Extreme States: Religion and The Self in the High Middle Ages - MST00099M

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Module summary

This module takes a new look at the religious fervour that gripped men and women c.1120-1250, inspiring monks to seek the wilderness, knights to take up arms for Christendom, anchorites to enclose themselves in cells, and hospitallers and beguines to tend the sores of the sick. Whether fleeing the world or forging a life on city streets, the new religious were drawn to struggle, seeking out lives of personal challenge. Their story is told by historians largely in institutional terms, but it was the human story that preoccupied contemporaries. Hagiographers and rule-makers wrestled with the knowledge that people were willful and emotional, capable of great feats and susceptible to base temptations.

Our seminars focus on this drama of human being, as it was pursued by religious men and women and articulated by medieval writers. We examine saints’ lives, statutes, sermons, and rules, to explore different forms of religious life, how their human challenges were imagined, and how authors conceptualized person and personality. We will consider the question of ‘self’ in an era that was charting new approaches to inner being and Godly service. This means looking afresh at the ‘discovery of the individual’ at this time, a debate enriched in recent years by the study of emotions, sexuality, and imagination, and by ideas of interiority and the confessional self. At the core of the module lies the challenge of how to study lived experience, and find human voices, in the most unusual of medieval texts. All materials are provided in English translation.

Module will run

Occurrence	Teaching period
A	Semester 2 2025-26

Module aims

The aims of this module are to:

• Develop skills of source analysis and interpretation
• Assess a range of source material and relevant secondary works; and
• Develop students’ powers of evidence-based historical argument, both orally and in writing.

Module learning outcomes

Students who complete this module successfully will:

• an understanding of, and critical engagement with, the study of lived experience through medieval texts
• an awareness of the changing landscape of high medieval religion, including the forces and controversies at the heart of new forms of monastic, mendicant, and urban religious life
• an appreciation of key topics and historiographical debates relating to the historical study of the individual, the self, interiority, and emotions
• an ability to read critically and interrogate sources for the study of medieval religion, including hagiography, rules, statutes, and sermons.

Module content

Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1. Students will then attend a 2-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing (RAW) weeks during which there are no seminars, and during which students research and write a formative essay, consulting with the module tutor. Students prepare for eight seminars in all.

Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:

1. Rewriting the rule book: Cistercians and the self
2. Inner lives and loves: Aelred of Rievaulx
3. Blurring boundaries: The new Knighthood
4. (Self-)determination? Christina of Markyate
5. Building internal worlds: Anchoritic texts
6. Confessional states: Holy Women and Beguines
7. Disregarded selves: leprosy and hospital lives
8. Social undoing: Francis and his companions

Indicative assessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100

Special assessment rules

None

Indicative reassessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100

Module feedback

Students have the opportunity to submit a formative essay of up to 2,000 words and receive written or oral feedback, as appropriate, from a tutor. For the summative essay (3500-4000 words), students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback in line with the University's turnaround policy. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required.

Indicative reading

For reading during the module, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading:

• Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’ in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, 82–108. (Berkeley: University of California, 1984.)
• ed.Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger. History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, New York: (Columbia University Press, 2007.)
• Dyan Elliot, The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women, 200-1500. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,) 2012.