Medieval Christian Romance

Reading: The Lais of Marie de France (Blackboard: Marie de France, Lais.pdf)

Viewing: The Unicorn Tapestries, link. (If you live or visit New York City, I recommend you see these in person at the Cloisters, an annex of the Metropolitan Museum of Art near the northern tip of Manhattan.)

Writing: Respond to ONE of the following prompts. Keep your response short, posting as a reply under the appropriate heading in the comments section:

1. Aestheticizing violence: point out a moment from the works you read and viewed today where beauty is mixed with or in proximity to violence. If you can, give a 1-sentence paraphrase of what the artist/author seems to be saying about the relationship between violence and beauty—or possibly art.
2. The wild and the civilized: point out a moment from the works you read and viewed today when something wild becomes tame—or something tame/civilized becomes wild. If you can, give a 1-sentence paraphrase of what the artist/author seems to be saying about the binary opposition between wilderness and civilization.
3. Ovid exerted a tremendous influence on both art and literature in the Middle Ages. Point to a detail in either of today’s texts that offers evidence of this claim.