and resources from medieval and early modern sites such as Spensers Kilcolman Castle to the substantial early printed book collections of the Boole Librarys Special Collections and other accessible early collections.
Unique Aspects of the Course.
This course is unique in these islands in offering a specialist graduate course which covers the full range of the three linguistic and cultural phases of earlier English writing: Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) to c. 1100; Middle English (or later Medieval writing) to c. 1500; and Early-Modern (or Renaissance) writing (c. 1500-1700). Study in UCC also affords graduate students the opportunity (subject to approval) to enrol in courses in other languages and literatures of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance such as Latin, Irish, Italian, and the languages of the Iberian peninsula.
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Course Practicalities.
The seminars for the taught core course in Texts and Contexts consist of two two-hour sessions per week. Each meeting will concentrate both on close reading of primary texts and on the contextual element of the course, considering authors and texts along with key secondary criticism concerning matters of genre, history, book-history, politics, culture, and art. We will examine some of the major literary influences on medieval and Renaissance texts, and take account of medieval and Renaissance theories of authorship and translation, as well as modern theoretical approaches to pre-modern texts. Field trips to sites of particular importance to the production and dissemination of Anglophone writing in Ireland are undertaken each year (such as Spensers Kilcolman Castle, Co. Cork, and Archbishop Marshs Library, Dublin).
All MA students in English must also take EN6009 Contemporary Literary Research, which requires a 2 hour per week attendance.