Cosmology medieval Literature

This course is about the interactions on the page between texts and images and the way they together represent and frame aspects of the world so as to situate them in relation to the reader and make them perceptible and intelligible in their eyes. This world includes, as in the miniature above, people, land, and sky, and the multiple connections between them. Pages such as this reveal the intermediality of medieval “literature” and the plasticity of the medieval “world-view,” thanks to the complex ways they mediate these interconnections.

Students in this class will be invited to engage with premodern curiosity about the cosmos and explore how different ideas of it are conveyed by developments in book design, from the exquisite Latin manuscripts of the Carolingian period to the illuminated vernacular ones of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries.

The pages we will study over the semester are drawn from a number of interconnected textual clusters that respectively foreground the cosmos as a locus of transformation (Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the French Moralized Ovid); as understood relative to gender and sexuality (Guillaume de Lorris’s Romance of the Rose and Machaut’s Fountain of Love); and as an object of learning (Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and Christine de Pizan’s Path of Long Study). These works range in date from early imperial Rome to fifteenth-century France; the majority are composed in early forms of French, others in various forms of Latin. All are literary works, by accomplished poets, which both address cosmological themes and also inspire fine illuminated manuscripts. You will have the opportunity to examine original manuscripts of all of them, several of them in person.

Alongside these core works, the syllabus will include extracts of philosophical, scientific and mythographic works on cosmology and astronomy. Its current outline is flexible so that students can propose texts or extracts of texts from other traditions for comparative study alongside the ones prescribed.

All texts will be made available in modern English translation but a part of each class will be devoted to working on them in the original languages; French Department majors/graduate students are encouraged to read and write in French. There will be frequent opportunities to engage with original manuscripts, online and in person in the manuscript room of Columbia’s