Module Information

This module will help you advance your Latin reading skills by studying select passages from key texts. Materials for discussion will be selected with two aims in mind: first, to provide you with an understanding of key works in the classical repertoire, consulted and read in the European Middle Ages; and, second, to help you gain familiarity with the vocabulary of particular writers or genres featuring prominently in your research. Texts will thus include the writings of chroniclers like Matthew Paris and William of Malmesbury, but can easily extend to administrative sources (charters and administrative manuals), or religious and theological texts (Peter Comestor or Bernard of Clairvaux, liturgical treatises, and so on), as well as, of course, key classical authors like Suetonius, Quintillian, or Cicero, and medieval ones like Bede, Einhard, or Peter Comestor. The overarching aim, in short, is to help you advance your ability to read and understand both medieval materials and the textual inheritance on which many of them drew.

This module pursues two closely related goals. First, it is an intensive Latin reading class. It will allow you to develop further your Latin reading skills, to work on issues of Latin that you may find difficult, to pursue aspects you enjoyed/are curious about etc. Should you intend to undertake a PhD, the module will provide you with essential training, and will bring you to a level where you can read most primary sources in the original with relative ease. Second, the module will introduce you to key texts, to materials that most reasonably educated writers in the Middle Ages would have known, and that fundamentally influenced their way of writing and thinking. These were the foundational texts on which medieval literature, theology, historical writing etc. rested, and without some knowledge of which it will be difficult to make sense of many primary sources. Texts and writers normally include Augustine, Gregory the Great, Boethius, Isidore of Seville, the Rule of St Benedict, and the Sententiae of Peter the Lombard.

The module will offer students an opportunity to engage in more detail with primary sources in the original Latin than in HYM2120. It will require some knowledge of Latin. Texts that made the Middle Ages will focus on the kind of materials that any medieval writer with a more than rudimentary education would have known and used. It thus provides not only training in tackling Latin materials, but will also allow students access to a canon of texts that fundamentally shaped the texts they have read in HYM2120, and that will aid them in analysing and interpreting the sources they will need to use for their dissertation or if they intend to pursue doctoral research. It also provides additional training for PhD students as part of their research training.