Module Information

This module explores lives and life writing in medieval and renaissance England (and Wales) by detailed consideration of literary and material evidence from the period, c. 1400-1650. It focuses on the lives of both women and men. Recent scholarship has recovered a great deal of previously neglected medieval women's and men'r writing. For women, spiritual texts (often of an autobiographical nature) make up perhaps three quarters of this material, but some early secular works also exist. For men, there is a range of life writing.

The module will encourage students to think about how to interpret the various surviving evidences for lives. Students will develop their theoretical position(s) on the concept of lives by introducing and enabling critical consideration of theoretical approaches to lives, self fashioning and life writing drawn from literary and cultural studies. The module will examine the often problematic circumstances of the production and dissemination of a text. We will ask questions such as: What is a life? How were medieval and renaissance lives represented through text and object? How do these representations impinge on medieval and renaissance perceptions of life and identity? What is biography? How are past lives represented now? This module will address these questions by examining, in detail a selection of the wide variety of evidence for renaissance lives, such as: diaries, letters, monuments, life stories, testaments, saints' lives, portraits, personal meditations, prayers, biographies and romances.