School of English
Module manager: Catherine Batt
Email: c.j.batt@leeds.ac.uk
Taught: Semester 1 (Sep to Jan) View Timetable
Year running 2026/27
| ENGL2029 | Renaissance Literature |
ENGL2085 Medieval and Tudor Literature
This module is approved as a discovery module
This module explores literature that creatively bears witness to human experience in tumultuous social, religious, political and cultural change in ways that have lessons for our own troubled age. Our chronological reach—1360 to 1590—challenges the traditional division between ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ cultures. We explore works across a broad timespan of literary innovation, from Geoffrey Chaucer’s imagined fourteenth-century Canterbury pilgrimage to Christopher Marlowe’s astonishing late-sixteenth-century experiments in drama. Through dynamic, intellectually curious and entertaining examples of prose, poetry and drama, including satire, social realism, magic, romance, comedy and lyric, we trace, for example, concerns about defining selfhood both religious and secular, the nature of gender identity and relations, and political thought, against the cultural background of medieval education, European Humanism, religious belief and the Reformation’s shifts in institutional religion. Our texts test the boundaries of literary possibility (and social decorum), challenging the relationship between orality, performance, writing, and printing; foregrounding debates about the place and representation of women in the world; and questioning literature’s role in politics and religion. The literature of this era is acutely relevant to our own times and continues to inspire modern writers (for example, Simon Armitage or Patience Agbabi). The module assessment’s creative writing and critical reflection option is a further opportunity to be part of that creative engagement. Please note this is an optional module and runs subject to enrolments. If a low number of students choose this module, then the module may not run and you may be asked to choose another module.
This module facilitates the understanding and reading of early varieties of English and fosters the ability to analyse texts from cultures radically different from those of the modern world critically and without prejudice. Through guided study of a range of representative texts, you will interrogate and re-evaluate assumptions about periodisation and identify and appreciate the continuities and the literary and cultural diversity of this period, the cultural place of literature in English in the wider world, and the significance of this for literary interpretation and analysis.
On successful completion of the module, you should be able to:
LO1. Identify early varieties of English and discuss the literary possibilities they offer
LO2. Apply and evaluate the power and constraints of historicist approaches to textual and literary analysis
LO3. Analyse texts representing new and unfamiliar cultures and the politics of representation.
SLO4. Use initiative and independent thinking to investigate and build on past research to seek new interpretations of texts. (Work Ready)
SLO5. Communicate purposefully and effectively in different modes and contexts. (Work Ready).
| Delivery type | Number | Length hours | Student hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lecture | 20 | 1 | 20 |
| Seminar | 10 | 1 | 10 |
| Private study hours | 170 | ||
| Total Contact hours | 30 | ||
| Total hours (100hr per 10 credits) | 200 | ||
Students will receive formative feedback as part of their weekly seminars, in conversation with the module tutors and with their peers. There will be opportunities for peer review of written work that gives students experience of implementing the grading criteria, exercises that enable students confidently to use knowledge of early language and rhetorical strategies in their close reading; critical engagement with secondary material to support skills of evaluation.
| Assessment type | Notes | % of formal assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Assignment | Close reading | 30 |
| Assignment | Comparative close reading or creative response | 70 |
| Total percentage (Assessment Coursework) | 100 | |
Normally resits will be assessed by the same methodology as the first attempt, unless otherwise stated
Check the module area in Minerva for your reading list
Last updated: 30/04/2026
Errors, omissions, failed links etc should be notified to the Catalogue Team