Courses
Past Schedules
Fall 2011 | Spring 2011 | Spring 2010 | Spring 2009
FALL 2013
MSCP. 70100 - Introduction to Medieval Studies
GC: T, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Sautman, [21622]
Introduction to Medieval Studies (Contours of the Medieval West) The course requirements include completion of assigned readings, class attendance, a take-home midterm essay, a final research project (about 20 pages), and an online presentation of individual project. The topics to be taken up during the semester are as follows:
1 What does "medieval" mean? what does it encompass? From
temporalities to Dinshaw's "Touching the Past"
2 Time and events: Roncevaux--Hastings--Navas de Tolosa
3 Spiritual time, daily time: what is the medieval calendar?
4 Real time: work, labor, and their symbolic expression
5 Inside and outside of Time: feast and celebration
6 Proximity to the sacred: churches, cathedrals, cemeteries and lived space
7 Touching the sacred, material traces: relics and cult objects
8 Political power: how is it asserted and maintained?
9 Power and gender
10 Power, gender and the patronage of the arts
11 Transgression: heresy
12 Transgression: sexualities
13 Systems of exclusion--creating the margin
14 Exclusion, race and the ethnic other
MSCP 80500 - The Medieval Turn
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Burger, [22334] Cross listed with ENGL 80700 & WSCP 81000.
This course will consider various theoretical frameworks-both contemporary and medieval-useful in discussing the production and management of affect and emotion. It could be said that the Middle Ages invented affective devotion,and the course will begin by focusing on medieval emotional relationships with texts,devotional objects and religious drama concerned with Christ's passion: for example,"The Wooing of Our Lord," Richard Rolle's Meditation, Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of JesusChrist, and lyric laments of The Virgin. We will track the ways that affect in courtly love poetry provided medieval readers with intimate scripts to put inner and outer states of feeling into contact with one another,particularly as the individual perceives herself in relation to (private) desires and (public) pressures. We will examine such texts as Guillaume de Lorris's Romance of the Rose, Machaut's Dit de Ia Fonteinne Amoureuse, Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, and John Lydgate's Complaynt of the Loveres Lyfe. We will also examine the crucial role that affect management played in late medieval conduct literature,and we will consider how the production of self-restraint in such texts,particularly within the structures of the married household, helps form emotional communities that allowed emergent social groups new modes of self-identification. We will examine conduct texts such as The Good Wife's Guide (Le Menagier de Paris) and The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry, as well as literary texts such as Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, as well as Thomas Hoccleve's Series, and Boccaccio's,Petrarch's, and Chaucer's versions ofthe Griselda story. Student work in the course will include one or two oral presentations as well as a 20-25 page research paper.
ART. 85000 - Medieval & Renaissance Manuscripts/Morgan Library GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Lane, [21718] Open to Ph.D. Art History students, permission required for all others.
This seminar will give students the rare opportunity to study original illuminated manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum. Introductory lectures will cover manuscript terminology and a review of illumination from its origins through the Gothic period, before focusing on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century books of hours produced in France and the Netherlands. Two classes on original manuscripts will be held at the Morgan, led by the curators of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts. Students will work on Corsair, the Morgan’s online database, in which their Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts are catalogued with full bibliographies and links to all of their miniatures. Seminar papers may concentrate on a single manuscript or a theme traced through many manuscripts, such as the iconography of an unusual cycle of miniatures or the relationship of a manuscript to panel paintings or to other French or Netherlandish manuscripts of the same period. After choosing a topic and reading the major sources on their working bibliographies, students will be given access to the Morgan’s Reading Room to consult material they cannot find elsewhere. Students are urged to visit the summer exhibition at the Morgan, Illuminating Faith: The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art (May 10 through September 1), as an introduction to the course. Auditors will be accepted if space permits.
Preliminary Readings: De Hamel, Christopher. A History of Illuminated Manuscripts. London, 1994.
Wieck, Roger. Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life. New York and Baltimore, 1988.
CLAS. 75200 - Latin Sight Translation
GC: W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Clayman, [21515] Course open to Graduate Center students only.
ENGL. 80900 - Old English
GC: F, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Whatley, [21563]
A knowledge of “Old English” (OE) is essential for understanding (or teaching) the history of the English Language, as well as for serious work in much Middle English and Scots literature. But as students who take a course like this invariably discover, OE is of abiding interest in itself, as the first documented phase of the English language, and as a treasure-horde of challenging and intriguing texts (along with Old Irish, OE is by far the oldest and greatest surviving corpus of early literature in any European vernacular). At first glance it looks like a “foreign” tongue (elþēodiga reord), but long experience has shown that motivated students routinely succeed in acquiring a competent reading knowledge during a 14-week introductory course like this one. After a month or so of “boot camp” (elementary grammar and short translation exercises), the focus shifts to reading more extensive passages of secular and religious prose, including prose texts from chronicle, scripture, and hagiography (including Ælfric’s legends of the “virgin martyr” St. Agnes and/or the martyred virgin king Edmund), and then shifts to some of the classic anonymous lyric/elegiac poems (such as Dream of the Rood, Wanderer and Seafarer, The Wife's Lament, some riddles), and selections from a biblical epic (Judith). In addition to working on the weekly texts, students will occasionally report briefly on pertinent secondary sources, and also do research for a modest paper (10-12 pp) on a suitable text or topic in Anglo-Saxon literary culture. To compensate for only 2 hrs of class a week (three 1-hr classes would be ideal), there are good web sites to help with learning and practicing the language, and researching the literature and culture of the Anglo-Saxons. Contact me with any queries, and please register early if you plan to take the course: E.Whatley@QC.cuny.edu.
MUS. 87600 - Analysis of Early Music
GC: W, 2:00-5:00 p.m., Rm. 3389, 3 credits, Prof. Stone, [21881]
P SC. 70100 - Ancient & Medieval Political Thought
GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Fontana, [21797]
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SPRING 2013
MSCP. 80500 - Medieval Hagiography
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Head, [20101] Cross listed with HIST 70400. COURSE CANCELLED
MSCP. 80500 - Romance, Medieval & Beyond
GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kruger, [20650] Cross listed with ENGL. 80700
At the center of this course will be the genre of medieval romance, and we will examine intensively a series of (mostly poetic) medieval texts, stretching from the romances and lais of Chretien de Troyes and Marie de France (in the 12th century) to Thomas Malory (in the 15th).
Along the way, we will consider romances about Charlemagne, Alexander, the Crusades, Arthur, the Grail, ancient Greece and Rome, “modern” England and France.
Although we begin with texts written in French, we will examine mainly English-language texts, and we will read these in the original Middle English.
One goal of the course will be to consider what we mean by the genre of romance, and how we might approach the question of genre more generally. Alongside the romance texts, we will therefore consider a wide range of approaches to theorizing genre, and specifically the genre of romance: formalist approaches like Todorov’s; feminist readings like Radway’s; reception theory like Jauss’s; Marxist/materialist formulations like Lukács’s; cultural studies projects like Modleski’s; quantitative methods like Moretti’s.
Additionally, we will be concerned with examining some of the later developments of medieval romance: about one-third of the syllabus will be devoted to works in later periods that take up romance structures and themes. Thus, for instance, we might read Philip Sidney or Mary Wroth; Sir Walter Scott or Nathaniel Hawthorne; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando; a Harlequin romance, with an eye to considering how these take up the mantle of the romance genre while transforming it.
For non-medievalists, projects on later cultural materials are encouraged. For medievalists, interdisciplinary approaches (e.g., thinking about Crusades-related romances in relation to the historiography of the Crusades; considering works across different linguistic/national traditions; thinking comparatively about the representation of something like “courtly love” or “chivalry” in both literary works and non-literary modes like the visual arts) are encouraged.
Course requirements will include at least one in-class presentation; shorter writing during the semester; a final seminar paper of 15-20 pages.
ART. 83000 - Jerusalem in the Middle Ages
GC: F, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Ball/Holcomb, [20166] Course open to Art History students only permission required for all others.
This course will meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Jerusalem in the Middle Ages was a bustling, commercial city home to Jews, Muslims, Orthodox and Catholic Christians, all of whom regarded the city as integral to their various faiths.
Typically, art historians have studied Medieval Jerusalem through a Crusader lens, focusing on the Islamic-influences found in Western Medieval material culture set to a backdrop of violence, a view that ignores the many cultures within Islam that ruled Jerusalem through the centuries as well as the thriving Orthodox Christian and Jewish communities found in the city.
Each week’s discussion will spring from a different object in the Metropolitan’s collection to highlight various aspects of the living and imagined city – a fragment of the True Cross from Golgotha was encased in a precious enamel reliquary and found its way to the Vatican as a gift to the Pope; a group of molded glass vessels some with Jewish symbols and some with Christian designs were made for the many pilgrims of all faiths who came to Jerusalem; diagrams and maps of Jerusalem attest to the many attempts made by scholars to understand how this Biblical city fit into their own histories. The format also affords opportunity to test a variety of methodological approaches to the art object.
Requirements: Discussion, a research paper focusing on an object(s) in the Metropolitan’s collection and presentation of one’s research are required.
No auditors accepted.
Preliminary Readings: Jaroslav Folda, “Reflections on the Historiography of Crusader Art,” and “The Beginnings of Crusader Art: 1099-1100,” in The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land 1098-1187.
Hillenbrand, Robert, “The Art of the Ayyubids: An Overview” in Ayyubid Jerusalem, ed. R. Hillenbrand and S. Auld (London, 2009), 22-44.
Montefiore, Simon Sebag, Jerusalem: The Biography (London, 2011), chapters 15-30.
ENGL. 70700 - Mystic Bodies
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Hennessy, [20127]
This seminar will examine a broad range of texts written on the topic of sex and gender in the Middle Ages.
From the scandalous fabliaux to the orthodox lives of the saints, from mystical writings to medical treatises, the texts read in this course will be used to explore some of the dominant ideas about gender and sexuality, as well as the often paradoxical discourses of medieval misogyny, present in medieval literature and religious culture.
Texts to be read include works by major authors such as the women troubadours, Marie de France, Heloise and Abelard, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Richard Rolle.
In addition, we will read several anonymous texts, including women’s weaving songs (chansons de toile), “The Ballad of a Tyrannical Husband,” and (in translation) the Anglo-Latin Book of Monsters.
Topics to be studied include: blood, body, and Christian materiality; chaste marriage and clerical sexuality; the erotics of courtly love; transgender persons and hermaphrodites; the sexuality of Christ and other issues of iconography and visual representation; and masculinity in the earliest Robin Hood texts.
Throughout the course we will engage with recent developments in criticism (including historical, literary, feminist, queer, and art historical approaches) by authors such as Judith Bennett, Glenn Burger, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Carolyn Dinshaw, Dyan Elliott, Ruth Mazo Karras, Sarah McNamer, and Leo Steinberg, among others, as well as theoretical approaches by Judith Butler, Michel de Certeau, and Judith “Jack” Halberstam.
In addition, we will consider how the topics of sex, gender and religion in the Middle Ages intersect with affect theory and the history of the emotions.
Requirements: one research paper (15-20 pages); and 20 minute oral report based on one of the optional readings for the week on the syllabus.
FREN. 71000 - Enigmes medievales
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Sautman, [20266] Course taught in French.
En ce qui concerne la littérature médiévale, il n’est sans doute pas injuste de supputer que, pour nombre de lecteurs non médiévistes, cette littérature se dérobe à l’entreprise théorique, souffre d’ un affligeant dénuement de pertinence, et est marquée par sa transparence, voire sa simplicité, sa prévisibilité, sa redondance—ou au contraire, est le champ onirique d’ un imaginaire a-historique et sans freins. A l’opposé, les médiévistes en loueront la complexité, les multiples ancrages historiques, les intertextes qui tissent d’ immenses réseaux de conversations, les strates symboliques qui affleurent à la peau des textes, leur étonnante matérialité, à la fois artefacts et traces, et l’enrichissement vertiginieux que lui apportent les approaches théoriques modernes.
Recherchant un point de rencontre entre ces deux perspectives, ce cours entreprend une approche multiple envers quatre textes particulièrement significatifs, chacun à sa manière, et chacun dans sa période. Il s’agira du Perceval (ou Conte du Graal) de Chrétien de Troyes, du Roman de Mélusine de Jean d’ Arras, du Livre de La Mutacion de Fortune de Christine de Pizan, et du Testament de François Villon.
Reconnaissant à la fois l’importance d’ un concept tel que “l’étrangeté” du Moyen Age et l’indispensable appareil critique des lectures historisantes, la valeur des approches modernes et post-modernes et le fondement des connaissances médiévistes, le travail du cours consistera à “compliquer” les interprétations trop simples et définitives, à proposer des ouvertutres sur de multiples fenêtres dans et à travers ces textes, et à explorer les sens divers (et contradictoires) qui puissant en conserver intactes ces énigmes fondamentales qui font que ces textes continuent, en fait, à inciter, provoquer, et stimuler.
Travail: lectures des textes premiers et d’un appareil critique et théorique substantiel. Un travail continu sous forme de “research paper” à developer en étapes et ébauches programmées au cours du semestre avec présentation orale du projet individuel. Un court essai de midterm “take-home”. NB: la technologie du GC le permettant, ce cours utilisera E-Portfolio.
Le noyau du syllabus sera disponible vers la fin du semestre de Fall 2012: me contacter (fsautman@gc.cuny.edu) par e-mail pour ces informations ou consulter Blackboard.
HIST. 70800 - The Byzantine "Dark Ages"
GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Ivison, [20051]
This course focuses on the East Roman or Byzantine Empire and its world during the period ca. 580-843: a period of far-reaching crisis, transformation and change often dubbed the Byzantine “Dark Ages”.
This period witnessed the final end of Roman imperial hegemony in the Mediterranean, first weakened by war with Sassanid Persia, and then made permanent by the Islamic conquests of the Roman Middle East and the settlement of the Slavic peoples in the Roman Balkans and Greek lands. These momentous events threatened the very existence of the east Roman state and reduced the Empire to portions of Italy, Greece and the Balkans, and the provinces of Asia Minor (Anatolia). Military defeat and political instability shook the ideological foundations of the state and led to the collapse of the economy and urban society of Late Antiquity.
The East Roman Empire survived by the skin of its teeth, however, and initiated policies of retrenchment, reorganization and reconstruction that transformed it into what historians recognize as its medieval or `Byzantine' form. By the early 9th century, these developments had set in train a process of military and economic recovery that supported the successes of middle Empire of the Macedonian epoch (867-1056). New rivals emerged during this period, most importantly the Islamic Caliphate and the Bulgar state in the Balkans, resulting in the militarization of the Byzantine state, society, and economy.
Although the Empire maintained a hold on southern and central Italy, this period also saw the emergence of an independent Roman papacy and the challenge of rival ‘Roman Empire’ in the form of the Carolingians after 800. The political and military crises of this period also produced major ideological controversies, the most important of which was Byzantine Iconoclasm.
This course discusses these developments and therefore offers a case study of an empire in crisis, exploring the effects of these changes and the imperial response.
This course offers an introduction to the secondary historiography and primary sources for the period, and is conceived as a reading and discussion class.
The first weeks will introduce students to the range, uses, and issues of the primary sources, both textual and archaeological. Subsequent meetings will discuss major historiographic questions in modern scholarship, using readings from monographs and journal articles, as well as translations of primary sources. No prior knowledge of medieval languages is required (translations will be used) but any such knowledge would be welcomed.
Secondary readings will be mostly in English, but some readings will be in French and possibly German.
Each week we will all read major critical and paradigmatic studies, while select students will present on individual readings that illuminate aspects of the question under discussion.
Grading is divided between a choice of two historiographical essays, and class participation based on discussions that review assigned readings and present mini-research projects.
Assigned Readings available at Mina Rees Library will be put on Reserve; hard-to-find items will be placed on Blackboard as PDFs. Some readings will have to be consulted in other NYC libraries; some photocopied handouts will be distributed. For ease of reference, these books are available for purchase (soft-cover):
• Haldon, J.F., Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture (Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 1997, revised ed.). ISBN 052131917 X, list price $58.00 – a classic, we will read a lot of JFH.
• Kaegi, W.E., Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests (Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 1995). ISBN 0521484553, list price $45.00 – detailed discussion of the conquests.
• Schönborn, C., God's Human Face: The Christ Icon (Ignatius Press, 1994). ISBN 0898705142, list price $16.95 – a very readable scholarly overview.
• Brubaker, L., Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm (Studies in Early Medieval History) (Bristol Classical Press: Bristol, 2012), ISBN-10: 1853997501, ISBN-13: 978-1853997501, list price $27.95 – new!
• Howard-Johnston, J., Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century (Oxford UP: Oxford, 2011), ISBN-10: 0199694990, ISBN-13: 978-0199694990, list price $75.00 – a significant synthesis and revision of the historiography and chronology of the 7th century.
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FALL 2012
MSCP. 80500 - Medieval Dress in Society GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m.,
Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Ball, [18707] Cross listed with ART 83000.
Anne Hollander, writing in Seeing Through Clothes (1993), characterizes medieval dress as having a Astatic simplicityY with no kind of aesthetic or stylistic superiority. (p. 363)@ She declares, as most in fashion studies do, that fashion itself does not begin until the very late Middle Ages and is really a phenomenon of Renaissance society.
Since the 1990s however much attention has been given to Medieval dress, east and west, arguing for a re-examination of the dress made between the 4th-14th centuries as fashion. Furthermore, scholars have explored the importance of dress in comprising Medieval identities and for understanding gender, in addition to the frequent transgressions of such categories through dress.
The rich use of dress in literary imagery, its place in the economy of Medieval Europe, ceremonial and sacerdotal dress, have also been well documented in contemporary scholarship. Yet, the study of dress in the academy still remains rare in part because few Medieval garments survive. This seminar will study Medieval dress from three perspectives where a plethora of primary evidence remains: in literary descriptions, representations in art and its impact on the economy, where textiles comprised one of the largest sectors. Some attention will also be paid of course to actual garments and textiles where they exist. These bodies of evidence will highlight dress and its relationship to identity, group and individual, the importance of dress in communication, especially in diplomacy, and the importance of it as a high art form.
ART. 72000 - Great Digs: Important Sites of the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic Worlds GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Macaulay Lewis, [18982] Course open to Art History students only. Department permission required for all others. Cross listed with MALS 74500.
This course introduces students to major archaeological methods and important archaeological sites from the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic worlds. It seeks to broaden students= awareness of archaeological methods and types of evidence, while demonstrating how interconnected the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic worlds are.
The two primary methods of archaeological inquiry, excavation and survey, are first introduced, discussed and problematized in this course. We will then survey specific sites B cities, towns and, in certain cases, residences B to understand how archaeology has contributed to our knowledge of these sites. Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Hadrian=s Villa (Tivoli), Pompeii, Dura Europos, Constantinople, Ravenna, Jerusalem, Samarra will each be the focus of a lecture. Archaeological evidence B art, architecture and other types of material culture, such as ceramics and glass B from each site will be discussed in detail. By the end of the course students will gain a knowledge of the principles of archaeological excavation and survey; an understanding of major classes of archaeological evidence; and knowledge of important archaeological sites from the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic worlds.
Course Requirements
The course is composed of lectures at which attendance is mandatory. The course assumes no previous knowledge of archaeology. Two papers are required. First, a 7-10 page paper that discusses a methodology or type of evidence that archaeologists use to understand a site or region; for example a student could discuss numismatic evidence, dendrochronology, or field survey and the benefits and problems that it presents to archaeologists in this paper. Students will be graded on this paper; however, it must be revised and resubmitted, as this course also aims to help students develop their academic writing. Second, students must prepare a 15-20 page report on the historical and significance of a site of their choice from the Classical, Late Antique or Islamic worlds that has not been discussed in class; this site can be a city or a specific excavation site or area. This report should be based on the study of all published archaeological and historical sources for the site and it aims to teach students an understanding of a site=s topography and to develop an ability to describe a site in clear and precise archaeological and architectural terms. It should also enable a student to understand and interpret archaeological sites and publications and demonstrate the significance of the selected site.
All papers are double-spaced and must be properly referenced. Images should be included when appropriate.
Office Hours: Wednesday, 2-4. GC 3300.6
Preliminary Readings
Renfrew and Bahn, Archaeology, Theories, Methods and Practice (pp.9-160)
Alcock, S. Graecia Capta
C L. 80100 - The Tristan Legend GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Oppenheimer, [18854]
For at least a thousand years, torturous human conflicts between passion, or undying, obsessive love, and politics, or public responsibility, as well as between love and art, have found some of their most influential and fascinating representations in versions of the Tristan legend. The legend itself has exerted a profound influence, which lasts into the present, on Western cultures, poets, musicians, painters, film-makers, and novelists. Starting with what may be its earliest appearance, in the eleventh-century Persian epic Vis and Ramin by Fakhraddin Gorgani (to be read in translation, as will other works, unless students have the languages), the course will investigate the Tristan story=s extraordinary flourishing in the West, in such masterpieces as the medieval Tristan by Béroul , Gottfried von Strassburg's thirteenth-century Tristan, and the Morte D'Arthur by Malory, plus the important modern changes in its characters and situations brought about by Swinburne, Richard Wagner (whose operatic treatments of the legend will be considered in detail), Thomas Mann, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose Tender Is the Night will be examined from the point of view that it reflects many of the poisonous, seductive, psychological, and mystical motifs of the original story.
Cinematic treatments will be explored, and where possible, shown.
A brief, in-class presentation of a research topic. One research essay.
Texts (addenda to be supplied later)
:Fakhraddin Gorgani. Vis and Ramin. Dick Davis trans. Penguin Classics
Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan. A. T. Hatto trans. Penguin.
Béroul. The Romance of Tristan: The Tale of Tristan's Madness. Alan S. Fedrick trans. Penguin Classics.
Malory. Le Morte D'Arthur, etc. Keith Baines trans., Robert Graves intro. Signet Classics.
Richard Wagner (TBA): both opera and libretto.
Charles Algernon Swinburne. Tristram of Lyonesse. Various editions: see also editions of his complete poems.
(Optional text.)Thomas Mann. Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories. Lowe-Porter trans. Various editions.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender Is the Night. Various editions.
C L. 88200 - Philosophical Approach to 13C Italian Poetry GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Ureni [18858]
Far from being dominated by a single tradition of thought, the medieval intellectual debate constantly challenges the definition of the individual soul and its faculties, the possibility for earthly happiness, the boundaries between sensitive and rational spheres, and the (im)mortality of the rational part of the soul. Multifaceted philosophical approaches, ranging from the Aristotelian tradition and its heterodox forms to the Augustinian speculative tradition, offer diversified answers to those questions, and raise a series of debates that permeates thirteenth-century thought in Italy and Europe.
This course will explore the poetic response to these medieval speculative debates. We will focus on the poets of the Sicilian School, and on Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante Alighieri.
We will highlight how thirteenth-century Italian poetry shares its roots and its creative moment B as well as a lexicon - with theological and philosophical discussions and with scientific investigations, particularly medicine. Within the context of a broad exploration of the relations between philosophy, medicine, and poetry, we will also focus on more specific themes that are key to medieval philosophical debates, such as memory and imagination.
ENGL. 70700 - Literature & Identity in Medieval Britain GC: F, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Whatley, [18786]
The course selects works both "canonical" (the kind often required in undergraduate surveys) and non-canonical, from the broad range of vernacular medieval British literature (not all of which is "English"), and will focus on the literary construction of idealized secular and religious identities (with some attention to beasts and birds).
Works from the Old English period will include three "heroic" verse narratives: Beowulf (with two recent film versions), Genesis B (an idiosyncratic account of the fall of Lucifer, Adam & Eve), and Judith (the biblical-apocryphal Hebrew heroine who decapitates an Assyrian warlord). From the late 12th-early 13th century, when England's reading public was bi-lingual in French and English, we will encounter a group of texts written by/about/for women:- Old French lais by the mysterious Marie de France (Guigemar, Equitan, Bisclavret, Yonec), Clemence of Barking's Anglo-Norman Life of St Lawrence, and two early Middle English works: Holy Maidenhood ("Letter on Virginity"), and the legend of the virgin martyr, Seinte Margarete.
Two groups of texts from the later Middle Ages mainly emphasize male, if not always traditionally "masculine," identities. First, Chaucer's learnedly innovative, late 14th c. chivalric romance, The Knight's Tale, will be read against earlier "popular" romances such as Sir Orfeo (the Orpheus myth) and Amis and Amiloun (a romance of male friendship), and these secular productions will be juxtaposed with vernacular vrsions of Christian saints' legends (Saint George, England's patron saint, and Saint Francis of Assisi, "the last Christian" from the highly successful South English Legendary (late 13th c.).
Finally, Chaucer's beautiful but enigmatic dream-vision of St Valentine's Day, The Parlement of Fowles, will be bracketed with the visionary subjectivities of William Langland's Piers Plowman (selections!) and Juliana of Norwich's Showings.
Most of the course readings will be available in translations and/or modernized versions, but afficionados may work also with the originals; everyone will be expected to handle Chaucer's English (for which there are numerous online aids).
Students will report regularly on recent critical scholarship, and for a term project will research issues of textuality, intertextuality, and historicism, and/or explore and test theoretical models for further understanding of the course readings.
MUS. 86300 - The Multimedia Machaut GC: M, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Rm. GSUC3491, 3 credits, Prof. Stone, [18845]
This course survey Machaut’s entire corpus: lyric poetry, songs, motets, mass, and narrative poetry. His two narrative poems with musical interpolations (the Remede de Fortune and the Voir dit) will merit special attention as multimedia artifacts--prose texts with lyric, musical, and epistolary interpolations, decorated with lavish illumination programs. The class will also consider the role of manuscript transmission in generating meaning: the way the juxtaposition on the page of music, text, and image invites reading across media, for example, and the way manuscript ordering can suggest meanings that accrue between adjacent works.
The seminar will be two hours, with an additional hour required of music students (others welcome to attend as well), in which there will be examination of Machaut’s use of notation; by the end of the seminar students will be able to sightread a Machaut song or motet in three parts.
PHIL. 76100 - Medieval Philosophy GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 4 credits, Prof. Jacobs, [18900]
The course will focus on issues in moral psychology, philosophical anthropology, debates concerning freedom of the will, and metaethics. Our texts will come from Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers. Many of the medievals had subtle, sophisticated views on issues in moral psychology and moral epistemology, and we will find that there are resources in the works of the medievals relevant to numerous significant contemporary debates, as well as being important to the history of philosophy.
There has been steadily growing interest in medieval philosophy in recent years and that interest has begun retrieving several thinkers who had been largely overlooked, and it has also involved looking at medieval philosophers’ views on a wider range of topics than previously, now including ethics and moral psychology, as well as metaphysics and philosophical theology. This course is very much in the spirit of that trend.
Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, and Neoplatonic Aristotelianism all have a pronounced presence in medieval philosophy. Republic, the Laws, Nicomachean Ethics, and Metaphysics are all strongly relevant background for the course.
As the course proceeds we will see that certain central themes recur and that there are increasingly sophisticated articulations of them and arguments concerning them. The issue of the rationality of what is given in revelation—and thus, the relation between reason and religion—is one of those themes.
Another is the relation between intellectual virtue and ethical virtue, and related to that issue, the question of the nature of political rule. Also, the question of the nature of the authority of tradition and its epistemology is addressed by several of these philosophers.
By examining works from the three Abrahamic religious traditions we will get a good sense of the different ways in which these themes and issues have been addressed, including the different ways they appropriated the ancient philosophical heritage.
Most of the thinkers we will study had more or less rationalistic dispositions and impressively sophisticated views of the relation between revealed religion and reason. They were meticulously alert to ways in which theistic commitments have implications for matters of moral psychology, freedom of the will, the relation between ethical perfection and intellectual perfection, and even questions concerning such things as the voluntariness, plasticity, and revisability of character.
I am hoping that we can move through Augustine and Boethius fairly swiftly, and not because they are any less important than the other philosophers, but because they, and the works of theirs on the reading list are more likely to be at least somewhat familiar. My guess is that the works by the Islamic thinkers and Jewish thinkers are less familiar, and because they are actually no less philosophically interesting, it will be worthwhile to explore them as patiently as possible, within the confines of a single semester.
P SC. 70100 - Ancient & Medieval Political Thought GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wallach, [19092]