A seminar course for MA students. The course will be assessed by seminar paper due September 1^st 2025.

In the last decades, medieval scholars have paid considerable, valuable, attention to the female body as it suffers in sex-specific ways such as childbirth, rape, and the peculiarly sexualized tortures inflicted on female martyrs. In this course, we will look at male suffering, exploring the ways in which men suffer, both physically and emotionally, in medieval texts. We will explore religious texts and martyrdom narratives in which men suffer in imitation of the archetypal suffering of Christ; we will consider also narratives of suffering and martyrdom in Judaism and Islam. We will look too at men suffering in more secular narratives: knights suffering physical wounds and emotional blows in romance stories, for example.  The title of the course puns on men as sufferers and men as causes of suffering, so some attention will also paid to wives, children and subjects who have to suffer men in charge.

Schedule:

18.02     Out of Eden: the beginning of man’s toil

25.02     Christ’s model sufferings

04.03     Secular suffering I: loneliness and the last survivor

11.03     Secular suffering II: women suffering men

18.03     Suffering spines: Saint Sebastian and King Edmund

25.03     Suffering and swooning in Chaucer  

01.04     Suffering and swooning in Malory

08.04     The Suffering of Job in Abrahamic tradition

15.04     The Suffering of Job’s wife

29.04     Noah the hen-pecked husband

06.05     Suffering men in Ta’ziyeh

13.05     Grieving men and lost pearls

20.05     Men suffering islamophobia

27.05     Men and boys suffering antisemitism

• Advanced training in reading Old and Middle English
• Broadening acquaintance with a range of medieval genres
• Introductory knowledge of sources and analogues among Abrahamic traditions
• Developing understanding of medieval ideas about gender and sex