This course focuses on three main literary works composed in languages sharing a common Old Germanic origin: Old Norse/Old Icelandic (verse Edda), Old High German (Hildebrandslied), and Old English (Beowulf). We will be working on these texts as a chance to deepen some main issues, tenets, and approaches of the philological study of the Middle Ages, especially as concerns Central and Northern Europe. 

These issues are:

- What is a text? How to reconstruct the original version of a text, starting from its later handwritten copies?

- How to read a text directly from a medieval manuscript?

- How to detect (if this is ever possible) 'native', pre-Christian, Common Germanic cultural motives among/behind Christian ones in works composed in an Old Germanic language?

- How to understand a medieval text from the point of view of the cultural communities and codes within which that text was produced and originally circulated?

- Why are European medieval cultural motives still so alive in present-day European and non-European culture? How are they being received and re-functionalized in the present days?

- How can we apply some philological competencies and skills to our professional life even outside philological work?

This course will be organized in the didactic format of three laboratories. After 8 common introductory lecture hours, we will be approaching the three works (Edda, Beowulf, Hildebrandslied) in three student groups. Each group will be developing its own lab research design on 'their' selected work. The teacher's role will be to help and facilitate, but not to guide. After 8 laboratory hours, the three groups will meet again, and each group will present its results to the others. A common discussion and feedback will conclude the course.

1. Introductory lessons: Edda, Hildebrandslied, Beowulf / How to approach a medieval literary work. A philologist's understanding of 'text'; a philologist's working tools.

1.1. The Old Norse/Old Icelandic verse Edda. Manuscript tradition, main topics, reception along the centuries. Scholarship on Edda.

1.2. The Old Hight German Hildebrandslied: Manuscript source, main topics, language contamination. Scholarship on Hildebrandslied.

1.3. The Old English Beowulf: Manuscript source, main topics, reception along the centuries. Scholarship on Beowulf.

2. Laboratories on Edda, Hildebrandslied, Beowulf.

2.1. Common hours on how to design a philological project in a laboratory: working with sources, language, contents, text in context, reception, media. 

2.2. Edda

2.3 Hildebrandslied

2.4 Beowulf

3. Presentation and discussion of results. Why philology today? Conclusions and outlook.

At the end of the course, the students will have achieved the following outcomes:

1. Demonstrate knowledge and understanding. The students will have demonstrated to have properly comprehended and acquired the philological approach to cultural phenomena; they will have understood and learned the function of philological working tools; they will have learned how to pursue philological work individually and in groups.

2. Apply knowledge and understanding. The students will have learned how to apply the philological tools onto research objects chosen by themselves, on the basis of personal questions. They will have learned how to approach and solve philological problems within a self-constructed philological investigation strategy. They will have learned how to trust their own self-generated questions and how to negotiate and share them in a laboratory team so to build a shared project design.

3. Making judgments. The students will have learned to formulate judgments even in case of incomplete data, for example, while pursuing a research design with evidence still to be tested and verified. they will be able to negotiate their own judgments with other lab participants' ones and stand their own point while acknowledging the others' points of view.

4, Communication skills. The students will have learned how to raise a philological question, formulate a hypothesis, identify the evidence to test it, articulate their judgments on them, and state a thesis, all this with appropriate academic terms, and in an effective presentation and argumentation style. They will have learned how to negotiate their standpoint in a team. 

5. Learning skills. The students will have acquired the skills to develop their own research goal and process, as well as making analogy connections with knowledge fields outside philology, so as to be able to apply the tools acquired in this course to other academic and professional domains.

The teaching material prepared by the lecturer in addition to recommended textbooks (such as for instance slides, lecture notes, exercises, bibliography) and communications from the lecturer specific to the course can be found inside the Moodle platform › blended.uniurb.it