Course for international guest/part time students
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities
- Organization
- BTK Department of English Studies
- Code
- BBI-ANG22-225E.04
- Title
- Reading Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches: Love Poetry in Early Modern England (Renaissance and Baroque)
- Usual semester
- Both
- Published semester
- 2026/27/1
- ECTS
- 3
- Language
- en
- Learning outcomes
- The course aims to close read love poetry from the age, both prominent, better known pieces (such as sonnets from Shakespeare, or the Mistress-poems by Donne and Marvell) and lesser known poems (from Sidney, Wyatt, or the female authors of the time). The course will also help establish a better knowledge of the ageCloseCurlyQuotes views and philosophy on love, and will also give insight into the cultural/historical background of love and marriage in the age, thus providing a better understanding of the works discussed.
- Course content
- Through the semester we are going to close read a different poem each time. Beginning with the Italian/Petrarchan tradition through the 16th centuryCloseCurlyQuotes sonneteers until the metaphysical poets of the 17th century, we will establish how the eraCloseCurlyQuotes perception of love (both spiritual and physical, bodily love) changed with time. Students will also explore the cultural-historical background of early modern (renaissance and baroque) love, sexuality, marriage and divorce. Works of Petrarch, Gaspara Stampa, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Shakespeare, Raleigh, Elizabeth Dacre, Spenser, Lady Mary Wroth, Donne, Marvell, Margaret Cavendish and others will be in the centre of the classes.
- Assessment method
- Active in-class participation; presentation (optional) or essay and in class tests;
- Bibliography
- For the basics: https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/love-poetry-in-renaissance-england Mariann Sanders Regan: Love Words: The Self and the Text in Medieval and Renaissance Poetry; 1982. Pamela S Hammons: Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse; 2010. Ilona Bell: Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship, CUP, 1998. Cristina Malcomson: Renaissance Poetry, Routledge; 1998, 2013 Albert James Smith: The Metaphysics of Love: Studies in Renaissance Love Poetry from Dante to Milton, CUP, 1985.