What was Lancelot's greater sin: committing adultery with Queen Guinevere, or betraying his best friend, King Arthur? While much has been said about courtly love in the middle ages, the value of medieval friendships tends to get overlooked. Medieval life was very communal, meaning individuals often formed relationships for practical, incidental, and personal reasons. In this course, we will examine friendships depicted in medieval literature, asking questions like: Was chivalry just the "Bro Code" for knights? What was the main source of drama in medieval monasteries? How many of Chaucer's poems pass the Bechdel Test? We will read canonical texts like The Book of Margery Kempe, The Canterbury Tales, and Mallory's Le Morte D'Arthur alongside recent literary criticism and scholarship from the emerging scholarly field of friendship studies
- Instructor of record: Mary Alcaro