Welcome to EN 3430/3435* Rethinking Medieval and Renaissance Literature! Or as I affectionately call the course, Brit Lit I. For the Fall 2025 semester, we’re meeting in Rounds Hall 204 from 2:30-4:10 PM on Mon and Wed each week.
Professor Nic Helms (they/them) (nrhelms@plymouth.edu)
I’ll be in touch daily this semester via email and MS Teams (an Office 365 app available in my.usnh.edu). For drop-in appointments, I’ll be in my office in Ellen Reed 14 (top of the main stairs on the left) on Mondays & Wednesdays from 10:00-11:45 AM. If you’d like to schedule a meeting for another weekday, contact me.
I try to respond to all communications within twenty-four hours, except on weekends. (I treat the weekends as days of rest for me and for you! If something breaks over a weekend, let me know, but don’t worry: it can always wait until the following Monday.)
*EN 3430 is currently being updated in our academic catalog to EN 3435.
EN 3435.01 Rethinking Medieval and Renaissance Literature (4 Credits)
Catalog Course Description: By studying the literature of the British Isles before 1700, we will learn from old stories: Why is today’s culture – from novels to TV to games – obsessed with swords, sorcery, dungeons, and dragons? How far back can we trace ideas like disability, gender, and race? How have we developed our understanding of health and wellness over the past millennium? Falls.
Prerequisite(s): none
Reading Schedule
Wellness Connection (WECO)
To be fully educated, people need respect for and understanding of how health, physical activity, and wellness contribute to mental acuity and emotional well-being. Awareness of and attention to the physical can enhance the cognitive and emotional aspects of life.
Students take a three or four-credit Wellness (WECO) course (either within the major or not) designed to increase their understanding of the connection between mind and body.
These courses expose students to the theory and practice of life-span wellness and fitness activity, and to the knowledge, attitudes, habits, and skills needed to live well. Their goal is to help students cultivate life skills, which will promote mental, physical, and emotional well-being.
Wellness and Disability
You might ask, what does wellness have to do with disability? Or, for that matter, with medieval and renaissance literature? Both ‘wellness’ and ‘disability’ are words with long histories, histories that we can see change over time through the stories we tell. As a class with a long view of literature (from about 600 to 1660 C.E.), Rethinking Medieval and Renaissance Literature is uniquely poised to trace the roots of how we think about human ability, health, sanity, and well-being today. As we’ll learn by applying Adams’s Keywords for Disability Studies to over a millenia of literature, humans have long defined the ‘well’ against the ‘unwell’, and vice versa. How we do that, however, varies a lot over the centuries, in ways that can seem strangely foreign as well as eerily similar to our own moment in history.
Student Learning Outcomes
Upon completion of this English course, students will be able to:
Use cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts to inform their understanding of all kinds of texts.
Display analytical skill in their written responses to texts.
Write fluently and understand writing as an artistic and/or intellectual process.
Understand the conventions of literary genre as creative writers and critics.
Capably use research to accomplish their reading, writing, and thinking goals.
Understand the role of emerging digital technologies in writing, literature, and communication.
Draw connections between literature and contemporary society, tracing back the roots of present-day systems of oppression.
Upon completion of this Wellness Connection course, students will be able to:
Apply both Disability Studies and Literary Studies to a wide range of texts from both inside and outside of the traditional literary canon.
Trace the long histories of disability and wellness through premodern literature.
Analyze the way stories construct and shape our ideas about humanity, health, ability, and sanity.
Reflect, in both creative and critical modes, on how disability and wellness are constructed by contemporary society.
Aside: ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and Anti-racism
The work of rethinking Medieval and Renaissance literature begins now!
A major part of rethinking literature involves rethinking terms. In recent years, Dr. M. Rambaran-Olm (@ISASaxonists) has advocated in her scholarship and on social media for the field of Anglo-Saxon Studies to willingly rebrand itself as Early English Studies. She’s done this for two reasons: 1) “Anglo-Saxon” is a 19th century white supremacist coinage rather than a widespread term from the early medieval period; and 2) “Anglo-Saxon” is associated today with white supremacists.
‘Anglo-Saxon’ as a term and as a racial concept is one of the original cornerstones of contemporary white supremacy. Until very recently, it was a term in the PSU course catalog. It’s in most university course catalogs, most editions of early medieval literature, and all over the internet. It’s a reminder that rethinking takes time, work, and attention to detail.
Required Texts
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Folger Edition. Simon and Schuster, 2013.
Recommended Texts
These texts are required reading but optional to purchase. I’ll also be offering free online versions of all of these, but I’ve ordered a few copies in the bookstore for those of you who would like print editions. Again, any editions are fine!
Adams, Rachel, et al., editors. Keywords for Disability Studies. New York University Press, 2015, https://doi.org/10.18574/9781479812141.
Armitage, Simon, translator / Sir Gawain and the Green Knight / 978-0-393-33415-9 / 2008.
Marie de France / The Lais of Marie de France / 0140447598 / Penguin 1999
Middleton, Thomas and Thomas Dekker. / The Roaring Girl: A Norton Critical Edition / 2011.
Milton, John / Paradise Lost: A Norton Critical Edition / 978-0-393-61716-0 / 2020.
Spenser, Edmund / The Faerie Queene / 0140422072 / Penguin 1979 (reissue)
Optional
If you’re feeling anxious about academic or literary writing, I suggest
Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Brikenstein. They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. Sixth Edition. Norton (2024); ISBN: 978-0-393-63167-8 (any edition will do!)
Sprockets and Springes 