Medieval Literature: Love, Sex, and Marriage
MIT's literature course examines how medieval writers depicted love, sex, and marriage, using Arthurian romances, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, mystical visions, and love letters as primary texts. Students read across genres to see how medieval authors treated ideas that can seem strange today, such as the claim that married couples cannot truly be in love, or that romantic love and pain are intertwined, or that religious celibacy could contain its own erotic charge. The course traces medieval attitudes toward gender roles and sexuality as part of literary and historical analysis, asking how these centuries-old ideas still echo in modern beliefs about romance. Materials include the syllabus, reading list, and assignments from MIT's undergraduate literature curriculum, freely available through MIT OpenCourseWare with no enrollment or certificate fee.