s/o Four Books for the Middle Ages/Ren

[In The Great White North]

Hoping this will help narrow things down.

 

Could you recommend your "best" four books/plays/essays etc for the Middle Ages and Renaissance?

 

TIA

[regentrude]

We will do Middle Ages/Renaissance next year, and my four "must reads" are:

 

Beowulf

Chaucer Canterbury tales

a version of the King Arthur legend

Dante Divine Comedy

 

and - partly because of our German heritage- the Nibelung saga.

[In The Great White North]

partly because of our German heritage- the Nibelung saga.

 

in German?

[regentrude]

in German?

 

Not in the original Middle High German - we would not understand that.

(we are not going to read Beowulf in the medieval English either).

We will find a translation into modern German.

[In The Great White North]

I actually dragged the kids down to the Cloisters to hear a bard do the first part of Beowulf in Middle English. They weren't impressed.:glare:

 

Is there a "less than college reading level" version of the Nibelungenlied?

[regentrude]

Is there a "less than college reading level" version of the Nibelungenlied?

 

I don't know what "college reading level" would be.

It's the same as with the Odyssey and Iliad: there are numerous prose retellings, some geared towards children and young adults (I fondly remember several versions I read as a kid), and then there are verse translations. Not sure which one we are going to use.

[Ester Maria]

First and foremost, Dante. If you miss out on Dante, you pretty much missed out on the best the middle ages have to offer - Commedia is such an emblematic middle ages work, a real "encyclopedia" of its time, and I would definitely include it. Maybe not in its entirety lest you get lost in breadth and lose out on depth, but about a third of the work with excerpts from all three parts would be good. I also suggest reading Epistola a Cangrande for the sake of getting the idea of multiple levels of Biblical interpretation that Dante introduces and that is quite important for the whole allegorical context and the importance of allegory in middle ages.

 

Next, honestly, it might be a national bias, but speaking of Renaissance, I would do Tasso (Jerusalem Delievered), it is historically relevant (you can tie it perfectly to History studies because of its plot and setting). Tasso also works wonders to connect it to English literature - Spenser used its elements in The Faerie Queene and if you read Milton you will notice Tasso's relevance too.

 

While we are at Milton, I definitely nominate Paradise Lost next. If you have to choose between Tasso and Milton, choose Milton, but I would personally do both.

 

For the forth work, I would probably try to combine Decameron (at least in excerpts which you find acceptable), Cid and Song of Roland, or choose one of those to focus on them.

 

Of course, to make the course more complete, it would be very useful to add in one Shax, one Calderon, a bit of Chaucer and a bit of Petrarca, but on the whole, I would pick something along those lines. It depends on where exactly you want to make the chronological "cut".

[In The Great White North]

I don't know what "college reading level" would be.

 

Here's a guide :

 

http://www.lexile.com/

 

 

It's all theoretical, of course, but gives a rough estimate of reading levels for each grade. Everything above "12th" is college level.

[Moira in MA]

Scholars Online uses the Penguin Classics edition translated by A.T. Hatto.

 

dd2 has just read it and said it was fine.

 

hth

~Moira

[Jenn in CA]

Dante, Divine Comedy

Milton, Paradise Lost

Shakespeare, Henry V

another Shakespeare play

 

.... not that I'm a literature scholar or anything.