COURSE PLANS: Introduction to Medieval Literature: Faith and Text in the Spanish Middle Ages Course Plan, New York University 2014
By S. J. Pierce, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese – Ph.D. 2011, M.A. 2009, (Near Eastern Studies) Cornell; B.A. 2005, (Spanish and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations) Yale
ABSTRACT
This is a graduate-level introduction to the historical and literary panorama of the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages. The touchstones in this vast sea of material will be the loci in which faith and text co-present in the intellectual lives of medieval Spanish readers and writers. This course will seek to expose students to some of the major debates within the field of Hispano-Medievalism, broadly defined, and will ground those debates contextually in a set of case studies that look at how members of the three Abrahamic faiths approached the joint tasks of religious devotion and writing, and the sophisticated ways in which they balanced the requirements of faith with the pull of literature and rationalism. This semester-long course does not seek to, nor will it be able to provide students with a comprehensive overview picture of the Spanish Middle Ages; rather, the ultimate goal of the course is for students to have a basic sense of the scope and range of medieval texts and sophisticated scholarly approaches to them to serve as background for further study, either of the Middle Ages or of later periods.