Program Overview

Unit Overview

The unit WCIV501 - Medieval Encounters is designed to help students grapple with the key puzzles and texts of medieval thought. The seminar explores the many ways in which encounters come to characterize Medievality and the ways that these encounters reverberate in the present.

Unit Rationale, Description, and Aim

Medieval thought arises at a kind of intellectual crossroads: the intersection of Ancient and Modern Western Worlds. This intersection is characterized by vast cultural transformations. The aim of this unit is to allow students to begin to consider the complexity of their contemporary world and what they are already in the middle of today.

Learning Outcomes

To successfully complete this unit, students will be able to demonstrate the following learning outcomes:

1. Acquire an advanced, integrated, research-based knowledge of Medieval thought together with the conceptual, theoretical, and political impacts of texts drawn from, and related to Medieval philosophy, theology, theory, and literature.
2. Explain the literary, social, historical, philosophical, political, aesthetic, religious, and/or ethical implications of texts drawn from, and related to, Medievality.
3. Critically evaluate and synthesise knowledge, concepts, and theories connected to Medievality from diverse sources and communicate complex ideas and findings with sophistication and confidence to a range of audiences in diverse contexts.
4. Research, develop, and apply interdisciplinary theories and practices to a range of bodies of knowledge drawn from key texts in Medieval Western Thought.

Unit Content

Topics may include:

• Arguments on faith, reason, and revelation, including the immortality of the soul and rational knowledge of God.
• Debates on universality and the universal.
• Studies of the transformation, preservation, and loss of Ancient thought.
• Comparisons of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic inheritances of Ancient Western ideas.
• Historical linkages between Ancient culture and Medieval thinking, as well as the ways in which Medieval thought forms the basis of the emergence of modernity, and temporal consciousness of such distinctions.
• Debates on free will, autonomy and human nature.
• Philosophical and religious mysticism.
• The beginning of secular thought, including transformations in the Church and the emergence of the nation state.
• The changing idea of sovereignty.
• Medieval debates on knowledge formation and the imagination.
• Key themes of Medieval narrative fiction, including journey, escape, travel, bridging, and encounter.
• New ideas of nature, society, and the individual.

Assessment Strategy and Rationale

The assessment tasks for this unit have been designed to contribute to high-quality student learning by both helping students learn (assessment for learning), and by measuring explicit evidence of their learning (assessment of learning). Assessments have been developed to meet the unit learning outcomes and develop graduate attributes consistent with University assessment requirements.

Assessment Tasks

1. Close Reading Task: This task requires students to produce analyses that cross disciplinary boundaries. (Weighting: 20%)
2. Class Presentation: This task requires students to present an independent point of view related to the unit content. (Weighting: 30%)
3. Research Essay: This research essay requires students to produce a theoretically acute, graduate-level, interdisciplinary analysis of a key text or author in Medieval Thought, on a topic proposed in consultation with the instructor. (Weighting: 50%)

Learning and Teaching Strategy and Rationale

This unit is designed and delivered in a small-group attendance mode which facilitates the use of the Socratic method. The Socratic method promotes active and receptive dialogue in which students are encouraged to think for themselves rather than passively receive information, doctrines, or positions.

Representative Texts and References

• Al-Farabi, Abu Nasr, The Political Writings , trans. by Charles Butterworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015)
• Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy , trans. by John Sinclair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
• Averroes, Averroes on Plato's Republic , trans. by Ralph Lerner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974)
• Burger, Glenn D. and Holly A. Crocker, Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion: Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)
• Canning, Joseph P., Ideas of Power in the Late Middle Ages, 1296 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
• Hildegard of Bingen, Selected Writings, trans. by Mark Atherton (New York: Penguin Random House, 2001)
• Mack, Peter, Reading Old Books,(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019)
• Tether, Keith, Johnny McFayden, Ad. Busby, Leah Putter, Handbook of Arthurian Romance (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2017)
• Turner, Marion, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019)

Unit Details

• Credit Points: 10
• Year: 2026
• Location: North Sydney