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7:00 PM

BMH 101

If you’ve read any medieval literature at all – Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Dante’s Divine Comedy – you’ve encountered medieval literature at the tail-end of a long editorial process. That process has involved careful, judicious decisions for how best to represent an old handwritten text for the modern reader. The majority of our carefully edited texts have unintentionally obscured a significant aspect of the literature. If we return to the manuscripts, we discover texts in which the scribes visually invite a more engaged, dynamic, and playful reading process that puts the medieval text in line with more recent theories about literature as cybertext.

Dr. Klein will elaborate on these ideas with some key examples from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and poems from the Middle English lyric tradition.