Dante’s Divine Comedy: Hell and Its Afterlife

FRIT-M 501 / MEST-M 502 with Filippo Petricca

This course focuses on Dante’s Inferno and its legacy. First, we will read Dante’s Hell in its entirety, exploring sins and punishments; addressing questions about justice, and morality; retracing the interactions between the protagonist, the sinners, and the infernal authorities; mapping the geography of Hell, with a special focus on Dante’s poetics and on scholarly interpretations. Second, as we move through Dante’s cantos, we will be bringing the Inferno in conversation with its modern rewritings across multiple literary traditions and media, including cinema, visual arts, and music. Taught in English.

 

German Literature I: Heroes and Anti-heroes

GER-G 571 with  Christopher Sapp

This course surveys some major works of German literature before 1500, with a focus on the high Middle Ages. After the two surviving works of heroic poetry (Song of Hildebrand, Nibelungenlied), we'll read two texts that problematize the knight figure (Poor Heinrich, Helmbrecht) and the early humanist Ploughman from Bohemia. The course will be conducted in English.

 

Medieval French Literature

FRIT-F 501 with Elizabeth Hebbard

This course offers a general introduction to vernacular literature from medieval France through major works, themes, and critical approaches with an emphasis on transferrable research skills: archival work, premodern primary sources, medieval manuscript culture, philology and critical edition, and the digital tools available for working in all those areas. In the first part of the course, students will develop some reading fluence in medieval French through guided grammar study and familiarity with manuscript culture through encountering manuscripts at the Lilly Library. Coursework includes translations of short excerpts from our primary readings, reading responses, and a long-term collaborative digital critical edition project of a medieval work in multiple manuscript versions. Reading knowledge of modern French or another romance language is required, but the course will be conducted in English.

 

Medieval Literature

CMLT-C 523 with Rosemarie McGerr

Have you ever wondered who invented the sonnet? Or what the first troubadours sang? Did you know that the Arabic lyric form called the muwashshah was invented in medieval Europe? Or that a 9th-century Carolingian woman wrote Latin puzzle poems? The sestina used by modern poets like W. H. Auden and Kona Macphee and many of the hymns still used by modern Christians were invented in medieval Europe. From love songs to religious chants, puzzle poems, and political satires, lyric poetry by artists in medieval Europe created or participated in traditions that continue to shape poetry and song today. Lyric poems from medieval Europe also provide us with the clearest examples of interaction between different languages, religions, and social groups during this time. In this course, we will examine the development of lyric poetry in Europe from the fourth century through the fifteenth century. We will study examples of religious and secular lyrics from a wide range of languages (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, English, Occitan, French, Spanish, Dutch, German, and Italian), learning about traditions and innovations in form and content, as well as the relationship between verbal text and musical setting and the social roles played by lyric poetry. Some of the issues we will explore are the representation of subjectivity in lyric poetry, shared discourses of desire in religious and secular lyrics, the role of dialogue within and between lyric poems, and the embedding of lyric poems in works in other genres. In addition, we will examine the relationship of oral performance and manuscript transmission of lyric poems.

 

Medieval Music

MUS-M 651 with Jennifer Saltzstein

 

Practicum on Research Techniques: The Book Lab

ENG-L 504 with Patricia Clare Ingham

Throughout the recent history of Higher Education, the lab model has been almost exclusively identified with research techniques in the sciences. And yet, in the early decades of the 20th century, John Matthews Manley (scholar of the literary works of Chaucer and medieval authors and early president of the Modern Language Association) and Edith Rickert (scholar of texts of Chaucer and medieval romance) collaborated at the University of Chicago on “The Chaucer Laboratory,” a collaborative research center dedicated to the production of scholarly editions of Chaucer’s corpus and other key medieval texts. On the one hand, this example urges attention to the long history of collaborative research methodologies in medieval studies; on the other hand, it suggests an exemplary model that might extend beyond the specificities of Chaucer, and help us to consider the power, pleasures, and politics of collaboration of the kind now again in vogue in all kinds of humanities fields.

In this course we will engage the lab model for work in Book History and Book Arts. My own expertise resides in late manuscript culture and early print, but students will be welcome to work in whatever period or bookish modality suits them. We will 1) think methodologically about the uses of the ‘lab’ for Humanities Research and Teaching, reading some recent work on its uses in media studies, digital humanities, and elsewhere. What features of early humanities laboratories might we revive or redirect? What liabilities to the lab model are legible either from the example of the Chaucer Laboratory, or in other examples today? 2) But our primary focus will be on the material book, its history and the current efflorescence of homemade books and private presses. And we will, explicitly, draw on the capacities available via IUB’s ‘Book Lab’ to experiment with how immersive experiences might fuel research and making. Precise projects will develop as we proceed, so be ready for some experimentation, with trying on various possibilities that may involve going out on a limb or working outside your comfort zone.

We will work with some materials in the Lilly Library, but we will also attend to varying features of book design, to IU’s collection of Art Books, to possibilities for digitization, and even master some specific book-making skills: how to fold a folio; how to sew a signature; or some skills related to book repair and preservation. Throughout the semester, students will be asked to report on how their own experiments with material books (of all kinds) fuel research projects.

 

Problems in Early Gothic Art

ARTH-A 624 with  Diane Reilly

Like in the ancient period, much of the monumental art that was commissioned in the European Middle Ages served as a setting for ritual activity; many of the portable artworks that survive were used as its tools. While most of the remaining artistic evidence from the early Middle Ages is associated with Christian practices, later centuries provide rich evidence for art used in diverse ritual contexts, whether by Christians, Muslims, or Jews, in public or in private, or in secular ceremonial. This seminar will take the early evolution of Christian rituals as its starting point and build from there, but student research projects can focus on ritual art from any medieval period or population.

 

Seminar in Latin Hist Texts: Roman Letters

CLAS-C620 with Cynthia Bannon

We will read selections from letters by Cicero, Pliny, and Seneca along with secondary readings to advance their literary and cultural analysis

 

State and Faith in Iranian Societies

CEUS-R 356/556 with Professor Jamsheed Choksy

The course examines the bases, permutations, and administrative, societal, economic, literary, and diplomatic developments and ramifications of the relationship between politics and religion in Iranian societies past and present, and how those can be studied through historical and contemporary contexts.

No previous knowledge of subject or prerequisites needed. R356 satisfies College CASE Global Civilization and Culture credit (GCC), Social & Historical Studies (S&H), and Intensive Writing (IW) requirements.

 

Topics in Medieval Iberian Literature and Culture

HISP-S 618 with Ryan Giles

The topic of this course is The Mester de Clerecía and the Book of Good Love. The first part of this course will examine the emergence, development, and impact of a thirteenth-century poetic school known as the Mester de Clerecía. Apart from the spiritual, hagiographic works of Gonzalo de Berceo, heroic texts concerning legends such as that of Alexander the Great formed part of this movement. Also important were works that reflected Jewish and Islamic cultures on the Peninsula, and in particular the anonymous Poema de Yusuf (composed in Aljamiado, or Iberian Romance written in Arabic characters) and the Proverbios morales of the Rabi Sem Tob. The second part of the course will examine the relationship between these texts and the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor (LBA), a work which builds on, adapts, and subversively transforms conventions and traditions inherited from these earlier poets.

 

War and Peace in Islam

MELC-M 391/681 with Asma Afsaruddin

War and peace are universal themes in which Muslim scholars took great interest. This class will focus on how the concepts of war and peace are dealt with as religious, ethical, legal, and social issues within the internally diverse Islamic tradition. Class readings and discussion will focus on how jihad and related concepts are treated in the Qur’an and Qur’an commentaries, hadith (statements of the Prophet Muhammad) and ethical literature, legal and mystical texts produced in the Muslim-majority world, both from the pre-modern and modern periods.

 

Worship and Rule in East Asian History (Topics in East Asian Studies)

EALC-E 505 with Nick Vogt

Throughout history, kings, emperors, dictators, and other rulers have engaged customs of worship - whether by claiming divine descent or inspiration, receiving devotions themselves, conducting public demonstrations of piety, or championing certain practices and denigrating others - as part of the construction of their authority. This course surveys the multivalent forms that this negotiation has taken in East Asian political culture and that drive religious and cultural history from ancient times to the present day. It combines a time-based survey with case studies of important individual rulers, including: - Wu Zetian, famed female ruler of medieval China - Prince Shotoku, early Japanese regent and Buddhist devotee - Yi Yingjo, Korean reformer and Confucian paragon - Mao Zedong, Chinese Communist leader and personality cult object - Kim Il-sung, first supreme leader of North Korea and focus of its state ideology Through these examples and others, the course explores the juncture of politics, religion, and ritual in an effort to understand better the nature of rule.