ENG 5206 - Spring 2026 - Sprenkle

This course prepares students to read medieval texts written in what we still popularly term “Old English,” a collection of English dialects dating from approximately 600-1100 CE. Familiarity with Old English is not required! The aim of the class is to develop translation skills (learning vocabularies, grammars, syntaxes, etc.) in tandem with studying early English literary culture. We will translate and analyze samples of poetry (including short selections of Beowulf), riddles, sermons, philosophical texts, historical chronicles, law codes, and educational materials, considering them as literature as well as historical evidence of life and politics in early medieval Britain.

As we learn how to access these texts in their original dialects, we will also interrogate and critique the colonial history of Old English philological studies—how the “scientific” linguistic approaches of the nineteenth century aided in British colonial projects, and how the imagined direct continuity between an “Old” and “Modern” English fueled (and continues to fuel) white-nationalist rhetoric and ideologies. We will explore newer directions in the field that offer alternative frameworks for studying the language that challenge prescriptivist and paradigm-based models and the linguistic homogeneity that they imply. This class therefore questions the concept of language “mastery” and instead aims to familiarize students with the current questions and issues of Early English studies, engaging not only scholarly conversations about these specific medieval texts, but also about methodology and pedagogy.

Requirements: This course fulfills the general literature requirements for one pre-1660 and one pre-1800 course. It also satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Area of Concentration: History of Medieval and Early Modern British Literary and Cultural Studies (through 1660).