MA Medieval and Early Modern Textual Cultures, 1381-1688

You will read widely across the boundary between medieval and Renaissance cultures and interrogate that boundary itself to understand its historical and conceptual origins and reflect on how it continues to shape modern understandings of both periods. At the heart of the course is an emphasis on the varieties of medieval and early-modern humanism, a complex movement that enabled new understandings of the classical world, of our place within history, and of our relationship to language.

You will work closely with local material and local archival sources. East Anglia was home to an extraordinarily rich literary culture in the medieval and early-modern periods and this has left behind fabulous materials to research. Thousands of early-modern printed books and a small number of important medieval manuscripts are preserved in the Norfolk Heritage Centre. The core of that collection is the Norwich City Library – founded in 1608, it’s one of England's most important and best-preserved regional libraries. The Cathedral library is home to its own collection and the Norfolk Record Office holds extraordinary medieval and early-modern manuscripts, which include documentary records of East Anglia’s history, poetry miscellanies, letters, maps, heraldic papers, and more. Together, these archives bear witness to Norwich's role as a vibrant, cosmopolitan, and religiously diverse, international centre of North Sea trade and culture. This archival landscape is yours to explore and use to develop your own original research projects.

The MA has a strongly interdisciplinary character. You will explore the range of cutting-edge methods by which scholars are researching the cultures of these periods. You will move freely between texts, material artefacts, and visual art and consider how unpublished manuscript evidence can help us to understand the priorities of medieval and early-modern readers.

ABOUT

Immerse yourself in medieval and early-modern literature in its rich historical, intellectual, cultural, and material contexts.

Read a range of major British writers alongside the works of the important continental European authors who influenced them, including, Chaucer, Lydgate, Henryson, Douglas, Spenser, and Sidney together with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, Erasmus, Rabelais, and Montaigne.?

Explore the rise of Renaissance humanism and its medieval antecedents and work closely with local archival materials to discover the ways in which Norwich and East Anglia’s rich literary and intellectual culture participated in global narratives like the rise of humanism and the emergence of the early-modern from the medieval.?