I’ll be taking a small holiday in July, but the MLS will be back in force with courses for the latter half of 2016 beginning from August. Here are the offering so far booked in:
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer’s collection of tales includes representatives of every major narrative genre current in his time, all rendered with an incomparable comic touch. He wrote them as entertainments, and they still have the power today to charm and amaze readers today.
12 two-hour sessions on Thursdays 1-3pm, 4 August to 21 October in Ross House second floor room 2.1. Fee: $250.00
I will be using A.C. Cawley’s Everyman edition of The Canterbury Tales. It provides the Middle English text with helpful notes and glosses that make reading Chaucer in his Middle English not much harder than reading Shakespeare:
978-0460870276 (paperback)
978-0679409892 (hardcover) this is a lovely, affordable and durable hardcover, well worth the slightly higher investment
The Middle English Mystery Plays
These anonymous dramatic scripts were performed annually in major English urban centres during the fourteenth and fifteenth century. Designed as popular entertainments, they enact biblical narratives from creation to doomsday in one-act pageant performances. Their authors sought to make sophisticated elements of later medieval theology accessible to lay audiences, making cunning use of farce and slapstick, punctuated by moments of riveting drama and exquisite language.
12 two-hour sessions on Fridays 1-3pm, 5 August to 20 October in Ross House first floor room 1.1. Fee $250.00
The Penguin edition edited by Peter Happé offers a representative sampling of mystery plays in the original Middle English, with glosses and notes to aid the modern reader’s appreciation of their extraordinary art.
The Middle English Mystery Plays (Penguin, ISBN 978-0140430936)
Old English V (Beowulf)
Our Old English sessions continue with the beginning of the greatest poem of the Anglo-Saxon period, Beowulf. The best text to acquire would be George Jack’s Beowulf: a Student Edition (Oxford UP, ISBN 978-0198710448). There are a couple of useful bilingual editions available as well: Howell D. Chickering’s Beowulf: a Dual-Language Edition (Anchor Books, ISBN 0385062133) and Michael Alexander’s Beowulf, which gives the original text with facing pages that offer complete glossing (Penguin, ISBN 0140433775)
12 two-hour sessions on Mondays 1-3pm, 1 August to 17 October in Ross House fourth floor room 4.2. Fee $250.00
The MLS Refectory
This perennial favourite (I can call it a ‘perennial favourite’ by now, can’t I?) will return as well, with twelve scheduled sessions. Come when you can and as you are, bring $10, and I bring a couple of poems by a different poet each week.
Wednesdays from 3 August, 1-2 pm in Ross House first floor room 1.1
Other Courses
I expect to book in a few more short courses in and around these. Details to follow.