Module 1: This course seeks to survey the basic issues in ‘Germanic philology’ and its methods. Its main topics are: ‘Germanic philology’: meaning and aims; Germani in linguistic and cultural-historic fields; Germanic ethnic names; earliest and current Germanic languages in their Indo-European relationships; Greek, Latin and vernacular sources concerning the Germanic history; Germanic origins: where and when? The Barbarians and the Roman Empire; the migrations and the growth of eastern, western and northern Germanic nationes; cults, religious beliefs, myths, legal practices and society; from orality to literacy; writing: the invention of runes and the adaptation of Greek and Latin alphabet; Christian achievement and the beginning of a manuscript culture; earliest literatures: Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, Old (High and Low) German and Old Norse; Germanic gentes in Italy: ethnographic, historical and linguistic features.

Module 2:
This course concerns English and German literature of the earliest centuries and their contemporary audience, in surveying some major eschatological texts (concernig the End and the Renewal of the world), with their most significant philologic and linguistic features. The selected text, the Old English Harrowing of Hell, shows how this wide-spread theme can enlighten the bicultural world of the Middle Ages, combining illiteracy with scholarship, vernacular poetry with Latin rhetoric.

Module 3:
Il corso si occupa delle letterature inglese e tedesca dei primi secoli, e del pubblico contemporaneo, esaminando i più significativi testi di argomento escatologico (sulla Fine e il Rinnovamento del mondo) nelle loro implicazioni filologico-linguistiche. Il testo prescelto, il Muspilli altotedesco antico, mostra come un tema di larga diffusione possa gettare luce sul mondo ‘biculturale’ del Medioevo, sintesi analfabetismo ed erudizione scolastica, poesia volgare e retorica Latina.

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