School of Critical Studies

Course Overview:

This is a creative and hands-on course where students will produce their own edition of a historical text or group of texts from start to finish. Students have the freedom to find and select their own text, which can include material from Glasgow University’s Archives and Special Collections, before beginning the process of transcription, analysis and annotation. As well as broadening technical and critical skills, students will make discoveries about culture, society and the history and transmission of the English language.

 Course convener Dr Alison Wiggins writes:

"Students have a diverse range of texts to choose from a range of archival sources -- both online and physical archives, which include our own Archives and Special Collections here at University of Glasgow. For example, past student projects have included editing the letters of a Scottish slave owner, the diary of a Glasgow high society lady and an early illuminated manuscript. This freedom to choose makes the course highly creative and imaginative, as well as being an opportunity to pick up skills and competencies in web editing and digital humanities."

Course overview

This is a multi-faceted course which introduces students to the Scots language from its earliest written forms. It presents an overview of the linguistic levels of Scots, incorporating elements such as its formal properties of sound and grammar. Students will also employ historical linguistic methods to reconstruct how people in medieval and early modern Scotland might have sounded and spoken. Students will dissect a diverse range of material sources such as medieval legal documents, early modern personal letters and Scots poetry. Through this course, language is merged with the culture, history and heritage of Scotland. 

Course convener Dr Joanna Kopaczyk writes: 

"Many students comment that this course was their first opportunity to engage fully with the linguistic history of Scotland, which isn't taught in schools. It certainly helps students to gain a better understanding of Scotland's linguistic present."

Course convener Dr Fraser Dallachy writes:

"Medieval English literature includes a diverse range of genres which gain richness from their interaction with international literature and classical models. We look at a representative sweep of medieval texts in this course to give students an awareness of the types of literature which circulated in Middle English including romance, fabliau, and epic poetry, considering how these relate to the needs and interests of medieval readers, and studying their interpretation in subsequent scholarly work."

Course convener Professor Elizabeth Robertson writes: 

"The Dream Vision was a landmark literary genre of the late Middle Ages; in addition, medieval mystics recounted visions they had of Christ or the afterlife that shared a number of features with the more literary form. Both forms drew on classical and Biblical forebears as well as on the Middle Ages’s version of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio.  This honours class considers the poetic opportunities dreams and visions offered readers and writers for the consideration of such topics as poetic identity and self-reflexivity, the relationship between authority and experience, gender, the nature of God, and the strengths and limits of governmental structures and social institutions. Texts to be considered will include Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, Parliament of Fowles, and House of Fame, Pearl, and William Langland’s Piers Plowman."