Constantine the Great

HIST-J300 with Professor Jeremy Schott

Explore how the emperor Constantine the Great transformed Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. There is perhaps no figure so controversial and so misunderstood in the history of the Roman world as the first “Christian” emperor. Our study will focus on the same primary sources used by professional historians: ancient texts, documents, art, and architecture. We will explore Constantine’s conversion and his religious policies, but we will also examine his foreign and domestic agendas, and military and economic policies. We will also study the “mythical” Constantine and how the Constantine of medieval and modern imaginations shaped thinking about monarchy, church, and state. This course carries IW credit.

Medieval Civilization

HIST-H206 with Professor Deborah Deliyannis

The Middle Ages spanned more than a thousand years, from approximately 400 to 1500 AD, and included many different political, cultural, and ethnic communities. There was not one medieval civilization, but many medieval civilizations, related in some ways to each other, but distinct and constantly changing. This class will be an introduction to the history of the Middle Ages through its culture and ways of life. We will focus our attention on seven communities that are representative of the Middle Ages - villages and towns, manor houses and cities - for each, we will consider who lived in the community and what aspects of medieval life, politics, and culture are represented there.

CEUS-R 191 Introduction to Central Eurasia with Professor Christopher I. Beckwith

The empires of the Scythians and Attila the Hun, the medieval Tibetans, Turks, and Arabs, the invention of science, and Chinggis (“Genghis”) Khan and the Mongols, and the Great Mughals, are the focus of this course, which also introduces the brilliant culture of the cities, colleges, and monasteries of the Silk Road as well as the destruction of Central Eurasia and its reemergence in the late 20th century. Special topics include music, poetry, and the perfection of architecture and art in the Asian Renaissance. The course includes extensive use of films, including Attila, The Conqueror, Lost Horizon, Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet, and Urga. No previous knowledge or prerequisites are needed.

Medieval and Tudor Drama

ENG L307 with Professor Shannon Gayk

From biblical cycles to allegorical morality plays, medieval theater offers a unique mix of the sacred and the profane, the high and the low, the bawdy and the profound. Unlike the renaissance theater that followed it, medieval drama was amateur, community theater. Often the project of entire towns, it was performed in the streets rather than in theaters and acted by merchants, artisans, and laborers rather than professionals. We will read widely in early English drama, exploring the literary strategies used to move, teach, and make audiences laugh, discussing issues of performance and staging, and considering the larger social, economic, and religious contexts in which the drama is produced.

The Gothic Cathedral

ARTH A224 with Professor Diane Reilly

This course will survey the development of one of the most important cultural institutions of the Medieval era, the Gothic Cathedral. Starting in the Ile-de-France around 1140, the cathedral became the most important innovating force in Europe, leading the way in the development of architecture and the visual arts, as well as education and music. The centrality of the cathedral in the later medieval world reflects a fundamental change in the structure of medieval society, which shifted from being primarily rural to urban in the course of only a century. A study of the Gothic cathedral therefore provides an ideal jumping off point to examine the most important trends of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Dante

FRIT-M 501 with Professor Helena Phillips-Robins

Dante’s Divine Comedy is a searching exploration of human existence and of the capacities, and limits, of language and poetry. The poem begins with Inferno – Dante’s exploration of the evil that human beings can do to themselves – and ends with Paradiso – Dante’s exploration, in dialogue with thinkers from Aquinas to Bernard of Clairvaux to Ovid, of what human existence could be, if it was fully shaped by love. This course offers the opportunity for in-depth study of the Comedy, the medieval worlds that produced it, and its later global reception. Students will be encouraged to develop their own research interests within and beyond the Comedy. We will also focus explicitly on different methodological approaches to study of the Middle Ages.

Medieval Performances

ENG L636 with Professor Shannon Gayk

This course offers an introduction to the genres and modes of performance in late-medieval England with a special focus on drama. We will survey a range of premodern performed works, including liturgy, songs, dance, dialogues and debates, religious imitation and role playing, and biblical cycle plays, morality plays, and mummings. Attending to these different modes and genres, we will both think about the uses of performance in premodern England and consider how early performances challenge later assumptions about what constitutes drama, a play, or theater.

Medieval Iberian Literature and Culture

HISP-S518 with Professor Ryan Giles

Survey of classic literature written on the IBERIAN Peninsula from the early Middle Ages to the end of fifteenth century. The focus will be on major works studied within their historical and cultural contexts, with an emphasis on the most influential literary genres to which they belonged, taking into account trends in literary criticism, as well as issues of gender and intersections with Jewish and Muslim literary traditions. Graduate students in any department with a serious interest in the period and training in Spanish are welcome to register for the course.

Life and Death in Medieval Italy

M322 with Professor Helena Phillips-Robins

The period 1250-1375 in Italy witnessed profound artistic experimentation, ongoing political turmoil, and a plague that killed one quarter to half the population of Europe. We will investigate medieval literature, art, and cultural history, studying the major works of the period and also voices that helped shape medieval consciousness but that were subsequently marginalised because of their gender. We will study writers and artists from Dante to Boccaccio, Giotto to Catherine of Siena. Among the questions we will investigate: How did medieval Italians understand life and death? What is the role of art in rebuilding a society after a deadly pandemic? What did the search for justice and freedom look like in medieval Italy? Taught in Italian.

The Troubadours

FRIT-F615 with Professor Elizabeth K Hebbard

Troubadour lyric has long been considered foundational to literary culture in the Middle Ages, particularly in its development and elaboration of the influential concept of fin’amors (courtly love), and in the early date of the expansive and virtuosic vernacular poetic community that the tradition represents. This community of troubadours comprised all 12th- and 13th-century poets and composers who wrote songs in Occitan. Unlike for most medieval works, the majority of which are transmitted anonymously, troubadour lyrics circulated with hundreds of names in medieval sources. In this seminar, we will use troubadour lyric as a case study for exploring larger questions around authorship in the medieval period, including authority, attribution, and anonymity. Our approach will encompass a range of related cultural and material considerations, such as the manuscripts themselves (including their author portraits), the Occitan language, the interaction of text and melody, gender, performance, and the construction of literary community and individual identity through song. Our readings and discussions will build this context while students become familiar with key figures of the tradition and read broadly across major and minor lyric genres. Discussion will be in English, and facing page translations will be provided. No prior knowledge of medieval languages is assumed. Students are, however, expected to engage with medieval language traditions relevant to their research area(s).