Exclusive look Inside Harvard's new Game of Thrones-Themed Class

Just as Game of Thrones fans are getting excited for the coming of the show's seventh season, the professors behind a new Harvard class have revealed exclusively to TIME that they'll be offering a course this fall about real medieval history called "The Real Game of Thrones: From Modern Myths to Medieval Models."

This Folklore and Mythology class will look at the way the George R.R. Martin's series and HBO TV show based on those books "echoes and adapts, as well as distorts the history and culture of the 'medieval world' of Eurasia from c. 400 to 1500 CE" by exploring " a set of archetypal characters at the heart of Game of Thrones — the king, the good wife, the second son, the adventurer, and so on — with distinct analogues in medieval history, literature, religion, and legend," according to a description of the course provided to TIME by one of its professors, Sean Gilsdorf, a medieval historian and Administrative Director and Lecturer on Medieval Studies. Gilsdorf is co-teaching the class with Racha Kirakosian, an assistant professor of German and the Study of Religion.

This isn't the first time serious academic attention will be paid to Game of Thrones — and the fantasy-heavy show is known for drawing on real history — but this course lends the idea the Harvard imprimatur, TIME reports.

In giving the publication an overview of what the course will cover, Gilsdorf said that medieval biographies of queens will be prime source material. "Game of Thrones does dramatize nicely some fundamental things going on in medieval courts. Tensions between a queen and the younger women who marry their sons are some 'Real Housewives of 10th-century Germany' kind of stuff, where you see these women going after each other," says Gilsdorf.

Kirakosian, meanwhile, pointed out that the character of the "vindictive queen" is something shared by both Cersei Lannister and Kriemhild, the main royal character in the medieval German epic Nibelungenlied, which gives students an idea of family rivalries in the Middle Ages. A few other themes are shared by the show and the epic, she says: both stories involve female rulers whose husbands were killed in a hunt and competition with foreign queens at court, for example.

Other texts that are anticipated as possible required reading include the Irish prose epic Táin bó Cúailnge ("The Cattle Raid of Cooley") — about a legendary war sparked by a fight over a magical bull, for a section of the course on mythical beasts — and a 10th-century account of the Islamic world by a traveler named Ibn Fadlan, which will be used to show how fascination with far away places was of huge interest to people in the Middle Ages, just as it is to Game of Thrones characters.