JANE AUSTEN’S ROMANTIC MEDIEVALISM

Class begins on Wednesday May 21st, at 5pm Pacific (8pm Eastern), and continues for EIGHT Wednesdays. Last class will be on July 9th, 2025.

Continued course description from above…

Austen critiqued, appropriated, and transformed the romance tradition, particularly the tradition of courtly love, which called the knight to serve and worship his lady. Austen recognized the moral dangers posed by courtly love; such service and worship might blind a woman to her own moral faults and the worship a man offered might mask his selfish motives. However, she also recognized courtly love’s real insights; love does involve humble submission and sincere worship, from both the man and the woman. In her treatment of courtly love, Austen upends gender norms, depicting women who take on knightly virtues of courage, service, and worship. For Austen, rightly-ordered love is central to happiness. Her vision of happiness, like her vision of love, was shaped by the medieval romantic tradition, which depicts, not just ladies and knights in love, but a providential cosmos in which human effort and divine provision bring about a happy ending. Austen does ironize the romantic tradition, perceiving its dangers and absurdities and unrealities. Nevertheless, her irony is not simply negative or corrosive. Rather, it gives her a rich and complex vision that allows her to perceive follies and failures, practical economic needs, and high ideals of love and happiness.  Such a multifaceted vision is also a legacy of the medieval tradition. This course will consider the medieval romantic tradition and how Austen, in Emma and Persuasion, critiqued, appropriated, and transformed that tradition. In the end, we will see that Austen’s novels should be understood as ironic providential romances, a genre to which Chaucer and Shakespeare both belong.