Spring 2010 English Department- English 250 Section: 3
Title: Agents [and Others] in Anglo-Saxon England
Instructor: O'Brien O'Keeffe, Katherine
Time: Tues. 3:30-6:30
Location: 305 Wheeler
Book list: Texts for “Agents (and Others) in Anglo-Saxon England":
Course Description: This course will investigate questions of agency and identity (particularly religious identity) in the textual world of Anglo-Saxon England. As part of our investigations, we will begin with some early medieval engagements of predestination and free will, focusing on Anglo-Saxon negotiations of these issues in a range of philosophical, theological, and pastoral texts. We will first ask how Anglo-Saxon writers conceptualized agency and who they thought could be agents. Such questions will require some wide-ranging reading in the laws, liturgy, hagiography, monastic rules and commentary, as well as in practices of education. In probing this material we will be seeking the cultural logic at work in these texts and working toward a further set of questions: What models of agency do we wish to bring to the study of texts from a highly traditional society? What can practices regarding people who are legally incompetent (children, women, and slaves) tell us about agency in Anglo-Saxon England? What light does the abbatial relation (of abbot or abbess to subject), carefully theorized in commentaries on the Rule, shed on questions of agency? The ultimate research goal of the course will be the writing of a publishable paper.
History Department- History 283.001
Title: Thinking Through History
Instructor: Koziol
Time: Wed 4-6
CCN: 39786
In the west, history has always been part of very large debates about the nature of society, the powers and limits of government, the capacity of individuals, and the role of religion. It is less a matter of writing history than of thinking with history – thinking about the present through the past. The questions are why we do history this way and whether we should continue doing it. Because this habitus is distinctively (and originally) European, the readings are entirely European. They are, however, quite broad: from Thucydides and Machiavelli to Marx, the British Marxists, the Annales, Foucault, and Hayden White. Also, given the influence of European historiography, this reading is important background for non-Europeanists. In fact, one of our recurring questions will be the extent to which these European-derived questions have been or should be applicable to non-European historiographies. And the final paper topic is quite ecumenical, simply asking students to interrogate the historiographies of their own fields with that discussed in the class. NB: Only the first weeks’ readings, required translations, or books of limited availability will be made available for purchase at the bookstores (or as PDFs, or at a copy center). For most readings, students should make their own direct purchases. Email the instructor to learn which books to order oneself and which to purchase at the bookstore. - History 281.001
Title: Paleography
Instructor: Mavroudi
Tues 10-12
Location: 104 Dwinelle
CCN: 39783
This course is designed as a general introduction to the use of primary documents pertinent to Mediterranean history and culture during the ancient and medieval periods. It will address issues of paleography, codicology, textual tradition, and the critical edition of sources. The main focus will be on Greek and Arabic documents, but the issues covered will be of interest to anyone interested in the manuscript culture of the medieval Mediterranean even beyond these two languages. We will mainly study books, but will also refer to administrative documents. Though the bulk our material will be medieval, the course is of potential interest to clacissists, since the works of ancient authors survive mostly in medieval manuscripts. The unifying theme for covering such a great chronological, geographical, cultural, and linguistic gamut will be the common developments regarding the technology of book production and the logic of authoring, editing, and reproducing texts before the advent of printing, though differences will also be discussed. Students will be encouraged to work independently in order to learn more about the written documents of the civilization and time period that most interests them beyond what will be covered in class, and will be graded based on class participation and a final paper covering an area of their special interest. In addition to the two-hour seminar discussion, those who know Greek and/or Arabic will also read out of medieval Greek and/or Arabic medieval documents.
French- French 210A
Title: Studies in Medieval Literature
Location: M 1-4P, 4226 DWINELLE
Instructor: HULT, D
CCN: 32548
Medieval Latin - Latin 155A Section 1
Title: Readings in Medieval Latin: Latin Lyrics from the High Middle Ages: the “Carmina Burana”
Instructor: Bezner, Frank
Location: 279 DWINELLE
Times: TTh 9:30-11A
In this course, we will study the most important collection of medieval Latin secular lyrics from the High Middle Ages, the so-called “Carmina Burana”. These poems (close to 300) were all written during one of the most creative, innovative, and tension-ridden periods in the Middle Ages, the “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century”, and can be separated into three main groups: a first group contains satirical poems which are directed against the ecclesiastical establishment, against greed, corruption and hypocrisy. A second group consists of love poems – poems which often draw on the poetry of Ovid and explore the emotions of those falling in love. Finally, the third group consists of poetry (apparently) written by a rebellious group of poets (the “Vagantes”) who in their poems adopted the personae (or masks) of hypocrites, false beggars, and outlaws…
Emphasis in our course will be on reading, translating, and analyzing these fascinating poems, which are markedly different from Ancient Latin poetry. We will also discuss the manuscript of the “Carmina Burana” and explore the complex relationship between these poems and their cultural and intellectual contexts.
All texts and further materials will be made available in a course reader (on bspace).
Medieval Studies- Medieval Studies 250
Title: Vernacular Theology in Medieval England
Instructor: Vincent Gillespie, Distinguished Visiting Professor
Time: Th 3-6
Location: Barrows 78
CCN:56906From Ancrene Wisse to Elizabeth Barton, writing for the needs, abilities and spiritual potentials of women (enclosed, lay, and increasingly metaphorical) provides the paradigm for English vernacular theology. This course will explore the dynamics of vernacular theology from its earliest twelfth and thirteenth century manifestations in writings for nuns and anchoresses to its public exploration and celebration in the cycle and stand-alone plays of the later fifteenth century, and its polemics in the early reformation period. In particular, close attention will be given to the situation before and after Thomas Arundel's 1409 decrees, to ask the question (without begging it): what, if anything changed? Texts and authors to be considered include Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group (including A Talking of the Love of God), Rolle, Julian of Norwich, the Cloud of Unknowing corpus, Margery Kempe, Nicholas Love, The Chastising of God's Children, Lollard spirituality, religious plays, reformation polemics, and some of the mass of shorter material included in the devotional miscellanies and compilations that allowed the literate laity to take the clergy's words out of their mouths. - Medieval Studies 150 section 002
Title: Anglo-Saxon Art and Archaeology, 600-800
Instructor: David Wright, Professor Emeritus of History of Art
Time: Th 2-5pm
Location: 308C Doe Library - Medieval Studies 150 section 001
Title: Dreams of Glory: Poetic Identity and Poetic Theory in the Later Middle Ages
Instructor: Vincent Gillespie, Distinguished Visiting Professor
Time: TTh 11-12:30
Location: 2312 Tolman
Dante cast a long shadow across the later Middle Ages. This course will explore how writers after him came to terms with his massive presence, and how they developed their own distinctive poetic identities. In particular, we will explore how the humanist construction of the poet drew on earlier theological and exegetical models and blended them with classical ideals. Writers to be considered will include Petrarch and Boccaccio (especially their theoretical writings about poetry), and some later Italian humanists (such as Salutati) who were read in England. In the English vernacular, fifteenth century writers responded to the humanists, and to Chaucer's anti-humanist art poetical, and in particular to his astonishing and experimental House of Fame in a variety of ways, always involving creative re-writing. Lydgate, Hoccleve, Dunbar, Henryson and Skelton will form part of the horizon of our focus on the English responses to Chaucer, Dante and to developing ideas of poetic identity.
German- German 205
Title: Studies in the Medieval Literature
Instructor: Largier, N.
Time: M 2-4pm
Location: 225 Dwinelle
Scandinavian- Scandinavian 201B
Title: Norse Literature
Instructor: Carol Clover
Email:
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Time: Tu 1-4
While building skills in reading Old Norse-Icelandic, the course attempts an introduction to and survey of the major genres of the literature. One three-hour meeting per week. Readings, reports, and a term paper.
Texts: C. J. Clover and J. Lindow, Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide (Toronto Univ. Press, 2005); others TBA.
Prerequisite: Scandinavian 201A or the equivalent; consent of instructor.
Italian- Italian Studies 244
Title: The Novella After Boccaccio
Instructor: Albert R. Ascoli
Location: 6331 Dwinelle
Times: M 3-6
Note: Course Conducted in English - Reading Knowledge of Italian Required - This course may be taken for 2 or 4 units.
It is well-known how Francesco Petrarca appropriates and transforms the vernacular lyric tradition in his macrotext, the Canzoniere, and in the process creates a model for lyric compilations that that would dominate the European scene for at least three centuries. Similarly Boccaccio’s Decameron gathers together preceding narrative efforts (including not only fablieaux, romances, and earlier novelle, but also parables, saint’s lives, Dante’s encounters with souls in the otherworld, and so on), into a macrotextual structure that would exert immense influence in the late medieval, Renaissance and early modern periods, in Italy and elsewhere throughout Europe, in collcetions of stories and in other genres as well (e.g., comedia erudita; chivalric romance). This course will begin with two weeks dedicated to precursor texts that the Decameron draws upon for its themes, narratives and formal structures (Ovid and Apuleius among the classics; Il Novellino and Dante among the moderns ) and will continue through ten weeks dedicated to Boccaccio’s text. In the final section of the course we will examine some sixteenth and seventeenth century texts from the European tradition that adapt and transform the Boccaccian model (e.g., Ariosto; Machiavelli; Bandello, Girald-Cinzio, Basile, Marguerite de Navarre, Cervantes, and Shakespeare).
Comparative Literature
- Comparative Literature 152
Title: Complexities of Desire Medieval Love Literature
Instructor: Frank Bezner
Location: 175 Barrows
Times: Tu/Th 12:30-2:00
Often labelled as ‘courtly’ love, medieval love literature is of a rich, complex, and challenging variety: intellectuals write (in Latin) about the anxieties and traps related to falling in love; monks send their love poetry to nuns; French nobles negotiate power and dependency by writing abouth ‘their’ desire; professional singers create and perform highly dense literary fabrics about their unreachable lady; authors of romances explore the tensions between being a ruler and falling in love; mystics interpret (and write about) their religious experience as sensual love.
Our course will explore this variety. In the first half we will closely read and compare a significant number of both ‘classic’ and less known Latin and vernacular love lyrics from the High Middle Ages: authors read include Baudri of Bourgeuil, Peter of Blois, Andreas Capellanus (Latin), William of Aquitaine, Marcabru, and Bertrand of Ventadorn (French), Heinrich of Morungen, Reinmar and Walther of the Vogelweide (German). In the second half we will mainly read and compare some medieval (Arthurian) narratives centered around the problem of love (Erec, Tristan), but at the end also discuss the fusion of religious lyrics and love lyrics.
In reading and comparing these texts we will engage in literary analysis (form, imagery, recurrent elements, principal ideas, beginnings/ends, construction of a speaker/’I’, performance), explore the intersections of love literature and other discourses(medical, theological, legal), and discuss the relationship between our texts and the complex intellectual and social milieus in which they originated.
Students must read at least one of the above languages, and a certain knowledge of Latin is strongly recommended. All texts will be available both in the original and in translation. Students must be willing to engage in intensive close reading and are expected to contribute actively to class. One oral presentation, one mid-term and one final paper will be required.
Books: Course reader (for the poems) on bspace. Erec and Enide (Chretien de Troyes, tr. Staines ), Erec (Hartman of Aue, tr. Tobin ), Tristan (Gottfried of Strassburg, tr. Hatto).
Art History- HA 254 Title: Medieval Art: Procreation, Alchemy, and the Divine Artist: Concepts of Creativity around 1500
Instructor: Prof. Beate Fricke
CCN: 05632
Time: T 2:00-5:00
Location: 425 Doe Library
Creating and animating a work of art appears to have been the main challenge for an artist working at the dusk of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance. This seminar will consider the intriguing differences between various contemporary perceptions of the process of art-making, as well as the puzzling analogies between medieval approaches to the production of artworks and contemporary theories about the procreation of life in medicine and theology. Theologians of the time, for example, thought of the process of art-making in dramatically different ways: some deferentially described the artist’s workshop as a space of scientific experimentation, while others suspected it of being more akin to a witch’s kitchen than a laboratory. Moreover, some artists consciously and openly fashioned themselves as erasing the boundaries between the approaches of a scientist, alchemist and divine artist in their work. Others did not overtly display their knowledge of these “artes et scientiae” but a thorough analysis of their works reveals that these artists, too, were immersed in the contemporary debates about the relationship between art and science. The seminar will focus on the concepts of procreation and animation involved in the production of a work of art and their reception in contemporary theories of art. Scholars have mostly emphasized the impact of the antique idea of the divine artist, embraced and popularized by Neoplatonism, on contemporary art production. This seminar will follow another strong, but more obscure, current of fifteenth century art theory, one that has an earlier origin. We will try to trace the impact of the Latin reception of alchemical knowledge of Arab and Byzantine texts, explore the influence of theologian debates since Nicolaus Cusanus and consider the artistic reaction to new medical knowledge in the period between 1420s and 1520s. Each class session will be dedicated to one enigmatic work of art (including Konrad Witz, the Aurora Consurgens manuscript in Zurich, Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer, Dosso Dossi and Leonardo da Vinci) and to exploring, through these images, the questions of procreation and animation and their intersections. Requirements for this course are: reading knowledge of German OR French OR Italian; intellectual curiosity; and active participation. Recommended but not required is a basic reading knowledge of Latin. Weekly readings will include texts by art historians, philosophers, theologians, and historians of science, medicine and alchemy, as well as primary sources.
Graduate Theological Union- STHS-4056 01
Title: Medieval Images of Person
Location: MUDD:102
Time: T 11:10AM-02:00PM
Instructor: Griener(JSTB)
This lecture-seminar course focuses on primary readings from the 11th-15th centuries to examine images of the human person which could contribute to a contemporary anthropology. Each class meeting contains a seminar-discussion of the assigned texts?-including those from Aelred of Clairvaux, Albert the Great, Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Hildegard of Bingen, Hugh of St. Victor and others. Background and secondary readings will locate the authors and assess their contributions. Participants will make summary presentations of the assigned materials. Requirements: Readings, participation in seminar discussions, final research paper (of at least 20 pages) or take home examination. [12 max enrollment; PIN code required; Auditors with Faculty permission] - HS-4050 01
Title: Patristic Medieval Exegesis
Location: DSPT:18
Time: F 02:10PM-05:00PM
Instructor: Thompson(DSPT)
This seminar will examine the modes of Biblical Exegesis used by the Fathers of the Church and Medieval Latin Christian exegetes. Focus will be on the concept of multiple senses and typology, especially for interpretation of the Old Testament. We will read a representative sampling of the Fathers, Scholastic Theologians, mystical writers, and Apocalyptic theorists, including: Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Augustine, Chrysostom, Bede, Ioachim of Fiore, Hildegard of Bingen, Richard St. Victor, and Thomas Aquinas. Students will present weekly individual reports and participate in general discussion and write a substantial (20 page) research paper of their own choosing in consultation with the instructor. Evaluation will be based on oral presentation and the paper. A prior course in the History of Christianity in ancient and medieval periods would be helpful, though not required. [12 max enrollment; Auditors with Faculty permission] - HSHR-4505 01
Title:Jewish Life in Medieval Europe
Location: GTU:HDCO
Time: M 09:40AM-12:30PM
Instructor: Aranoff(GTU/CJS)
This class will examine Jewish society and culture in medieval Europe from the 10th through the 16th centuries. We will explore features of Jewish communal life, interactions with Christian society as well as intellectual and religious trends. Special emphasis will be placed on the use of original documents in translation. The great diversity of Jewish history and ideas during this period will allow us to develop a nuanced sense of the overall process of social and religious change in Jewish history. Seminar/paper.
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