| source Duke (X) |
level |
department Medieval and Renaissance Studies (X) |
The names beckon from beyond the mists of time: Homer, Achilles, Hektor, Helen, Troy, Jason, the Golden Fleece, Vergil, Aeneas, Dido. Some of the finest literature ever produced was in the form known as "epic." But what exactly is this form? What makes it such a powerful vehicle of expression, one to which writers continually turn even today? This course intends to get to the bottom of these and other questions. You will acquire first-hand knowledge by engaging some of the landmark works from the ancient world, including Homer, Apollonius of Rhodes, Vergil and Ovid. Aside from the usual interpretive hermeneutics involved in a literary course, we shall lavish a significant portion of our efforts on such larger issues as the figure of the hero, the cultural context of each work, the orality/literacy dimension, and how each author after Homer responds to his predecessors. In addition, there will be brief discussions on other epics, most of which do not survive intact. At the end of the course, you will have gained a very clear and precise notion of what exactly "epic" signifies as a literary phenomenon.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
To what extent can one talk of ÂBritish history in the centuries before ÂBritain itself actually existed? In pursuing answers to that very complex question, this course surveys the history of the British Isles, at home and overseas, from the early sixteenth century to the formal legislative creation of Great Britain in 1707. Topics include: the rise of the Tudors in England and Stuarts in Scotland; the Reformation; relations with Europe; state formation and political community; colonial and commercial expansion in the Atlantic, Africa, and Asia; the Civil War; witchcraft; scientific and print revolutions; the Restoration; and the Glorious Revolution and the Anglo-Scottish Union. We will pay particular attention to changing ideas about politics, law, economy, nature, and society in the early modern British world, and especially to the role of empire at home and abroad in defining and shaping ÂBritain  as a place, a people, and a concept.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
An introduction to techniques of literary analysis through close readings of medieval and renaissance texts from a variety of genres (lyric, narrative, drama; political and scientific treatises; historical, autobiographical, and mystical writings) by major authors (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Catherine of Siena, Poliziano, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, Ariosto, Galileo) with particular emphasis on not only the works strategies of signification, but also their circulation, reception, and adaptation. Musical (Palestrina, Monteverdi) and artistic (Giotto, Botticelli) analogues and elaborations will also be considered, as will the manuscripts and early editions that transmit these works to us (for which some visits to Special Collections will be arranged) in order to define the literary field through an exploration of how literary works are performed orally, visually, theatrically, and bibliographically. Taught in Italian.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
Major writers of the Spanish literary tradition and the historical contexts from which they emerged: Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. Poetry, fiction, theater and essay and historical readings and film. Includes attention to Judaic and Islamic civilizations and expression in medieval Spain.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
Myths of gods, myths of heroes; readings and discussion of
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
This course surveys selected major works and other representative examples of Old and Middle English literature, exclusive of Chaucer, and some Latin literature in translation, from approximately the eighth through the fifteenth centuries. The course explores the development of typical medieval attitudes and themes in a variety of literary forms and genres, including poetry, prose, and drama. Readings may include /Beowulf/ and Anglo-Saxon poetry in translation; St. BedeÂs /Ecclesiastical History/; Arthurian material such as Geoffrey of MonmouthÂs /History of the Kings of Britain/ and Thomas MaloryÂs /Morte DÂArthur/; /Piers Plowman/; /Sir Gawain and the Green Knight/ as well as other Middle English romances; a selection of plays from the /N-Town/ cycle for Corpus Christi; and /Mankind/.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will focus on major works of the early Middle English era, from about 1100-1300. These include the first version of the Arthur story in English, La3amonÂs /Brut/, writings for women such as the AnchoressÂs Rule, early lyric poems, and the debate poem /The Owl and the Nightingale/. All works will be read in their original language, and the reading load will be correspondingly light, so that we can focus on language as well as literary aspects. Course requirements include a presentation and short paper as well as a short final exam.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
This course covers the economic, political, social, and religious history of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales from c. 400-1500. We will focus upon the development of each region as well as the relationships between these regions. Our work will be based upon the interpretation of primary sources, such as letter collections, saints' lives, chronicles, maps, castles and cathedrals, and manuscripts.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
An historical survey of the main trends in Jewish Mysticism or Kabbalah from rabbinic times down to the Hasidic movement. Direct experience with the classical texts, e.g. the Zohar supplies the raw data for interpretive analysis of how the mystical doctrines and practices grew out of non-mystical Judaism, and how they in turn profoundly shaped the content and intellectual history of Judaism. A central concern will be the correlation of Jewish social history with the mystical developments in belief, ritual, and attitudes toward the societies in which Jews lived. Major emphasis on the Medieval and Renaissance periods is to be noted, as are the methodological application of literary criticism and the psychology of religious experience.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
This course explores the ways in which the lives of community members shape buildings and these buildings shape the life of the community. The course will be divided into three units and will take place in conjunction with our reading of the primary text for the course: Ken FolletÂs The Pillars of the Earth. Set in twelfth century England, this historical novel tells the story of Philip, a devout monk, who hopes to build the worldÂs largest Gothic cathedral and of his mason, Tom, who becomes the master architect for the project. The secondary readings will be a bit unusual because rather than using contemporary materials to supplement our understanding of medieval England, this class takes the opposite approach. We will use materials from the Middle Ages to evaluate FollettÂs novel.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
This course is an introduction to early modern Protestant poetry in England. We will read poetry by Spenser, Herbert, and Milton. These writers compel us to think about the theological and political conflicts in which they were immersed and sought to shape. The class begins with Book I of the Faerie Queene. Please make sure that you have read at least the first five cantos of Book I before the first class. You will also find it helpful to read the thirty nine Articles of True Religion of SpenserÂs church, the Church of England ).
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
Love is Not Love: Shakespeare, Post 1600
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
Does NOT include the Canterbury Tales
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
The poetry and thought of John Milton, beginning briskly with the apprentice poems of his adolescence; next a longer look at such youthful masterpieces as Comus and Lycidas; then a thorough study of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. Textbooks: All required readings are in Milton's poems. Exams: A three-hour in-class final. Term Papers: One personal-critical paper. Grade to be based on Active participation in class discussions, term paper, exam (three parts weighed equally). Students who will not participate in class conversation should not enroll.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
Have you ever wondered why magical knowledge is forbidden, and yet pervasive in western culture? Have you considered the claims religious knowledge makes about the visible or the invisible world? Have you wondered why the power of science awes you? If you have ever wondered how you know what you know, and why this matters so much, then this course may be for you. This course charts the relationships between the three dominant ways of knowing in western cultureÂthe magical, the religious, and the scientificÂand their dependence upon each other right to the present day. The large issues of the course flow from an examination of how Âmagical systems of belief were de-legitimized and limits set to religious knowledge during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. This problem sets a framework for explorations of particular topics, including: Renaissance naturalism and the occult sciences, witchcraft and witch hunting, the Scientific Revolution, Christianity and Enlightenment rationalism, mesmerism, nineteenth-century Spiritualism, Darwinism and Christianity, the modern psychologizing of magic and religion (James, Freud, and Jung), social sciences and the Âmagical, psychical research and parapsychology, modern film and the supernatural, the Ânew religious movements of the 1960s, the skeptical movement, modern occultism, and the satanic panics of the 1980s and 1990s. Each unit explores the limits of what was considered knowable, the power religious, magical and scientific ways of knowing created, and the dangers of going too far. This is a course about the ways we westerners move into and out of visible and invisible worlds, and what happens when those worlds cross in unexpected ways. The approach in lectures is historical, but course materials draw on works from anthropology, comparative religion, film studies, the history of science, literature, and psychology.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
This course explores developments in art, architecture, humanism, and science in their social and political contexts from the Black Death through the trial of Galileo. We will focus on urban and court societies, modes of communication and cultural diffusion, and EuropeÂs shifting relation to the rest of the world. Readings include, among others, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Castiglione, More, Montaigne, and Shakespeare.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
Johnny Depp (in Don Juan de Marco) is NOT Don Juan. That charming seducer and trickster, one of the most famous characters of all time, was born in the popular theater of Spain in the early 17th century, as El burlador de Sevilla, or Tan largo me lo fiáis, two versions of the same story. But who wrote that play? The famous priest-playwright Tirso de Molina, or a mostly forgotten actor/ theater company owner/ author, Andrés de Claramonte? In this course we will read plays by both authors, and others as well, learn why such plays were the most popular entertainment in early modern Spain, akin to movies and television today, and study how the world of the theater worked. We will also look at how contemporary computer vision is helping decipher old manuscripts of the plays. In the latter part of the course, students in the course with sufficient computer skills will work at building a small Âvirtual world of Tirso / Claramonte / Don JuanÂs world, and brainstorm how to build parts of it into a computer-game format in order to bring that world to life and help solve the controversy.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
A contextual study of art and daily culture in the Netherlands. This course will focus on the visual culture in the early modern period as it came into being in cities such as Haarlem, Leiden, Amsterdam, Utrecht, Middelburg, Zwolle and Delft. Also included are a critical assessment of the stimulating role of migration (Flemish, Jewish, Hughenot) in the establishment of a cultural identity of the Dutch Republic, as well as discussions of major
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
Although every culture has "science" (the attempt to comprehend nature), the scientific enterprise dominant in the modern world had its origin in classical antiquity and its major transformation in the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This course examines the development of science from antiquity through the (Stonehenge), the development of Greek philosophy, science and medicine; medieval science (in Islamic countries and the Latin West), the Scientific Revolution and its relationship to early modern society and culture. Both original sources and historical studies and analyses and examined.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
Introduction to Old Norse (heroic) culture through the rich literature of the Viking Age. The course is taught and all readings are in English. Among other things, we will consider the mythology of ancient Scandinavia, aspects
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
DanteÂs Divine Comedy: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
The class will read, discuss, and write about ten plays from the second decade of Shakespeare's career.
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
Prerequisite: some previous work on aspects of medieval culture
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page
"The World in Venice and Venice in the World"
Score: 12.120831 Details | Listing | Web page