Accessibility statement

The Queer Middle Ages - CED00226C

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  • Department: Centre for Lifelong Learning
  • Module co-ordinator: Dr. Tess Wingard
  • Credit value: 10 credits
  • Credit level: C
  • Academic year of delivery: 2023-24

Module summary

This module aims to introduce students to the social, cultural and intellectual histories of queerness in late medieval Europe through a range of primary sources

Module will run

Occurrence Teaching period
A Spring Term 2023-24

Module aims

This module aims to introduce students to the social, cultural and intellectual histories of queerness in late medieval Europe through a range of primary sources

Module learning outcomes

Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

  • Demonstrate a knowledge of relevant key processes of social, cultural and intellectual change of the period
  • Contextualise and analyse relevant historical documents of the period
  • Understand and examine different historiographical interpretations of the period

Module content

Indicative content

  1. Framing the queer middle ages: historiographies and mythologies
  2. Law, punishment and persecution
  3. Queerness and the science of desire
  4. Queer love and intimacy in life and death
  5. The premodern lesbian and ‘lesbian-like’
  6. Transgender lives
  7. Intersex and biological sex in medieval thought
  8. Communities and networks
  9. Queerness in medieval Islam and Judaism
  10. Queerness and the invention of race
  11. Queerness at the end of the middle ages: a turning point?

Assessment

Task Length % of module mark
Essay/coursework
Essay : Critical essay		 N/A 100

Special assessment rules

None

Reassessment

Task Length % of module mark
Essay/coursework
Essay : Critical essay		 N/A 100

Module feedback

The tutor will give regular individual verbal and written feedback throughout the module on work submitted. The assessment feedback is as per the university’s guidelines with regard to timings.

Indicative reading

  • Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (1993)
  • Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (1999)
  • Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others (2017)
  • Anna Klosowska, Queer Love in the Middle Ages (2005)
  • Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov and Anna Klosowska, eds., Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern (2021)
  • Tom Linkinen, Same-Sex Sexuality in Later Medieval English Culture (2015)
  • Robert Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (2015)
  • Kim M. Phillips and Barry Reay, Sex Before Sexuality: A Premodern History (2011)


The information on this page is indicative of the module that is currently on offer. The University is constantly exploring ways to enhance and improve its degree programmes and therefore reserves the right to make variations to the content and method of delivery of modules, and to discontinue modules, if such action is reasonably considered to be necessary by the University. Where appropriate, the University will notify and consult with affected students in advance about any changes that are required in line with the University's policy on the Approval of Modifications to Existing Taught Programmes of Study.