• Dutton Elisabeth

• Dutton Elisabeth

This course explores the representations of death in poems, plays and prose of medieval England.  Attitudes to death may have varied during years of plague and war: Church teaching encouraged the creation of texts that taught people how to die well, and how to be prepared for death in order to avoid eternal punishment in hell; saints’ lives provided positive examples, while pictures and funeral monuments provided terrifying images of mortality.  Within the momento mori tradition the dance of death trope evolved, with its combination of visual and textual elements. Images of death in medieval art will be discussed, and presentations of death and dying on the medieval stage.  

21.02.  Heroic Deaths in Old English
28.02    Villainous Deaths in Old English
07.03    Medical Death
14.03    Death as Resistance: Martyrs
21.03    Slaughtering the Innocents
28.03    Gendered Deaths
04.04    Dying Well
18.04   Death and Despair
25.04    Personifying Death on the medieval stage 1
02.05    Personifying Death on the medieval stage 2
09.05    Lydgate’s Daunce of Poulys
16.05    Christ’s Death
23.05    Presenting Death on the early modern stage
30.05    Conclusions

• Increased familiarity with Old English and Middle English language
• Understanding of concepts of death in historical context
• Familiarity with medieval iconography of Death
• Understanding of literary tradition of ‘how to die well’
• Appreciation of dramatic tradition of staging death