This course is based on four key pieces of medieval literature in the English language: Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers the Ploughman, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  Beowulf is read in translation, but the other works can be read either in modern translations or in the original Middle English.  The course also includes four important shorter works, two in modern English and two in Middle English.  This course is written from a secular perspective, but Christian theology and though are central to many of these works.  Christianity plays an important part in the analysis of these works, therefore, but is not part of the English instruction which is the purpose of the course.