Our professionally active medieval and early modern literature faculty take diverse approaches to the study of early-periods writing and culture. Their courses and scholarship examine both canonical and non-canonical authors and texts, and explore such topics as authorship and anonymity, intertextuality, book history, the histories of embodiment and cognition, manuscript and print culture, race, visual culture and women writers.
Faculty and students work on canonical and non-canonical texts and in related fields such as paleography, history of the book, textual editing, and translation. At the same time, their interests regularly take them into literary theory, cultural and social history, intertextuality, and questions of gender and representation.
Graduate students in the department regularly work with scholars in sister departments such as Comparative Literature, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, German, History, and Classics. With strong faculty mentoring and supportive funding opportunities, they publish their work in top-tier academic journals and begin successful careers as scholars and teachers.
Some Recent Graduate Seminars
History of the English Language
Religious Conflict and Difference in Early Modern English Literature
Chaucer
Middle English Literature: Public Life and Private Life in Medieval England
Shakespeare: Adaptation, Appropriation, Non-Adaptation
Race, Scholarship, and Appropriation—Medieval and Early Modern Literary Studies
Studies in Early 17th Century Literature: MSS, Rare Books, Special Collections
Chaucer, Rhetoric, and the Art of Language
Shakespeare: The Renaissance Concept of the Divine Human
Old English Language
Book History in Theory and Practice
Milton: Liberty and Tyranny in Milton’s England
Beowulf
Early Women Writers
Middle English Literature: 15th Century English Literature
Textual Editing & Early Modern Literature: Histories / Theories / Practices
Ideas of the Renaissance: Literature and the Question of Periodization
Early Period Studies Reading Group
Faculty and graduate students in early periods (medieval to 18th-century) gather regularly to discuss texts suggested by the group members, read plays aloud, and attend theatrical productions. The reading group offers a pleasant, intellectually stimulating atmosphere for scholarly conversation. People argue vigorously but constructively and mingle amicably, whatever their critical or theoretical differences.
Scholarly Resources at the Penn State Library
The Penn State Library, which provides access to Early English Books Online, the Chadwyck-Healey English Drama and Poetry databases, the World Shakespeare Bibliography, and other holdings, is an excellent resource for the study of early modern literature.
Folger Shakespeare Library Membership
Penn State is a member of the Folger Institute consortium, which gives our students and faculty access to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Less than four hours away, the Folger is home to the world’s largest and finest collection of Shakespeare materials and to major collections of other rare Renaissance books, manuscripts, and works of art. Because Penn State belongs to the Folger Consortium, our students are able to utilize the collections and regularly take courses with distinguished faculty from across the globe.
Graduate Faculty, Medieval
with particular interests in Chaucer, continental and Latin literary relations, authorship in trilingual England
Early medieval literature (Old English and Anglo-Latin), History of the English Language
Graduate Students, Medieval
Chaucer; pastourelles; Decameron
Graduate Faculty, Early Modern
with particular interest in early modern drama; Shakespeare; book history; bibliography; typography; theater studies; textual editing
with particular interest in Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, literary intertextuality, authorship, classical reception in the Renaissance, and textual editing.
Early modern literature and culture from the Reformation to the Restoration; Milton and his contemporaries; literature in relation to politics and religion; book history and textual studies; Shakespeare; Renaissance intellectual history.
with particular interest in authorship, book history, manuscript culture, lyric poetry, and early women's literature
with particular interest in Renaissance drama, especially Shakespeare and Marlowe, embodiment and cognition, and early modern cartography
Graduate Students, Early Modern
Milton; metaphysical poetry and philosophy; classical philosophy and epic tradition in Early Modern poetry; literature of the Reformation, Interregnum, and post-Reformation; literary legacy of Catholicism; early modern women writers; religion and politics in literature; Christian hermeneutics; Cambridge platonists; early modern and medieval mysticism; humanism
with particular interest in Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, authorship, interpretation & hermeneutics, intertextuality, reception, poetics, and the genres of epic & romance.