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Description: A study of Boccaccio’s Decameron with particular emphasis on themes, conceptual innovations, and influences on French and English literatures.

This course, varying in content from term to term, focuses on special themes. Recent offerings include Tolkien and Lewis: The Medievalist?s Answer to Modernism; Religion and Identity in Medieval Europe; The Kiss; Gothic Romance; Music and Cosmology; Poets, Patrons, and Public in Medieval Lyric; Gender Issues in the Art of the Middle Ages; Myths and Legends of the Middle Ages; Doomsday: The Last Judgment in Medieval Culture; Medieval Minstrels; Angels; Sexual Transgression in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; Saints: Lore and Legend; The Troubadours: Lyrics, Love, and War; Early Irish Art; The Middle Ages at the Movies; The Medieval Book (held at the Pierpont Morgan Library).