To a future student,

Hi! I’m Abby and I took EN 265: Inquiries in British Literature and History with Dr. Mira Assaf
Kafantaris this past semester. I am an English: Creative Writing and Classics double major here
at Butler and am writing you this letter to tell you about this class with Dr. Mira.

There are many things that we focused throughout the course the semester, and one that stood
out to me was the focus on pre-modern literature and how looking at the people who wrote these
works is important. We talked about Chaucer and how even though he was a good writer he was
an awful person, and we should be aware of that. Looking into an author’s life is important when
examined a text because you need to understand where the author is coming from within their
writings and who they are as a person.

One of the other things that stood out to me a lot was the large inclusion of women writers.
Coming into this class I did not think that we would be looking at a lot of works written by
women because up until this part of my education there had not been a big focus on them. Hester
Pulter and Margaret Cavendish are great writers and poets and we as a class dedicated a good
week or two to talking about them and their works, which was quite interesting.

I think that one of the other things that I will remember most about this course was the focus on
violence within texts. These pre-modern texts are gory and detailed which make some of the
texts a hard read but you can get through them. I think that this also ties into looking into the
author’s past when reading an older text. When reading the works and then having the
knowledge of the author’s life and history you can synthesize more from the text. This a lot of
the times will show a trail of violence in an author’s life or show you how they view women and
sex most of the time.

A word that stood out to me in one of the readings for this course was the word “foul”. Within
the reading it referred to in the terms of a draft, of something that wasn’t complete. I think that
this word can go a multitude of different ways, you can take it as that draft version, but it can
also be something that is not good in a moral sense. Murder is foul for instance. There is the
saying “a murder most foul” meaning bad and awful and sneaky.

The word foul can also refer to something unsavory in a text. This foul thing is most likely
something defined by the author to be bad and by using foul helps explain that to the audience.
By understanding the word in the context of pre-modern texts can be really helpful while
reading.

I hope you have fun in this class!!

Best,
Abby