HC 421H, Honors College colloquium Inventing the Middle Ages -- possible paper topics

Read the Simmons essay (available on Blackboard) and note the many different medieval texts and medieval critics she mentions. Some will have a place in course materials already, such as The Castle of Otronto. But we won't be treating the other text available in our edition of The Castle, Walpole's play The Mysterious Mother. Term papers and presentation on The Mysterious Mother are welcome.

Late medieval (fifteenth century) texts and figures

• William Caxton, England's first printer
• Malory and his Arthurian tales

The premiere "medievalist" of sixteenth century England: Edmund Spenser

Antiquarians and poets of the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries

• John Stow, publisher of a Chaucer edition
• Thomas Speght, another publisher of a Chaucer edition
• John Leland, Henry VIII's "collector" of medieval books from the shuttered monasteries
• Edmund Spenser, author of The Faerie Queene

Eighteenth-century antiquarians

• Humfrey Wanley
• Elizabeth Elstob, author of the first Anglo-Saxon grammar
• George Hickes
• Sir Walter Scott (Ivanhoe would be the locus classicus)

Nineteenth-century figures

• Kenelm Digby
• Frederick Furnivall
• William Morris
• Viollet-le-Duc
• Robert Browning, "Childe Harold to the Dark Tower came"
• Jules Michelet

Concepts

• Collegiate gothic
• Arthurianism
• the Society for Creative Anachronism
• Jeanne D'Arc

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