FREN 6620

Paris in the Thirteenth Century

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

This course brings together two bodies of writing, very close in the space and time of their production, that nonetheless have come to seem very far from one another in their critical and scholarly afterlives.  It is no secret that thirteenth-century Paris is the professional home of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) and Bonaventure (d. 1274), two theologians- two Italian theologians- whose work will alter the shape of medieval philosophy, theology, and even (in Bonaventure's case) literature.  At the same time, thirteenth-century Paris is the home of two of the most difficult and genre-bending writers of the Middle Ages: Jean de Meun (d. ca. 1304), author of the largest part of the Romance of the Rose, and Rutebeuf (d. ca. 1285), whose Miracle de Théophile is but the tip of an enormous and not always holy iceberg.  We'll spend a few weeks with each of these authors and allow them, through us, to speak to one another.

When Offered Fall.

Comments Conducted in English. 

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