MA Medieval and Early Modern Textual Cultures 1381

Key details

MA MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TEXTUAL CULTURES 1381 - 1688

Start Year

2023

Attendance

Full Time

Award

Degree of Master of Arts

Duration (years)

Join us in Norwich, medieval and early modern England’s second city, to let your interest in the astonishing literary creativity of those eras flourish.

You’ll gain a mastery of the whole sweep of writing from the era in which Julian of Norwich became the first woman to write a book in English to the outpouring of print and letters at the end of the seventeenth century. Working with your peers in supportive and inspiring seminars, you’ll engage in intensive close reading of landmark literary works from across Europe. You’ll also learn how to harness cutting-edge techniques of archival work to create your own original research projects.

In your dissertation, you’ll bring everything you’ve learnt together to pursue a specialist project in either medieval or early modern literature. Recent topics have ranged from conceptions of motherhood in medieval East Anglia to seventeenth-century letter writing. You’ll graduate ready to pursue doctoral research or a career in anything from heritage to publishing.

About

Our MA gives you a cohesive and in-depth understanding of the incredible range of literature produced across the medieval and early modern periods – with both a local and an international focus – allowing you to develop the foundational knowledge and skills you’ll need to build your own bespoke research projects based around your specialist interests.

You’ll study some of the greatest literary masterpieces of the long European Renaissance, encountering authors such as Petrarch, Erasmus, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Michel de Montaigne. As well as developing a pan-European grasp of the period, you’ll also build a deep understanding of the importance of the regional in medieval and early modern literary production. You’ll delve into the rich traditions of East Anglian writing, studying figures such as Margery Kempe alongside the region’s passionate and powerful Cycle dramas.

Based in Norwich – medieval and early modern England’s second city – you’ll become an expert at working with original archival and printed sources. Working closely with the rich historic collections held by the Norfolk Record Office and the Norfolk Heritage Centre, you’ll learn how to handle and interpret early printed books and manuscripts, including mastering the art of reading early modern handwriting. Your new skills will open up a fresh archival landscape for you to explore: you might find yourself transcribing seventeenth century women’s manuscript letters that have never been published, or working at first-hand with some of the earliest books ever printed in England in the late fifteenth century. You’ll also work with cutting-edge digital book history resources from around the world, including our own unique site, ‘Discover Historic Books’.

As a student on our MA, you’ll be part of our thriving and close-knit Medieval and Early Modern research community, made up of graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, and lecturers who specialise in these periods. You might benefit from seminars and workshops with visiting speakers, or from field trips to local medieval and early modern cultural sites. You’ll be part of a department with longstanding relationships with cultural and heritage organisations in the region, including the National Trust’s Blickling Estate and the Norfolk Public Library and Information Service. You’ll benefit from working with academics who are committed to making knowledge of medieval and early modern literatures meaningful to non-specialist audiences, for instance through the Paston Footprints and Unlocking the Archive projects. We have had particular success in preparing students for funded doctoral study, but this MA offers ideal preparation for a career beyond academia, too, in sectors such as heritage, librarianship, or publishing.

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Important Information

Whilst the University will make every effort to offer the courses listed, changes may sometimes be made arising from the regular review of course programmes. Where this activity leads to significant (but not minor) changes to programmes, there will normally be prior consultation of students and others. Changes may for example consist of variations to the content and method of delivery of programmes, courses and other services, to discontinue programmes, courses and other services and to merge or combine programmes or courses. The University will endeavour to keep such changes to a minimum, and will inform students.

Assessment for Year 1

Your four core taught modules will each be assessed by a 5,000-word independent project. Most of the time, this will take the form of a single essay, but sometimes you may be invited to submit a portfolio of pieces which showcase different areas of your knowledge in the module.

Your dissertation will be a 15,000-word piece of original independent research – and you will have the opportunity to present your work to your peers as part of our Medieval and Early-Modern Mini-Conference. Your dissertation is worth 50% of your marks for the MA, while your taught modules combine to make up the other 50% of your marks.

Structure

Your four taught modules will give you the understanding of medieval and early modern literary culture, critical methods, and archival skills that you’ll need to tackle your own independent dissertation project.

The central spine of the MA consists of two modules (one in the Autumn and one in the Spring) which together offer an advanced introduction to medieval and early modern literature. You’ll investigate how medieval and early modern writers forged new literary genres out of their encounters with ancient texts and you’ll establish long-term continuities and ruptures, for instance by comparing fourteenth-century writings against the works of the twelfth-century Renaissance. You might study the changing representations across time of the Roman noblewoman, Lucretia, and the uses to which medieval and Renaissance authors put her tragic story; or you might find yourself grappling with how and why Thomas More imagined an ideal society in his path-breaking work, Utopia.

In the Autumn semester, you’ll study The Transformation of the Book: 1500–1700, a module which will introduce you to the ways books themselves were reshaped from the emergence of print at the end of the middle ages to the close of the seventeenth century. You’ll be introduced to the latest currents of research in this area, such as global book history, and you’ll cover a host of forms, from printed books to archival documents and the dazzling array of hand-written miscellanies and commonplace books. You’ll have training in early modern palaeography to enable you to make the most of reading original documents, and you’ll have fieldtrips to local archival collections to handle books and manuscripts for yourself. Recent topics explored on the module have ranged from the dispersal of manuscripts from East Anglian monasteries and the early modern printing of Chaucer to seventeenth-century women publishers, the traces left by readers in the margins of their books, and the development of print in early colonial America.

In the Spring Semester, you’ll take a module on East Anglian Literature, where you will explore the literature of medieval and early modern East Anglia in its social and material contexts. You’ll explore East Anglia’s rich dramatic traditions, its devotional literature and practices, and how its literature participates in its broader cultural worlds. You might explore how the works of two of the first women writers in English, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, were shaped by their East Anglian religious contexts, or how the history of racialisation in the region can enable us to interpret the difficult, troubling dramatic work, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament.

After completing your taught modules at the end of the spring semester, you will then work on your dissertation over the summer (submitted early September), with the guidance and support of one of our specialist lecturers. This is the culmination of your degree. You’ll have the chance to bring all the skills and critical understanding you’ve been developing to bear on a research project of your own choice. Some recent dissertations have focused on East Anglian materials and topics, such as the Paston Letters, N-Town plays, or the library of Thomas Knyvett, while others have ranged from Chaucer’s humanist contexts to the writings of Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676) and translations of Cervantes into English.

Teaching and Learning

Our teaching is focused on small-group seminars, where you’ll work closely with leading academic specialists in the field and your peers. You’ll develop your skills in closely analysing texts’ rich details. You’ll also often embark on mini research projects, utilising a range of tools (including the latest digital resources) to investigate topics and prepare presentations for your peers, working both individually and in groups. As such, you’ll develop skills not only in understanding medieval and early modern texts, but also far more broadly in collaboration and agile thinking, building confidence as a researcher both online and in a range of in-person settings.

From June to September, you’ll undertake your 15,000-word dissertation on a topic of your choice – the culmination of your work on the MA. You will be supported in shaping, researching, and writing your dissertation by one of our specialist lecturers. You’ll have regular one-on-one meetings with your dissertation supervisor who will read sample chapters of your work as it unfolds.

Throughout the MA, you’ll be immersed in a field-leading and exceptionally supportive medieval and early modern community. Our team will get to know you and your individual intellectual interests, and support and encourage you to develop your own innovative research questions, approaches and projects

Our areas of faculty research include the history of the book, material texts, and libraries, literary imitation and translation, the history and development of historiography, travel writing and cross-border cultural encounters, letters and correspondence networks from the middle ages to the seventeenth century, literary and intellectual biography, the development of distinct regional and East Anglian identities, conceptions of the landscape, the cultural importance of medieval saints’ lives, and the development of the literary essay.

You’ll have the chance to take part in lively medieval and early modern research seminars and workshops which showcase the research of our own scholars, graduate students, or of visiting speakers.

Independent study

Independent study will be a key part of this degree. You’ll read widely in medieval and early modern literature and develop your own innovative critical thinking to help you explore the contemporary interdisciplinary study of these periods.

With Norwich’s exceptional medieval and early modern textual and visual culture on your doorstep, you’ll develop skills in archival research, bibliography, and palaeography to help you approach the rich array of material that survives from that period.

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Assessment for Year 1

Compulsory Modules

EAST ANGLIAN LITERATURE

Code LDCE7002B

Credits 20

Throughout the medieval and Early-Modern periods Norwich was one of England’s most important cities – probably second only to London – and East Anglia one of the country’s culturally liveliest and richest areas. In this module you will explore the literature of these periods in its material contexts (the region’s prosperity and power may still be seen in its architecture and in the rich holdings of its libraries and museums) and ask whether there was a specifically East Anglian cultural tradition. You will explore East Anglia’s rich dramatic traditions, its devotional literature and practices (in orthodox forms and in those that brush against the heterodox), and, insistently, the manner in which its literature participates in its broader social and cultural worlds. This module may particularly appeal to you if you have an interest in the cultural traditions of Norwich and East Anglia or, more generally, in the literature of place.

RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGY TRAINING SEMINAR

Code LDCE7009B

Credits 10

This module introduces you to some of the challenges, possibilities, and productive practices of independent graduate research in preparation for your work on the dissertation. It is tailored to the distinctive approaches and emphases of your particular MA programme.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE BOOK 1500-1700

Code LDCE7019A

Credits 20

This module introduces you to the ways in which material texts (both in manuscript and print) were transformed during the vital era from the emergence of print at the end of the middle ages to the close of the 17th century. How did the ways in which books were published change? How can we use the evidence of annotated books to reconstruct readers' habits and interests? How far did print transform the nature of the book? What happened to books as they started to become absorbed and classified within modern libraries? And how did manuscript documents -- especially letters -- enable the enormous boom in communication characteristic of the seventeenth century? How did the transformation of material texts create new possibilities for writing and thinking? The module equips you with the skills in early-modern archival studies that are necessary to tackle these questions. In particular, we spend a portion of each seminar learning how to read the handwriting of sixteenth and seventeenth century documents. The module culminates in visits to two archives in Norwich -- the Norfolk Record Office and the Norfolk Heritage Centre -- and your summative assessed work will take the form of a study of document(s) from these archives. The module will be of interest to anyone who wants to learn more about the most vitally important era of the transformation of the book.

THE NORTHERN RENAISSANCE, 1500-1620

Code LDCE7011B

Credits 20

This module sets out to understand why and how humanism -- the advocacy of the study of the humanities, the Greek and Roman classics -- gave birth to the astonishing outpouring of literature that we call the Renaissance. We will situate English Renaissance literature within the wider context of the humanist literature of France, the Netherlands, and Italy. Questions we consider include: how did the rediscovery of classical texts generate new possibilities for literary writers? How did humanists understand the nature of poetic creation? How did their advocacy of rhetoric create new ways for writers to engage with public life? And what happened when humanists turned philological methods upon the most sacred text of their culture: the bible? Our work will focus on the writings of Thomas More, Desiderius Erasmus, and Michel de Montaigne, but there will be opportunities to read far more widely in the Renaissance literature of the period. Foreign language texts are all read in translation. The might be of interest to anyone who wishes to gain an in-depth understanding of one of the most dazzling periods of European literary history.

MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE HUMANISMS: FROM THE HISTORY OF THE KINGS OF BRITAIN TO THE FALL OF PRINCES

Code LDCE7013A

Credits 20

We start from the central proposition that new approaches to the 'studia humanitatis' (the study of the humanities – art, literature, history, philosophy) pioneered by the self-styled humanists ('umanisti') between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries constitute one of the most important achievements of the Renaissance. They defined the terms by which Renaissance humanists themselves most often distinguished their own work from the intellectual traditions of the medieval past and from the work of their (allegedly) more old-fashioned contemporaries. What, though, did medieval humanism really look like and what precisely did Renaissance humanism bring that was new? We consider the humanism of the fourteenth century against, for example, the historians and thinkers of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, to establish both continuity and rupture. So in this module English writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate will be situated relative to their predecessors – such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, John of Salisbury and William of Malmesbury – and to their continental counterparts – such as Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio – in order to establish a comprehensive view of the complexity and range of medieval and early modern humanisms, and the diversity of responses to an equally diverse classical legacy. We also examine what humanism meant for women writing and thinking historically, such as Christine de Pizan, who could use humanist practices to identify misogynist narratives within medieval culture.

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TEXTUAL CULTURES 1381 - 1688

Code LDCE7502X

Credits 90

Dissertation module for Early Modern and Medieval Writing MA.

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Important Information

Whilst the University will make every effort to offer the modules listed, changes may sometimes be made arising from the annual monitoring and review of modules. Where this activity leads to significant change to a programme and modules, the University will endeavour to consult with affected students. The University may not be able to offer a module for reasons outside of its control, such as the illness of a member of staff. Availability of optional modules may be restricted owing to timetabling, lack of demand, or limited places. Where this is the case, you will be asked to make alternative module choices and you will be supported during this process.

MA MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TEXTUAL CULTURES 1381 - 1688

MA MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN TEXTUAL CULTURES 1381 - 1688