England (1300-1600): History and Texts

HIST 523 is a graduate seminar in reading England's past directly from its own words — you spend the semester learning enough Middle and Early Modern English to actually wrestle with the vernacular sources historians of 1300-1600 depend on, rather than reading them in translation. Weekly work moves through chronicles, wills, sermons, drama, and mystical writing, building toward a presentation on a chosen text and an original research paper grounded in primary documents. It sits at the intersection of historical linguistics and late medieval / early modern social history, and matters because the religious, economic, and political shifts of this period only come into focus once you can hear the language the period spoke in itself.