#  English 231. Divine Comedies: Graduate Seminar 

 



Instructor: [Nicholas Watson](/people/nicholas-watson)  
Thursday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD  
*Enrollment: Limited to 15 students*

A study of a series of visionary works from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, including Guillaume de Lorris’s *Romance of the Rose*, Dante Alighieri's *Divine Comedy*, John of Morigny's *Book of Flowers*, Geoffrey Chaucer's *House of Fame*, William Langland's *Piers Plowman*, and Christine de Pisan's *Book of the City of Ladies*. We read these works through a late-medieval Aristotelian understanding of the imagination as a fundamental but fallible instrument of human perception, observing how they respond to traditions of writing about dreams, visions, and journeys to heaven or hell that go back to classical and Christian antiquity, in which human cognition and the shape of the cosmos are thought about very differently. We consider the inter-relationship between the poetic and the visionary in light of the categories of *orthodoxy* and *discretion of spirits*, at a period when both were fiercely contested. We also consider visionary writing and the contradictory claims it makes for the truth of intense imaginative experience as a precursor of the ubiquitous but puzzling modern concept of fiction, with special early reference to W. G. Sebald's 2001 novel *Austerlitz*. Texts not written in English will be read mainly in translation; no previous knowledge of Middle English, or of medieval visionary writing, is required.

Space permitting, this course is open to qualified undergraduates. Undergraduates, please contact Prof. Watson before classes begin if you would like to take the course. Students in Harvard Masters' programs welcome.



 



 

 See also:- [ 2023-24 ](/academic-year/2023-24)
- [ 2025-26 ](/academic-year/2025-26)
- [ Graduate Seminars ](/course-type/6-graduate-seminars)
- [ Course ](/page-type/course)
- [ Fall 2025 ](/term/fall-2025)
- [ Fall 2023 ](/term/fall-2023)