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