100 courses with the subject MEDVL, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
Topics and reading lists vary from section to section, but all will in some way address the subject of medieval culture. Consult the John S. Knight Institute Current Courses webpage to access current year offerings, instructors and section descriptions.
Globalization may seem like a recent hot topic, but it was already very much in vogue 1000 years ago when Norse explorers burst out of Scandinavia to journey as far as North America, Azerbaijan, the Mediterranean and the White Sea. This course will introduce students to the Norsemen and women of the Viking Age and the centuries following it, weaving together literary, chronicle, archaeological and other sources to tell the remarkable stories of these medieval entrepreneurs and of the many people and places they encountered. Along the way, students will also pick up crucial historical thinking skills: assessing change and continuity over time, learning the basics of source criticism, and gaining an appreciation for interdisciplinary research. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)
This course explores the history of imperial China between the 3rd century b.c.e. and the 16th century c.e. with a focus on the following questions: How did imperial Chinese states go about politically unifying diverse peoples over vast spaces? How did imperial Chinese approaches to governance and to relations with the outer world compare with strategies employed by other historical empires? How did those approaches change over time? How did major socio-cultural formations - including literary canons; religious and familial lineages; marketing networks; and popular book and theatrical cultures - grow and take root, and what were the broader ramifications of those developments? How did such basic configurations of human difference as Chinese (civilized)-barbarian identity, high-low status, and male-female gender operate and change over time? (ASIAN-GE, HIST-HAN, HIST-HPE)
The Middle Ages are usually imagined as a time of manly men and feminine women: no room for gender ambiguity in Conan the Barbarian! Yet gender, then as now, was in fact unstable, multiple, and above all, constructed. This course explores the different ways masculinity was understood, manufactured, and manipulated in northern Europe - primarily early Ireland, England, and Scandinavia - using a variety of literary, legal, historical, archaeological, and artistic sources. Students will gain new perspectives on both gender and sex, on the one hand, and the history of medieval Europe, on the other. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)
Colonial projects have a bad reputation; no one in their right mind would choose to identify as a colonizer, much less a colonialist. This was not always the case. In the 1800s, colonialism was the height of civilized accomplishment; everyone wanted in on it. In this course, we shift our gaze farther back in time to examine the thoughts and practices of people in medieval Europe. We delve into questions of function and type (is there a difference between colonization and colonialism?), of perspective and bias (does it matter how recent a colony is?), of social, cultural, regional, and temporal variation. By highlighting the non-self-evidence of truths we hold, the medieval past can help us appreciate why we cherish them nonetheless - or prompt us to re-evaluate them. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)
Romances were, essentially, medieval science fiction and fantasy writing. They were how authors in the Middle Ages imagined things beyond rational understanding that, at the same time, greatly extended the possibilities of the world around them. The course will survey some medieval narratives concerned with representative voyages to the otherworld or with the impinging of the otherworld upon ordinary experience. The syllabus will normally include some representative Old Irish otherworld literature: selections from The Mabinogion; selections from the Lays of Marie de France; Chretian de Troye's Erec, Yvain, and Lancelot; and the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We will finish by looking at a few contemporary otherworld romances, such as selections from J.R.R. Tolkein. All readings will be in modern English. This class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors. (ENGL-PRE)
This course explores major texts and themes of the Hispanic tradition from the 11th to the 17th centuries. We will examine general questions on literary analysis and the relationship between literature and history around certain events, such as medieval multicultural Iberia, the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492; the encounter between the Old and the New Worlds; the 'opposition' of high and low in popular culture, and of the secular and the sacred in poetry and prose. Readings may be drawn from medieval short stories and miracle collections; chivalric romances, Columbus, Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calder?and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, among others.
In this class, students are introduced to the broad scope of the city of Jerusalem’s political and religious history from its origins until today. Some topics the class covers include: the Jebusite origins of the city; the rise of kings David and Solomon; the Second Temple and Temple Mount; the life of Jesus in and around Jerusalem; Byzantine Jerusalem; the life of Muhammad in Jerusalem; the Crusades; the Ottoman era; archaeological sites; and the status of Jerusalem today. In addition to reading several broad accounts of the history of the city, students perform close readings of a range of primary sources, from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, the Qur’an, travelogues, pilgrimage narratives, geographers, letters, poetry and short stories, archaeological studies, among many others. Throughout the semester, students will discuss questions about identity-formation, sacred space, memory, myth, and pilgrimage.
Survey lecture course covering the creation, encoding, and reception of Medieval (roughly AD 500-1500) European, Byzantine, and Islamic architecture, ornament, manuscripts, liturgical and luxury objects. The approach is thematic but chronologically grounded; attention is also given to cultural interaction in the Mediterranean basin.
Immerse yourself in the essential Jewish movers and moments of Early Modern Europe. Catch the usual headlines (Expulsion! Atheism! Finance!) and headliners like Spinoza, Tzvi, or Baal Shem Tov. Stay tuned for hot, new bangers like Anusa’s Columbus, a Yid? or retro-pop classics like MHRL’s Golem. You’ll be transported from medieval Spain to the revolutionary Americas as you discover the Hebrews, Shebrews, and Theybrews who made modernity.
This course will introduce students to the study of sex and sexuality in the medieval and early modern Islamic World, ending at the dawn of the twentieth century; we will begin with the study of desire in pre-Islamic and early-Islamic poetry and end with the study of the impact of colonialism on the family, the home and morality across the Islamic world. Students will read (in English) from the Qur'an, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, obscene and chaste poetry, erotological works, medical treatises, moral condemnations of sex, legal case studies, erotic stories and travel literature. Students will also engage with modern scholarship on the history of sex and sexuality in the Islamic world. Major topics of study will include: the composition of the family across time and space, the intersection between slavery and sexuality, homosexuality and homoerotic desire in the premodern world, marriage and adultery, questions of consent and sexual violence in law and storytelling, and the discrepancies between law, morality and social practice.
This course focuses on the ideas and practices of Crusading, from its birth ca. 1100 to the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1292. We explore the roots of Crusading in Christian Europe and in the Islamic Near East; the conquest, settlement, and loss of the Latin Levant; and the impacts and afterlives of Crusading. Central themes include the institutional, intellectual, and political histories of Christianity (Latin, Byzantine, and other) and Islam; military, social, and economic narratives of the period; and social, cultural, and environmental analysis, using both material and textual sources. (HIST-HPE, HIST-HTR)
This course is an introduction to the study of Islam and Islamic history. Organised historically, the lecture series will begin with the career of the Prophet Muhammad, before charting the course of the Islamic Conquests, the establishment, zenith and collapse of various Islamic Empires, ending with European colonialism. Along the way, this geopolitical and historical overview will provide a backdrop to our exploration of changes and developments in Islamic thought and practice. In particular, we will focus on the emergence of the Sunni-Shi'i conflict, the rise of Sufism and Salafism, as well as how scholars across time and space thought and wrote about questions of ideal Islamic governance, the religious authority of the caliph, women's role in society and public space, slavery, the ethics of living under non-Muslim rule and the place of non-Muslims in Islamic society. (HIST-HGS)
For thousands of years, people have believed that the world is ending imminently. In this course, we will examine the roots of apocalyptic thinking in the ancient world, especially among Jews and Christians. We will look at biblical apocalyptic texts as well as a wide array of other apocalyptic literatures, such as the books of Enoch, the Sibylline Oracles, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse of Adam, the Apocalypse of Paul, and many others. These texts contain visions of end times, journeys to heaven and hell, and dramatic images of angels and demons, war and peace, and the natural and supernatural worlds. Our goal is to understand the circumstances that gave rise to apocalypticism and how disaster-thinking may have, paradoxically, provided comfort during crises. Throughout the course, we will pay close attention to the meaning of apocalypse as revelation, an unveiling, a discovery. (ARKEO-COS, ARKEO-RMNE)
From the poet-kings of medieval Persia to the trading networks of the famed ?Silk Road? to the wandering mystics of Herat to the constitutional revolution of Iran to the colonial and post-colonial occupations of contemporary Afghanistan, this course offers a broad cultural and political history of Iranian and Turkic Central Asia. In addition, we will explore the highly complex intellectual, artistic, and architectural trends and ?cross-cultural? exchanges that formed the backbone of many disparate Iranian-Turkic cultures. (ASIAN-SC)
What does it mean to be queer in the Middle East? How do queer Muslims and Arabs navigate their sexuality around contemporary legal barriers to same-sex sexual intercourse and social disapprobation? How do the sexual and emotional lives of contemporary queer Muslims and Arabs differ or resemble the lives of people in the pre-modern period? Taking students from the dawn of Islam to the current day, this course charts the history of sex, sexuality, the family and queerness in the Middle East. Along the way, students will learn about Islamic legal and scriptural approaches to sexuality, the importance of sexuality to the propagation of colonialism and empire, post-colonial approaches to sexuality and sexual difference and beyond. (HIST-HGS)
This course introduces the prehistory of “artificial intelligence” (AI), from ancient automata through medieval combinatorics to early modern calculating machines. Putting contemporary debates into historical perspective, readings and discussions will engage with literary, cultural, philosophical, artistic, and technical sources, as well as contemporary scholarship in critical AI studies. Discussions and writing assignments will explore the sociocultural imagination of techniques and technologies and the history of concepts related to creativity, intelligence, and artificiality. Taught in English.
This course explores the role of gender and sexuality in shaping the lives of Muslims past and present. Through a close examination of ethnographies, intellectual histories, and religious treatises, we will analyze the key debates and discourses surrounding the intersection of gender and Islam. We begin by investigating Quranic revelations and hadith concerning gender and sexual ethics, female figures of emulation in early Islam, and feminist exegeses of the Quran. Continuing onward, we focus upon the everyday lives of Muslim women and non-binary individuals in medieval, colonial, and post-colonial contexts, highlighting the ways in which people negotiate and respond to the sexual politics of the times in which they live as we ask what, if anything, is specifically Islamic about the situations under discussion? Following this, we embark upon a history of sexuality within Islam, tracing the ways in which the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality came to exist in the Muslim world, as well as the history and positionality of trans communities past and present. We then continue with an exploration of Islamic feminism as it exists today, looking to the ways in which Muslim feminists have critically engaged both religious texts as well as Western feminist theory. Finally, the course concludes by analyzing the relationship between the study of Islam, gender, and empire.
An introduction to Old Norse-Icelandic mythology and the Icelandic family saga-the native heroic literary genre of Icelandic tradition. Texts will vary but will normally include the Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda, Hrafnkels Saga, Njals Saga, Laxdaela Saga, and Grettirs Saga. All readings will be in translation. (ENGL-PRE)
English has a recorded history longer and more variable than any other language, including poetry and prose as skillful as writings in any period. While learning the language (especially in the first half of the course) we will investigate writings that exploit the language's powers and complexities from the earliest pieces into early Middle English, when the language and its literary traditions disintegrated and began being reinvented at the Norman Conquest. We will also sample (in translation) Latin, Old Saxon, and Old Norse materials that fed the multilingual and multicultural world in which early English developed. (ENGL-PRE)
Beowulf has received renewed attention in popular culture, thanks to the production of recent movies and riveting new translations. The poem's popular appeal lies in its complex depictions of monsters, its accounts of heroic bravery, and its lavish portrayals of life in the Meadhall. Through close readings we will also explore the darker side of the poem: its punishing depictions of loss and exile, despairing meditations on unstable kingship and dynastic failure, and harrowing depictions of heroic defeat and the vanities of existence on the Middle-Earth. Attention will be given to the poem's cultural contexts, its literary heritage, and its layered pagan and Christian perspectives. A bilingual edition of the poem will be assigned so that students may read in Old and Modern English. (ENGL-PRE)
What do love, torture, and ecstasy all have in common? How could they all be considered spiritual experiences? The thirteenth century brought a new and intense focus on the body of Christ, bloodied, wounded, and tortured. Female and male mystics began to describe Jesus as a lord, lover, and even mother in most intimate?and even sexual?terms. Guides for meditation, memory work, and holy living focused on bodily practices for approaching the divine and replicating the suffering of Christ. In this course we will explore a range of literary texts and artistic representations that illuminate this religious and aesthetic ethos. Readings will be in modern and medieval English, and will also include contemporary theoretical texts (ENGL-PRE)
Chaucer became known as the father of English poetry before he was entirely cold in his grave. Why is what he wrote more than six hundred years ago still riveting for us today? It's not just because he is the granddaddy of this language and its literature; it's because what he wrote was funny, fierce, thoughtful, political, philosophical and, oh yes, notoriously bawdy. We'll read some of Chaucer's brilliant early work, and then dig into his two greatest achievements: the epic Troilus and Crisyede, and The Canterbury Tales, his oft-censored panorama of medieval English life. Chaucer will be read in Middle English, which will prove surprisingly easy and pleasant. (ENGL-PRE)
This course aims to familiarize students with the history of Scandinavia, ca. 800-1100 ad. Although well known as a dramatic chapter in medieval history, this period remains enigmatic and often misunderstood. Our goal will be to set Norse history within its European context, observing similarities with processes elsewhere in the medieval world, the better to perceive what makes the Norse unique. We will examine the social, economic and political activities of the Norsemen in continental Scandinavia, in Western and Eastern Europe, and in the North Atlantic. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)
A selective survey of Western philosophical thought from the fourth to the 14th century. Topics include the problem of universals, the theory of knowledge and truth, the nature of free choice and practical reasoning, and philosophical theology. Readings (in translation) include Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. Some attention will be given to the development of ideas across the period and the influence of non-Western traditions on the West.
An introduction to some of the major thinkers and philosophical developments in the Islamic world from the 9th to the 14th centuries CE. Figures include Muslim thinkers such as Al-Kindi, Al-Razi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Al-Ghazali, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) as well as important representatives of the Jewish tradition such as Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides). Themes include philosophical theology (the existence and nature of God, God's relation to the created world, prophecy, the place of reason in religion), metaphysics (the nature of existence, fundamental ontology, causality), mind and knowledge (the nature and mechanisms of cognition, our knowledge of ourselves and the world), and ethics and political philosophy (how best to live and organize the state).
This course explores the relation between literary and utopian Enlightenment cultures in Western history. For each moment of rapid change, from Plato to the Communist revolutions of the twentieth century and beyond, we will focus on two texts: one which promoted the enlightened and revolutionary utopian social blueprint; and one offering an alternative model of transformation or a dystopian account of the utopian model. You will come away from this course having a chronologically wide and intellectually deep immersion in 2500 years of European philosophical and literary history. Throughout, you are encouraged to think about what resources we use to imagine social transformation and to ask if revolution is in fact the best way to effect social transformation. (ENGL-PRE, HIST-HEU)
This course will address both Romanesque and the earliest manifestations of Gothic art and architecture as Western Mediterranean phenomena, rather than northern European ones. We will adopt a comparative approach which includes Islamic and, to a lesser extent, Byzantine cultures and material. In addition to the more usual art historical skills, such as visual and stylistic analysis and compare-and-contrast, we will use selected primary sources and historical analysis to attempt to understand the objects and monuments we address.
Old Norse is a collective term for the earliest North Germanic literary languages: Old Icelandic, Old Norwegian, Old Danish, and Old Swedish. The richly documented Old Icelandic is the center of attention, and the course has two main aims: to provide students with a foundation in the language and its structure, and to give them access to medieval Icelandic (and Scandinavian) literature. Readings include passages from the Prose Edda, a key surviving 13th-century source on Norse mythology, along with an excerpt from an Icelandic saga.
The purpose of this course is to further develop the elementary reading skills acquired in Old Norse I. We will review some of the grammar from Old Norse I, cover additional grammar, and, through a primary focus on translation, develop a deeper understanding of how Old Norse grammar was used in practice. By the end of the semester, we will have translated the entire Icelandic saga, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða.
Sufism, popularly understood as Islamic mysticism, is a loose name given to a broad and diverse collection of beliefs, practices and groups that range and vary across time and space. Going from a small and largely secretive group of mystical practitioners to a mainstream form of piety in the late medieval period, Sufism has a fascinating history, filled with intrigue, controversy, conflict and interesting characters. In this course, students will delve deep into the history of Sufism and read widely from across the Sufi and anti-Sufi traditions. Concentration will be given to practical questions of how Sufis saw themselves and their relationship to God and the world, how they built mystic community, spurned or embraced family life, interacted with mainstream society, and engaged in controversial erotic practices. Across the course, we will read Sufi histories and biographies, poetry, introductory treatises, as well as anti-Sufi polemics and stories. (HIST-HGS, HIST-HPE)
This course examines the cultural and historical interaction of Muslims and Jews from the emergence of Islam in the seventh century through the classical age of Islam down to the turn of the thirteenth century. The intersection of the two cultures (scriptural, spiritual, intellectual, literary, communal, and interpersonal) and members of their respective religious communities will be studied through readings of primary texts (in translation). The course will conclude with some brief reflections on historical memory and the modern and contemporary significance of the two religious communities' interactions during the classical age of Islam.
This course examines the culture and society of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) from 711, when Islam arrived in Iberia, until 1492 and the demise of Nasrid Granada. Through extensive discussion and analysis of Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew primary documents and literary texts of various genres (in translation), the course challenges ideological bases of conventional thinking regarding the social, political, and cultural identity of medieval Spain. Among other things, the class investigates the origins of lyric poetry, the relationships among the various confessional and ethnic communities in al-Andalus and the problems involved in Mozarabic Christian and Andalusi Jewish subcultural adaptations of Andalusi Arabo-Islamic culture.
Today, the legacy of the Middle Ages can be found everywhere, from the game of chess to Game of Thrones, the parliament to the university, the Crusades to the Vikings, the nostalgia for tradition to the very concept of modernity. This course explores the function of the medieval past through the lens of modern visual culture, as part of an emerging field known as “Medievalism.” Along with readings of classic theories of Medievalism (Huizinga, Balázs, Panofsky, Bazin, McLuhan, Eco), screenings will put auteur films (Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, Bergman’s Seventh Seal, Kurosawa’s Ran) in dialogue with popular culture (from Monthy Python to A Knight’s Tale) in order to raise the question of a Global Middle Ages. Taught in English.
This course introduces students to the arts of the ancient Americas from circa 2000 BC to the Spanish invasions of the 15th and 16th centuries. The term pre-Columbian refers to the span of time during which indigenous cultures flourished before Christopher Columbus? voyage of 1492. This course covers the arts of indigenous Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras), the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the Greater and Lesser Antilles), and Andean South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile). Students will become familiar with the history, archaeology, and visual arts of the earliest cultures that populated these regions up through the Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures that encountered the Spaniards. This course also explores the legacies of pre-Columbian cultures among contemporary Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x artists in the United States. (ARKEO-RLAC)
What happens after death? If there is an Afterlife, how is it connected to earthly life? What would the Afterlife actually look like? What role does God or Satan play in the Afterlife? Since the earliest Qur'anic Revelations, Muslims have questioned, imagined and written about the Afterlife. In this course, we will read widely from across the Islamic religious and literary traditions, reading primary texts in translation. We will begin with a survey of the imagination of the Afterlife in scriptural, religious and literary texts, before examining the role and importance of the Afterlife in Islamic legal thinking and morality. Thereafter, we will focus on theological and ethical problems that arise from the imagination of the Afterlife, focusing in particular on the gendered experience of the Afterlife, as well as the question of whether the individual has free will and moral agency or whether eschatological fate is predetermined.
Introduction and training in dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) and its applications in archaeology, art history, climate and environment through lab work and participation in ongoing research projects using ancient to modern wood samples from around the world. Supervised reading and laboratory/project work. Possibilities exists for summer fieldwork in the Mediterranean, Mexico, and New York State. (ARKEO-TM)
Practice makes perfect, the old saying goes, but the nature of that connection remains opaque. This course, conducted in English and intended as a sequel to FREN 3540 - On Paying Attention, gives students the opportunity to engage with everyday material and spiritual practices, and to reflect upon the kids of things these practices make. What is the place of routine and repetition in our lives? How can we open a conversation about our habits? We'll look for models to the long history of writing on the subject, largely but not exclusively by Christian thinkers (e.g. Augustine, Benedict, Aelred, Francis, Ignatius), even as we develop new ways of accounting for, and developing, the practices that make our lives meaningful. Artists, athletes, and introverts especially welcome.
This course will introduce students to the relationship between modern fantasy fiction and the Middle Ages. What kind of world is the world of quests and secret love affairs, swords and sorcery? We'll begin with the two main models for adventure stories in medieval French literature, the Song of Roland and Lancelot, before examing how they appear in modern literature and film. Along the way, we'll consider more familiar exchanges between medieval literture and modern allegory in the work of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and we'll ask what fantasy fiction allows us to fantasize about.
The Qur'an is a cornucopia of stories, laws, apocalyptic visions, Paradisical landscapes and stark warnings. This course presents students with the opportunity not only to read the Qur'an in translation in its entirety, but also to explore different ways in which the Qur'anic text has been and can be interpreted, and the different religious, social and ethical questions that derive from different methods of interpretation. Across the course, students will be asked to explore questions, such as: how does dating the Qur'an impact interpretation? How does the debate concerning Qur'anic (un)createdness impact its interpretation? Is it possible to use extra-Qur'anic material to interpret the Qur'an? How can the Qur'an be read as a literary text? Or as a source of law? Or as a source for history? What is the Qur'an's own view of the past, present and future? How do feminist and queer Muslims read and interpret the Qur'an? This course is secular and academic in nature. We will study a wide range of religious and secular/academic approaches to interpreting the Qur'an, some of which may challenge widely-held assumptions about the Qur'an's authorship, dating, composition and interpretation.
The arts of Southeast Asia are studied in their social context, since in traditional societies creative processes are often mapped on the sequence of events that compose human lives. We will be looking particularly at the gendered ways in which bodies are mapped on the land, and how these various framings are often reflected in the unique relationships that emerge between works of art and textual sources. The South Asian epics of the Ramayana (Story of Rama) and the Mahabharata will be explored during the semester as infinitely renewable sources of inspiration. Special emphasis will be devoted to localized encounters in Indonesia, Cambodia, Burma/Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand. (ASIAN-SC)
This course explores the interactions between Jews, Christians, and other religious groups in late antiquity, especially in Sasanian Persia circa the first through seventh century C.E. Students pay particular attention to the portrayals of Christians in Jewish rabbinic literature, including Midrash and Talmud, but also draw from early Christian, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and other sources. There will be an emphasis on the reading of primary texts in translation in their appropriate historical contexts, and in comparison with one another. Students engage such questions as: How did Jews define themselves in relation to Christians, and vice versa? In what ways did Jews and Christians part ways with one another, as scholars often maintain, and what were the factors at play in their separation? And, lastly, what role did other religious and political groups, such as Gnostics, Zoroastrians, Romans, Mandaeans, Manichaeans, and early Muslims play in these developments?
Reading and translation of Latin philosophical texts.
The Survey is designed to introduce participants to characteristic genres and discourses of Medieval Latin. The traditional focus is prose style and its implications for audience and genre from classical rhetoric to the humanist revival of a 'classical' style. A basic foundation in Latin morphology, syntax, and vocabulary is assumed. Intermediate and advanced topics in post-Classical idioms and syntax will be treated as they arise, with the goal of improving the facility with which students approach, read, and, especially, understand Latin writings from the Middle Ages. In addition to studying the practice(s) of style and Latin prose composition, modern approaches to stylistic analysis, and the intersections of style and identity, participants will gain a working knowledge of medieval theories of prose style as articulated in treatises on the genera dicendi, ars dictaminis, and ars praedicandi, as well as medieval (and modern) discussions of cursus and clausulae.
This seminar explores the relation between book history and literary history during the span from medieval English manuscript culture through Renaissance print culture, with invitations to apply these concerns to any period and language. Skills taught are both theoretical and practical, focusing on manuscripts, old handwriting, literacy, printers, and issues linking material and social book-making to literary topics and forms. As a class, we will focus on the pivotal period of English literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare, but individual final editorial projects can take up any period or language. All students will learn to exploit chance archival discoveries, to write biographies of an early printer, and to use and create an edition. (ENGL-PRE)
This topics seminar will explore genres, forms, and theories of Medieval Latin poetry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (with a few forays into the fourteenth century and beyond). Topics include biblical and liturgical verse, historical epic, philosophical and didactic poetry, satire and parody, the ars versificandi, and historical/contemporary critical approaches to Medieval Latin poetics (Faral, Raby, Norberg, Zumthor, Leupin, Tilliette, Kay, et al.).
A comparative and interdisciplinary seminar whose focus is the visual world created by the pan-Mediterranean (Iberian Peninsula, Maghreb, France, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and Persia) culture of Courtly Love beginning during the 11th century ad, and continuing as a principle factor in medieval cultural production for the remainder of the period. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which the visual dimensions of this culture nuance, compliment, contradict, or at times even exist independently of, its oral and written spheres. Reading knowledge of any Romance or Semitic language and/or Persian, in addition to English, is highly advantageous.
Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.
Topic Spring 23: Portraiture.Byzantine artists produced a wide variety of images that modern interpreters have recognized as portraits. These images illuminate individual identity and visual representation in Byzantium. On the one hand, the constituent elements of a portrait (such as physiognomy, gesture, dress, and attributes) illuminate cultural understandings of personhood. On the other hand, those elements are assembled and displayed through means (composition, medium, and context) that illuminate cultural understandings of images and their ability to extend personal energy. We will focus on the primary sources, including preserved monuments (manuscripts, mosaics, sculptures, etc.) and literary witnesses (epigrams, historians' accounts, etc.), supplemented by selections from the secondary literature on identity, individuality, and subject formation in Byzantium.Seminar topics rotate each semester. Previous topics include: Ravenna, Hagia Sophia, Byzantine Iconoclasm, Spiral Relief Columns. (ARKEO-RMNE)
This seminar is dedicated to an in-depth study of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1349-1351), a masterpiece of Italian literature whose popularity has been renewed as it has been proclaimed "the 14th-century Italian book that shows us how to survive "coronavirus" and the "medieval book to read while under quarantine." Particular attention will be dedicated to: gender; social class; the ethical dimension of literature; Boccaccio's refashioning of Italian, Latin, French, and Provencal source material. Knowledge of Italian is not required.
The premodern world played a crucial role in the formation of postmodern theory. ‘Biblical exegesis’, ‘negative theology’, ‘inner experience’, and other premodern concepts and practices were taken up by postmodern authors including Ingeborg Bachmann, Georges Bataille, Italo Calvino, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, and Robert Musil. Each week we will read one modern author in dialogue with one premodern author, such as Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Hildegard of Bingen, and Mechthild of Magdeburg, among many others. The aim of our comparisons will be to interrogate the legacy of what Bruce Holsinger calls the “premodern condition.”
Moses Maimonides who was born in Cordoba (1138), moved to Fez as a youth and died in Cairo (1204) is regarded by Jewish, Islamic, and Christian tradition alike as the most important Jewish religious intellectual of the classical age of Islam/the High Middle Ages. This seminar will examine Maimonides as the product of his time and place including his complex relationship with Arabo-Islamic culture and, because of his stature as a communal figure, rabbinic scholar, court physician and philosopher, his role as a catalyst for cultural developments. For comparative purposes we also consider Maimonides' Andalusi contemporary, Ibn Rushd, the philosopher, Muslim jurist, physician and scholar of Islamic law.
How and why do landscapes come to inspire the religious imagination? And why do religious practices, rituals, traditions, and beliefs take place in particular landscapes? This seminar treats these questions by focusing on the desert, both imagined and real, as it has shaped religious ascetic practice, especially the development of Christian monasticism in the Middle East. We will read widely from monastic literatures, mostly from late ancient Egypt, to explore both the historical development of monasticism in Christianity and examine why the monastic impulse seems so closely tied to the desert. In addition to reading saints lives and the stories of hermits, we will read early monastic rules, the desert fathers, and we will draw from archaeological sources to examine the varieties of ascetic practices in the deserts of late ancient Egypt, Gaza, Sinai, Palestine, and Syria. Throughout the course we will explore ancient and modern ideas about wilderness and we will explore parallels between ancient Near Eastern literatures and their nineteenth- and twentieth-century parallels in the American frontier and environmental literatures.
How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world. (ARKEO-RMNE)
This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly. (ARKEO-TM)
The people who invaded the isle of Britain after the withdrawal of Roman government in the early fifth century, and who dominated it until the establishment of Norman rule in the late eleventh century, are responsible for some of the best-known and most enduring legacies of the Middle Ages: Beowulf and Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the archbishoprics of Canterbury and York, Alfred the Great and ?helred the Unready. This course examines the Anglo-Saxons in their early-medieval context, focusing especially on the cooperation between history and its sister disciplines - archaeology, literary criticism, and others - that is so vital for shedding light on this distant, opaque era. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)
This course examines the role of temples and their sculptural programs in South and Southeast Asia as creative stimuli for performative reenactments. Choreographic encounters between imagination and memory will be mapped as they occur at various points historically and politically in Java, Bali, Cambodia and India. Since architectural choreography implies the human body's inhabitation and experience of place, the nature of ritualized behavior and its relationship to performance and politics will be explored spatially, both in organizing experience and defining or redefining identity on colonial, national, and diasporic margins. Bringing back the haptic sense (i.e. of feeling and doing at the same time) students will have the unique opportunity to balance the demands of learning a Balinese traditional dance while exploring performance traditions in historical perspective. (ASIAN-SC)
'Violence' has become an unavoidable - and urgently troubling - buzzword in contemporary Western culture. We worry about its manifestations and representations in our own civilization, we scan foreign societies with which we interact for any sign of it, we fantasize about consummating it or construct our utopias around its absence. This course is intended as an opportunity for students working on a variety of topics, periods and areas in premodern Europe to investigate its relevance to their own studies. Through an examination of readings on violence in particular historical contexts, from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period, we will seek to elicit reflection on what is meant by the concept, to prompt consideration of distinctions among forms of violence, and to sample a variety of analytical approaches and tools. (HIST-HEU, HIST-HPE)
Theories of modernization have inspired, informed, and plagued histories of middle and late imperial China. For the Song-Qing eras (roughly 10th-19th centuries), comparative studies have variously found and sought to explain modernization emerging earlier than in Europe, an absence of modernization, or alternative paths of modernization. Regional models have argued for pan-East Asian systems and patterns of modernization. Global models have argued that China had a vital role in European development as a provenance of modernizing institutions and ideas, as a source of exploited resources, or otherwise as an integral part of global systems. In this course we explore these historiographical debates and develop critical perspectives, including approaches to escaping Eurocentric and teleological frameworks. (ASIAN-SC, HIST-HAN, HIST-HPE)
Reading and translation of Latin philosophical texts.
This course is an introduction to and survey of Latin scripts from Roman antiquity through the early Renaissance, with an emphasis on the identification, localization, and reading of scripts. Class meetings will combine practical study of Latin scripts through medieval manuscripts in the Kroch library, facsimiles, and online digital reproductions with instruction in the cultural-historical background to manuscript production, library practices, and bibliographical resources. Students will also be introduced to basic techniques for codicological description and the principles of textual criticism.
The Survey is designed to introduce participants to characteristic genres and discourses of Medieval Latin. The traditional focus is prose style and its implications for audience and genre from classical rhetoric to the humanist revival of a 'classical' style. A basic foundation in Latin morphology, syntax, and vocabulary is assumed. Intermediate and advanced topics in post-Classical idioms and syntax will be treated as they arise, with the goal of improving the facility with which students approach, read, and, especially, understand Latin writings from the Middle Ages. In addition to studying the practice(s) of style and Latin prose composition, modern approaches to stylistic analysis, and the intersections of style and identity, participants will gain a working knowledge of medieval theories of prose style as articulated in treatises on the genera dicendi, ars dictaminis, and ars praedicandi, as well as medieval (and modern) discussions of cursus and clausulae.
English has a recorded history longer and more variable than any other language, including poetry and prose as skillful as writings in any period. While learning the language (especially in the first half of the course) we will investigate writings that exploit the language's powers and complexities from the earliest pieces into early Middle English, when the language and its literary traditions disintegrated and began being reinvented at the Norman Conquest. We will also sample (in translation) Latin, Old Saxon, and Old Norse materials that fed the multilingual and multicultural world in which early English developed.
Beowulf has received renewed attention in popular culture, thanks to the production of recent movies and riveting new translations. The poem's popular appeal lies in its complex depictions of monsters, its accounts of heroic bravery, and its lavish portrayals of life in the Meadhall. Through close readings we will also explore the darker side of the poem: its punishing depictions of loss and exile, despairing meditations on unstable kingship and dynastic failure, and harrowing depictions of heroic defeat and the vanities of existence on the Middle-Earth. Attention will be given to the poem's cultural contexts, its literary heritage, and its layered pagan and Christian perspectives. A bilingual edition of the poem will be assigned so that students may read in Old and Modern English.
This seminar explores the relation between book history and literary history during the span from medieval English manuscript culture through Renaissance print culture, with invitations to apply these concerns to any period and language. Skills taught are both theoretical and practical, focusing on manuscripts, old handwriting, literacy, printers, and issues linking material and social book-making to literary topics and forms. As a class, we will focus on the pivotal period of English literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare, but individual final editorial projects can take up any period or language. All students will learn to exploit chance archival discoveries, to write biographies of an early printer, and to use and create an edition.
Chaucer became known as the father of English poetry before he was entirely cold in his grave. Why is what he wrote more than six hundred years ago still riveting for us today? It's not only because he was the model for a number of key literary forms and features, or because he opened projects that invited participation and imitation. It's also because what he wrote was funny, fierce, thoughtful, political, philosophical, scientific, and notoriously bawdy. We'll read some of Chaucer's early work against a few of his own models, then dig into his two greatest achievements: Troilus and Crisyede and The Canterbury Tales. We'll learn to read Chaucer's Middle English, which will prove surprisingly easy and rewarding.
Fear of idolatry is a recurrent feature of Western culture. The Christian image threatens to short-circuit the flow of spirituality between humans and God, just as images of the ancient, pagan gods threaten dangerously to preserve the energies of those lascivious and vengeful deities. And images, whether secular or religious, are always potentially threatening to literate culture: they compete with words, and seem to possess a much more immediate power to mesmerize the imagination. The Protestant Reformation in particular targeted images as the enemy to a true religion of the Word. Legislation in England determined the wholesale destruction of religious images (iconoclasm) between 1538 and 1644. On the other hand, many writers and artists, both secular and religious, look to the image for salvation of sorts. Guided by these perceptions, we will be looking to a range of pre- and post-Reformation texts and contexts. The course will be equally divided between late medieval and early modern texts. Students without Middle English should feel entirely at ease to take this course: all texts will be presented in reader-friendly editions.
This topics seminar will explore genres, forms, and theories of Medieval Latin poetry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (with a few forays into the fourteenth century and beyond). Topics include biblical and liturgical verse, historical epic, philosophical and didactic poetry, satire and parody, the ars versificandi, and historical/contemporary critical approaches to Medieval Latin poetics (Faral, Raby, Norberg, Zumthor, Leupin, Tilliette, Kay, et al.).
Graduate seminar covering a topic in medieval philosophy.
The term lyric is uncommon before the sixteenth century, but the songs and short, non-narrative poetry that evidently constitute those traditions reach back to the beginnings of written literature. Theory of the lyric is a contested field, with much at stake in how poetry should be assessed and appreciated. Beginning with ancient and early medieval traditions, the seminar will focus on the star-studded period from the early fourteenth through the early seventeenth century, particularly Petrarch, Machaut, Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Skelton, Sidney, Spencer, and Shakespeare. It will seek to explore their poems within literary exchanges as well as cultural history, from economics to media to colonialism to changes in the English language.
This course will address both Romanesque and the earliest manifestations of Gothic art and architecture as Western Mediterranean phenomena, rather than northern European ones. We will adopt a comparative approach which includes Islamic and, to a lesser extent, Byzantine cultures and material. In addition to the more usual art historical skills, such as visual and stylistic analysis and compare-and-contrast, we will use selected primary sources and historical analysis to attempt to understand the objects and monuments we address.
A comparative and interdisciplinary seminar whose focus is the visual world created by the pan-Mediterranean (Iberian Peninsula, Maghreb, France, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and Persia) culture of Courtly Love beginning during the 11th century ad, and continuing as a principle factor in medieval cultural production for the remainder of the period. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which the visual dimensions of this culture nuance, compliment, contradict, or at times even exist independently of, its oral and written spheres. Reading knowledge of any Romance or Semitic language and/or Persian, in addition to English, is highly advantageous.
Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.
This course examines the cultural and historical interaction of Muslims and Jews from the emergence of Islam in the seventh century through the classical age of Islam down to the turn of the thirteenth century. The intersection of the two cultures (scriptural, spiritual, intellectual, literary, communal, and interpersonal) and members of their respective religious communities will be studied through readings of primary texts (in translation). The course will conclude with some brief reflections on historical memory and the modern and contemporary significance of the two religious communities' interactions during the classical age of Islam.
Seminar topics rotate each semester. Topic for Spring 2023: Portraiture.Byzantine artists produced a wide variety of images that modern interpreters have recognized as portraits. These images illuminate individual identity and visual representation in Byzantium. On the one hand, the constituent elements of a portrait (such as physiognomy, gesture, dress, and attributes) illuminate cultural understandings of personhood. On the other hand, those elements are assembled and displayed through means (composition, medium, and context) that illuminate cultural understandings of images and their ability to extend personal energy. We will focus on the primary sources, including preserved monuments (manuscripts, mosaics, sculptures, etc.) and literary witnesses (epigrams, historians' accounts, etc.), supplemented by selections from the secondary literature on identity, individuality, and subject formation in Byzantium.Previous topics include: Ravenna, Hagia Sophia, Byzantine Iconoclasm, Spiral Relief Columns.
Sufism, popularly understood as Islamic mysticism, is a loose name given to a broad and diverse collection of beliefs, practices and groups that range and vary across time and space. Going from a small and largely secretive group of mystical practitioners to a mainstream form of piety in the late medieval period, Sufism has a fascinating history, filled with intrigue, controversy, conflict and interesting characters. In this course, students will delve deep into the history of Sufism and read widely from across the Sufi and anti-Sufi traditions. Concentration will be given to practical questions of how Sufis saw themselves and their relationship to God and the world, how they built mystic community, spurned or embraced family life, interacted with mainstream society, and engaged in controversial erotic practices. Across the course, we will read Sufi histories and biographies, poetry, introductory treatises, as well as anti-Sufi polemics and stories.
This seminar is dedicated to an in-depth study of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1349-1351), a masterpiece of Italian literature whose popularity has been renewed as it has been proclaimed "the 14th-century Italian book that shows us how to survive "coronavirus" and the "medieval book to read while under quarantine." Particular attention will be dedicated to: gender; social class; the ethical dimension of literature; Boccaccio's refashioning of Italian, Latin, French, and Provencal source material. Knowledge of Italian is not required.
The premodern world played a crucial role in the formation of postmodern theory. ‘Biblical exegesis’, ‘negative theology’, ‘inner experience’, and other premodern concepts and practices were taken up by postmodern authors including Ingeborg Bachmann, Georges Bataille, Italo Calvino, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, and Robert Musil. Each week we will read one modern author in dialogue with one premodern author, such as Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Hildegard of Bingen, and Mechthild of Magdeburg, among many others. The aim of our comparisons will be to interrogate the legacy of what Bruce Holsinger calls the “premodern condition.”
There's a moment in the movie The Princess Bride when, listening to an adventure story, a kid worries that this might be a "kissing book." This course takes kissing books as places where "romance" and "fantasy," two overcharged words and two overlapping genres, are stages for our enjoyment. If medieval romances give us a template for narrating desire, and if medieval monastics use kissing, especially in the Song of Songs, to articulate an erotics of reading, the recent explosion of queer romance and fantasy fiction may give us a new way to read (and, who knows, maybe even kiss) with our manifold bodies and desires. Expect Chretien de Troyes, Brnard of Clairvaux, Dante, and lots of queer fiction.
This course examines the culture and society of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) from 711, when Islam arrived in Iberia, until 1492 and the demise of Nasrid Granada. Through extensive discussion and analysis of Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew primary documents and literary texts of various genres (in translation), the course challenges ideological bases of conventional thinking regarding the social, political, and cultural identity of medieval Spain. Among other things, the class investigates the origins of lyric poetry, the relationships among the various confessional and ethnic communities in al-Andalus and the problems involved in Mozarabic Christian and Andalusi Jewish subcultural adaptations of Andalusi Arabo-Islamic culture.
Moses Maimonides who was born in Cordoba (1138), moved to Fez as a youth and died in Cairo (1204) is regarded by Jewish, Islamic, and Christian tradition alike as the most important Jewish religious intellectual of the classical age of Islam/the High Middle Ages. This seminar will examine Maimonides as the product of his time and place including his complex relationship with Arabo-Islamic culture and, because of his stature as a communal figure, rabbinic scholar, court physician and philosopher, his role as a catalyst for cultural developments. For comparative purposes we also consider Maimonides' Andalusi contemporary, Ibn Rushd, the philosopher, Muslim jurist, physician and scholar of Islamic law.
This course introduces students to the arts of the ancient Americas from circa 2000 BC to the Spanish invasions of the 15th and 16th centuries. The term pre-Columbian refers to the span of time during which indigenous cultures flourished before Christopher Columbus’ voyage of 1492. This course covers the arts of indigenous Mesoamerica (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras), the Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the Greater and Lesser Antilles), and Andean South America (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile). Students will become familiar with the history, archaeology, and visual arts of the earliest cultures that populated these regions up through the Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures that encountered the Spaniards. This course also explores the legacies of pre-Columbian cultures among contemporary Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x artists in the United States.
How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire's collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.
What happens after death? If there is an Afterlife, how is it connected to earthly life? What would the Afterlife actually look like? What role does God or Satan play in the Afterlife? Since the earliest Qur'anic Revelations, Muslims have questioned, imagined and written about the Afterlife. In this course, we will read widely from across the Islamic religious and literary traditions, reading primary texts in translation. We will begin with a survey of the imagination of the Afterlife in scriptural, religious and literary texts, before examining the role and importance of the Afterlife in Islamic legal thinking and morality. Thereafter, we will focus on theological and ethical problems that arise from the imagination of the Afterlife, focusing in particular on the gendered experience of the Afterlife, as well as the question of whether the individual has free will and moral agency or whether eschatological fate is predetermined.
This seminar provides a higher-level general introduction to, and survey of, contemporary theories, methods, and approaches in the archaeology of the Mediterranean world. Rather than focusing on a specific geographical sub-region or chronological period, this course examines and critically assesses the practice and distinctive character of Mediterranean archaeology more broadly.
The people who invaded the isle of Britain after the withdrawal of Roman government in the early fifth century, and who dominated it until the establishment of Norman rule in the late eleventh century, are responsible for some of the best-known and most enduring legacies of the Middle Ages: Beowulf and Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the archbishoprics of Canterbury and York, Alfred the Great and ?helred the Unready. This course examines the Anglo-Saxons in their early-medieval context, focusing especially on the cooperation between history and its sister disciplines - archaeology, literary criticism, and others - that is so vital for shedding light on this distant, opaque era.
The Qur'an is a cornucopia of stories, laws, apocalyptic visions, Paradisical landscapes and stark warnings. This course presents students with the opportunity not only to read the Qur'an in translation in its entirety, but also to explore different ways in which the Qur'anic text has been and can be interpreted, and the different religious, social and ethical questions that derive from different methods of interpretation. Across the course, students will be asked to explore questions, such as: how does dating the Qur'an impact interpretation? How does the debate concerning Qur'anic (un)createdness impact its interpretation? Is it possible to use extra-Qur'anic material to interpret the Qur'an? How can the Qur'an be read as a literary text? Or as a source of law? Or as a source for history? What is the Qur'an's own view of the past, present and future? How do feminist and queer Muslims read and interpret the Qur'an? This course is secular and academic in nature. We will study a wide range of religious and secular/academic approaches to interpreting the Qur'an, some of which may challenge widely-held assumptions about the Qur'an's authorship, dating, composition and interpretation.
The arts of Southeast Asia are studied in their social context, since in traditional societies creative processes are often mapped on the sequence of events that compose human lives. We will be looking particularly at the gendered ways in which bodies are mapped on the land, and how these various framings are often reflected in the unique relationships that emerge between works of art and textual sources. The South Asian epics of the Ramayana (Story of Rama) and the Mahabharata will be explored during the semester as infinitely renewable sources of inspiration. Special emphasis will be devoted to localized encounters in Indonesia, Cambodia, Burma/Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thailand.
This course examines the role of temples and their sculptural programs in South and Southeast Asia as creative stimuli for performative reenactments. Choreographic encounters between imagination and memory will be mapped as they occur at various points historically and politically in Java, Bali, Cambodia and India. Since architectural choreography implies the human body's inhabitation and experience of place, the nature of ritualized behavior and its relationship to performance and politics will be explored spatially, both in organizing experience and defining or redefining identity on colonial, national, and diasporic margins. Bringing back the haptic sense (i.e. of feeling and doing at the same time) students will have the unique opportunity to balance the demands of learning a Balinese traditional dance while exploring performance traditions in historical perspective. (ASIAN-SC)
This course explores the interactions between Jews, Christians, and other religious groups in late antiquity, especially in Sasanian Persia circa the first through seventh century C.E. Students pay particular attention to the portrayals of Christians in Jewish rabbinic literature, including Midrash and Talmud, but also draw from early Christian, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and other sources. There will be an emphasis on the reading of primary texts in translation in their appropriate historical contexts, and in comparison with one another. Students engage such questions as: How did Jews define themselves in relation to Christians, and vice versa? In what ways did Jews and Christians part ways with one another, as scholars often maintain, and what were the factors at play in their separation? And, lastly, what role did other religious and political groups, such as Gnostics, Zoroastrians, Romans, Mandaeans, Manichaeans, and early Muslims play in these developments?
'Violence' has become an unavoidable - and urgently troubling - buzzword in contemporary Western culture. We worry about its manifestations and representations in our own civilization, we scan foreign societies with which we interact for any sign of it, we fantasize about consummating it or construct our utopias around its absence. This course is intended as an opportunity for students working on a variety of topics, periods and areas in premodern Europe to investigate its relevance to their own studies. Through an examination of readings on violence in particular historical contexts, from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period, we will seek to elicit reflection on what is meant by the concept, to prompt consideration of distinctions among forms of violence, and to sample a variety of analytical approaches and tools.
Theories of modernization have inspired, informed, and plagued histories of middle and late imperial China. For the Song-Qing eras (roughly 10th-19th centuries), comparative studies have variously found and sought to explain modernization emerging earlier than in Europe, an absence of modernization, or alternative paths of modernization. Regional models have argued for pan-East Asian systems and patterns of modernization. Global models have argued that China had a vital role in European development as a provenance of modernizing institutions and ideas, as a source of exploited resources, or otherwise as an integral part of global systems. In this course we explore these historiographical debates and develop critical perspectives, including approaches to escaping Eurocentric and teleological frameworks. (ASIAN-SC)
Early English writers were of two minds about their homeland: they cultivated the mythology that the English were the New Israel, while they were intensely aware (and constantly reminded by Continental authorities) of their status as a backwater at the margins of Christendom. Scripture modeled for them the concept of divinely sanctioned colonization. It also portended for them the precarity of such an elite status, challenged in their day by Viking attacks, corruption in the Church, and various ecological disasters. Such conflicting ideas about their place in the world generated sophisticated reflections about difference with respect to what is now called race, nationality, indigeneity, and the status of the human in the world. Readings include numerous genres (poetry, sermons, riddles, and saints' lives available in Old English and translation) as well as a wide variety of relevant contemporary theory.
This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the study of the Middle Ages, with special attention to theory and methodology. Seminars will be led by Medieval Studies Program faculty who represent a broad range of disciplines, time periods, languages, and geographical areas.
This course gives students the opportunity to work with a selected instructor to pursue special interests or research not treated in regularly scheduled courses. After getting permission of the instructor, students should contact the department to request access to an instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes.
This course should be used for an independent study in which a small group of students works with one member of the graduate faculty. After getting permission of the instructor, students should contact the department to request access to an instructor's section. Enrolled students are required to provide the department with a course description and/or syllabus along with the instructor's approval by the end of the first week of classes.
Source: Cornell University's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
