Studies in Poetry: Gender and Lyric -- Renaissance Men and Women Writing about Love
This MIT OpenCourseWare literature seminar centers on the major English love sonnet sequences of the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Mary Wroth. Students trace how these poems move between private confession and public performance, tracking their experiments with sound, rhythm, and figuration. The course builds out context through the Petrarchan tradition, reading Petrarch and Thomas Wyatt alongside the English sonneteers, and examines how love poetry served social and political ends: seduction, fame-building, moral instruction, and career recovery. Renaissance conduct manuals and period theories of gender and anatomy inform discussion of ideal masculinity and femininity as the poets construct them. The syllabus also looks past the sonnet vogue to narrative and even pornographic verse of the period. Materials include the course readings and syllabus as published by MIT; no certificate is offered, consistent with OpenCourseWare's open materials model.