M.A. Exam Reading List

Interdisciplinary Studies
Brown, Peter. The Body and Society. Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988)
Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast. The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987) + Watson, “Desire for the Past” (article on the reception of Bynum’s Book) Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 59-97.
Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory. A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990)
Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and Latin Middle Ages. + Landauer, Carl. “Ernst Robert Curtius and the Topos of the Literary Critic” in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (1996)
Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (1992)
Mantello and Rigg, Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide (1996).

Fine Arts
Art History:
Michael Camille, “Labouring for the Lord: The Ploughman and the Social Order in the Luttrell Psalter.” Art History (December 1987), 10(4):423-454.
James S. Ackerman, ” ‘Ars Sine Scientia Nihil Est’ Gothic Theory of Architecture at the Cathedral of Milan,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Jun., 1949), pp. 84-111

Music:
Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology and Music. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001, paperback edition, 2004.
Margot E. Fassler, Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

History
Bloch, Marc. The Historian’s Craft (completed c. 1942, 1st English edition 1953)
Boswell, John. The Kindness of Strangers. The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (1988)
Clanchy, Michael. From Memory to Written Record. England 1066-1307 (2nd ed.) (1993)
Cohen, Mark R. Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (1994).
Cohn, Samuel K., Jr. The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death. Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (1992)
Gregory, Timothy. A History of Byzantium (2005)
Kennedy, Hugh. The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (1988).
Lawrence, C.H. Medieval Monasticism. Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages (3rd ed.) (2001)
Marshall, Richard K. The Local Merchants of Prato: Small Entrepreneurs in the Late Medieval Economy (1999)
Raftis, J.A. Tenure and Mobility. Studies in the Social History of the Mediaeval English Village (1964)
Schmitt, Jean-Claude. The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century. Trans. Martin Thom (1983)
Southern, Richard. The Making of the Middle Ages (1953; rprtd 1992)

Languages
English
Primary Texts:
Beowulf (Liuzza translation) + Lapidge, Michael. “Beowulf and the Psychology of Terror.”
Saints’ lives: Judith, Elene, Andreas
Alfred’s “Preface to the Pastoral Care”
Lyrics: “Dream of the Rood,” “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer,” “The Ruin,” and
“The Wife’s Lament”
Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad + Millett, Bella. “Ancrene Wisse and the Book of Hours.” Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England. Ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead. University of Wales Press, 2000. 21-40.
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
Langland, Piers Plowman (B-Text)
Pearl.
Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe
Gower, Confessio Amantis (Prologue, Books 1, 3, and 8)
Malory, Works (ed. Vinaver)
Lydgate, Troy Book (TEAMS)
Drama: York Crucifixion, 2nd Shepherd’s Play, Cain and Abel, Mankind
Secondary:
Burrow, J.A. Ricardian Poetry (1971)
Simpson, James. Piers Plowman:An Introduction to the B-Text. 2nd ed. (2007). + two scholarly reviews of the first edition.
Steiner, Emily. Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (2003)
Wallace, David, ed. The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP (1999)
Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, et al. The Idea of the Vernacular (1999)

French
Primary Texts:
The Song of Roland
The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes
The Romance of the Rose
Secondary:
Bloch, Howard. (D. Hollier ed.), A New History of French Literature, Harvard UP, pp. 1-132. + Kay, Sarah, T. Cave, and M. Bowie, A Short History of French Literature, Oxford UP, pp. 13-95.
Le Goff, Jacques. The Medieval Imagination, UP Chicago.
Zumthor, Paul. Toward a Medieval Poetics, UP Minnesota.
Busby, Keith. Codex and Context, Rodopi.

Italian
Dante, Divine Comedy.
Auerbach, Erich. Dante: Poet of the Secular World (1961)

Spanish
Primary Texts:
El Poema de Mio Cid (Poem of the Cid)
El Libro de buen amor (Book of Good Love)
Secondary:
Fletcher, Richard. The Quest for El Cid (1990).

Philosophy/Theology
Gilson, Etienne. Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (1938)
Knowles, David. The Evolution of Medieval Thought (1962)