An excerpt of “Survey of British literature 1: From Beowulf to Shakespeare” (a second-year survey course)

Course description

This course will traverse nearly 900 years of literature written in Britain, from Old English to early modern English literature. Of course, 900 years of literature cannot be thoroughly covered in a semester. Hence, this course will introduce you to works that capture important literary developments and social concerns at various historical moments. The literary works are diverse not only in time period and genre (e.g. epic, romance, lyric, and drama), but also in their authorship and their encounters with race, gender, religion, and nationality. We will investigate how the representations of these encounters—in their various generic forms and historical contexts—work to define “Englishness.”  

Reformation unit

Day 1: Conversion, race, gender, and nation: introduction to the Reformation and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

A brief lecture on the Reformation: Luther’s 95 theses, Henry VIII's separation from the Roman Catholic Church, Marian Counter Reformation, Elizabeth’s reestablishment of Protestantism. (There are also many good short overviews of the Reformation on YouTube that can be assigned instead of giving a lecture).  

John Foxe, “The First Examination of Anne Askew” (in John Foxe, Book of Martys, ed. John King, Oxford University Press, 2009), 22-34.

Day 2: Persecution and antisemitism: Foxe’s Book of Martyr’s continued

The Guernsey Martyrs (in John Foxe, Book of Martyrs, ed. John King, Oxford University Press, 2009), 198-203.

“the wicked Jewes at Lincoln” and “a certain Jew…fell into a privy” (I use EBBO-TCP, a good way to introduce students to this resource)

Day 3: Refusing to convert: selections from Luther’s On the Jews and their Lies and Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta

Selections from On the Jews and their Lies (Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies)

The Jew of Malta (act 1)

Day 4: The Jew of Malta continued

The Jew of Malta (acts 2-3)

Day 5: The Jew of Malta continued

The Jew of Malta (acts 4-5)