Spring 2004 Medieval Studies Courses
The following list is intended to be as inclusive as possible. An effort has been made to include all courses listed in the Medieval Studies program regulations as counting toward the graduate minor or undergraduate minor. Courses which might be of interest to medievalists but which do not count toward one of the minors are also included. Please consult the director of the minor program with questions about the relevance of specific courses.
This information is subject to change. Please consult the Registrar's online schedule or the websites of individual departments for up-to-date information on spring courses.
UNC students may also take courses at Duke University through inter-institutional registration. See the courses webpage of the Duke University Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies for the most up-to-date information on medieval courses at Duke.
Art
ART 82: The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land (TR 11-12:15) Jaroslav Folda [Intermediate undergraduate course; prerequisite, Art 35 or permission of the instructor]
This course deals with the art, architecture and history of the Crusaders in Syria/Palestine from the time of the capture of Antioch in 1098 and the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, to the fall of St. Jean d'Acre in 1291. Art historically we shall endeavor to answer the question, "what is Crusader art?" and to consider how the development of the art of the Crusaders differs in the 12th and 13th centuries, and why. Historically we shall consider major developments that have to do with the four Crusader States: the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch and the County of Edessa, all of which form part of the essential context of Crusader art.
ART 111: Early Medieval Art (TR 12:30-1:45) Dorothy Verkerk
ART 350: Seminar in Medieval Art (M 2-5:00) Jaroslav Folda [seminar for graduate students interested in medieval art]
This seminar will address Byzantine, Crusader, and Italian panel painting mainly in the 13th century, with regard to issues of differentiating essential characteristics among the three developments. The focus of our research will be on the phenomenon of chrysography, the golden highlighting found on selected works. We shall consider issues of origins, nature and development, technique, style and iconographic significance. We shall also be interested in the relationships found among Byzantine, Crusader, and Italian panel painting with regard to chrysography.
Classics
CLAS 45 (WMST 45): Women of Byzantium (TR 9:30-10:45) Carolyn Connor
This course looks at the culture through the contributions and roles of women and makes vivid the options open to ordinary women in daily life as well as influential women and empresses. Interactive classes include enactments and persona skits.
CLAS 118: Byzantine Civilization (TR 12:30-1:45) Carolyn Connor
This course is a history-based study of the culture, integrating artistic expression and literary works and the history of religious beliefs; it aims to bring students into the "thought world" of the Byzantines.
Comparative Literature
CMPL 191: Autobiography as a Literary Form (T 3:30-6:00) Dino Cervigni
This course on autobiography will focus on selected autobiographical writings from Augustine to Rousseau (Saint Augustine, The Confessions; The Letters of Abelard and Heloise; Dante's New Life; Petrarch's Letter to Posterity; Margery Kempe; Alberti's Life; Cellini, The Life; Rousseau, The Confessions; etc.), dealing primarily with the following issues: The autobiography as literary genre and related genres (biography; letters; diary; memoirs; travel literature); the special nature of autobiographical writings by women as well as related writings by women (e.g., mystical writings); autobiography and narratology; autobiography and the emergence of the self. All readings will be available in their original text and in English translations. Lectures and discussion will be in English. Class requirements: class attendance and participation; some brief presentations; research paper for graduate students; three brief papers and final project for undergraduates.
English
ENGL 52: Chaucer (TR 12:30-01:45) Ted Leinbaugh
Chaucer's development as an artist as revealed in his poetry.
ENGL 238: History of the English Language (TR 11:00-12:15) Patrick O'Neill
A broad survey of the English language from the introduction of literacy in the seventh century to the present. We will use representative works from different periods to illustrate the changing state of the language. You will be encouraged to apply the generalizations of the course to your own area of expertise.
ENGL 351: Seminar in Middle English Literature (R 3:30-6:00) Joe Wittig
The subject of this seminar will be Chaucer's "Minor" Poetry: Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, Parliament of Fowls, Legend of Good Women, and selected others. These fascinating "dream vision" texts are the works that usually get skipped in Chaucer courses for lack of time.
Germanic Languages
GERM 95: The Marvelous & Fantastic in Medieval Literature (TR 2:00-3:15; texts and discussions in German) Jutta Eming
Dragons and demons, monsters and mutants, warlocks and fairies, magical stones and automatons are regular occurrences in medieval literature across genres and centuries. For medieval man these phenomena were a part of their universe and thus neither rare nor dreadful. At least this is the standard claim of literary history: only modern man, who no longer believes in miracles, can be haunted by the literary manifestations of dread and horror. This course will investigate the question whether the ability to be "creeped out" by fictional representations is restricted to modern man; whether fearing a vampire is so different from fearing a dragon? And if there are differences in the emotional responses of medieval and modern man, how can these be explained? This seminar will pursue these and similar questions by juxtaposing modern theories of the fantastic, such as Freud's famous essay on the uncanny, and medieval texts which stage the marvelous. A foray into modern works of the fantastic and classical horror movies will then bring us full circle. A major goal of this seminar will be to revise our naive view of the - supposed - naivete of the middle ages and to make first steps towards a fuller understanding of this complex era by focusing on its darker side.
[NOTE: Professor Eming is Max Kade Visiting Professor of German at Duke and UNC-CH during the spring 2004 semester, and will also be teaching a graduate-level course at Duke: GER 302, Psychoanalitic Approaches to Medieval Literature (M 3:55-6:20; with texts and discussions in English).]
History
HIST 15: Medieval History — CANCELLED.
HIST 58 (WMST 58): Women in Europe to 1750 (TR 3:30-4:45) Barbara Harris
HIST 90M-002: Earliest England: The Age of Bede (W 1:00-3:50) Richard Pfaff
The course will be a study of the emergence of what becomes "England" in the 7th and early 8th centuries. We will focus on the work of the Venerable Bede (c. 673-735), pre-eminent as an historian and as a monastic humanist.
HIST 100-2: The World of the Nun: Convent Culture in the Renaissance (R 12:30-2:50) Wiley distinguished visting professor Kate Lowe
The course will examine the culture of female monasticism in Europe between 1400 and 1650, with a particular focus on Italy and Southern Europe, and with reference to history, art history and literature. Students will learn how to engage with interdisciplinary and comparative work, and how to evaluate differing historiographies and conceptualisations of the convent experience. There has been considerable new and exciting work in this field in recent years, challenging conventional notions of these all-female, Catholic institutions, once perceived as marginal, but now seen as offering some women significant freedoms. Major concerns will be nuns' everyday lives (including such topics as education and poverty/luxury), convent ceremonial and ritual, patronage and artistic commissioning, and nuns' creative outputs (literary and artistic) as well as relations between convents and the ecclesiastical and secular hierarchies who regulated them, between nuns and their natal families, and relationships inside the institution. Tensions between classical and Christian cultures in convent life will also be explored, as will transgressive nuns who refused to conform. Attention will be paid to representations of convent life in painting and in short stories. In addition to writing a short piece each week in response to the set reading, students will be required to write a research paper, and will be able to choose to write on any European country or area.
HIST 110: The Medieval University (TR 9:30-10:45) Michael McVaugh
The origins and development of the university during the period 1100-1400; types of organization, curricula and degrees, intellectual life, town-gown and student-master relationships.
HIST 111: Women and Men in Renaissance Europe (TR 3:30-4:45) Stanley Chojnacki
This course explores the variety of ways in which gender was conceived and gender roles implemented in the Renaissance and Reformation periods. The two basic premises are (1) that patriarchal ideas - the principles of male dominance - set the conditions of gender relations during the period and (2) that those ideas and their practical application varied from place to place and time to time, with variations intensifying in the environment of change of the 15th and 16th centuries. Examining patriarchy and its implementations means above all investigating the experiences of women and the way authoritative structures, ideological, institutional, and and familial, sought to shape those experiences. The basic question we'll explore is between patriarchal structures and female-male relations in practice: how effective were institutions and the ideas that galvanized them in controlling women's lives? Enlivening that tension was the uncertain harmony between familial and personal stakes in women's lives - especially their marriage prospects - and prevailing principles and policies regarding women. In other words, we'll consider women's position between institutional and private patriarchies. We'll also view the implications of the norms governing femininity and masculinity on men. Just as women negotiated their lives between family and broader structures, so men had to contend with principles of masculinity as well as with women. All of these complex relations were shaken and in some cases profoundly altered by the intellectual, social, religious, and political dynamics of the period.
The investigation will be divided into two phases. The first part will be a survey of aspects of gender in western and central Europe as a whole. The second half will focus on Italy, especially on the issues that converged in marriage. There will be two corresponding graded exercises. The first, due the week before spring break, will cover the material to that point. Undergraduate students will take a midterm exam; graduate students (if any) will write an interpretative historiographical essay. The exercise on the second half will be a paper interpreting our main primary source, the letters of Alessandra Strozzi, in the light of the other readings in the weeks following spring break. I will describe these exercises more fully during the course. Each of the written exercises will be worth 40% of the course grade.
HIST 131: The Origins of Medicine (TR 2:00-3:15) Michael McVaugh
This course will examine the "origins of medicine" through a study of a particular early modern society, England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the world of Shakespeare and Milton, of Hobbes and Locke, of Bacon and Newton. By looking not merely at medicine (illnesses and therapeutics) and doctors but at the broader set of attitudes and institutions by which ideas about health were expressed in this world, we will get an understanding of how medicine functions across a society. At the same time, by looking at the historical origins of such attitudes and institutions (often rooted in the Middle Ages or ancient world) we will be able to appreciate something of the development of medical ideas and practices as they had evolved over the preceding two thousand years.
HIST 134: Medieval England (TR 12:30-1:45) Richard Pfaff
"A consideration of England's origins, unification, and development as a national monarchy. Primary emphasis is on political, ecclesiastical, and cultural aspects." Those dry words summarize the subject matter but can scarcely convey the fascination involved in studying it - for those who like that sort of thing, which includes ingesting a healthy dose of English topography, mastering a narrative which its creators (prime among others, Bede, William of Malmesbury, Matthew Paris) have embedded in our cultural consciousnesses, and concentrating as much as our materials allow on visual evidence. The main thrust temporally will be on the ninth through twelfth centuries, but we shall have to begin in the fifth century and will make every effort to get at least as far as 1307. Graduate students will probably read accessible translations of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (which, despite its name, extends in one version to 1154) and the chronicles of Henry of Huntingdon and Jocelin of Brakelond. Knowledge of Latin is, alas, not required.
HIST 218: Genders and Sexualities in Renaissance Europe (T 7:00-9:30) Stanley Chojnacki
The broadly defined subject of the course is gender in its discursive, institutional, and biological dimensions in western and central Europe during the "long Renaissance." It is designed as a survey of writing on both the conceptions and experience of maleness and femaleness during the period. Guiding the survey will be two hypotheses: that gender and sexual identity were multiple and varied for both sexes, and that changes in ideas about gender are a hallmark of the period. The work of the course will be to test those hypotheses by examining notions and experiences of gender and sexual identities in different countries, during different sub-periods, and among different categories: by occupation and class and by ascribed and asserted categorizations. These last include, in addition to self-identified married persons, male and female religious, writers, witches, prostitutes, single men and women, gay and lesbian groups, and art patrons, as well as the different categories of family members. We will examine the institutional and familial sources of femininities and masculinities and individuals' reactions to gender and sexual expectations. The scope will be Europe-wide but we will give special attention to the scholarly literature on Italy.
Weekly discussions will be based on readings in common and individual assignments. Students will be expected to prepare oral presentations and write short analytical commentaries - reviews - on weekly readings, and to compile a critical bibliography and write a longer interpretative essay on one of the major themes in the subject. The oral presentations and reviews will be done on a rotating basis; students will will comment on each other's presentations, both the rotating weekly assignments and on the stages of research on the larger project.
Paperbacks available for purchase, through amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com (all are in Reserve Reading):
- Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters.*
- Bennett and Froide, Singlewomen in the European Past.
- Bornstein and Rusconi, Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy.
- Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy.*
- Brown and Davis, Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy.
- Cavallo and Warner, Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
- Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice.
- Murray and Eisenbichler, Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West.
- Muir and Ruggiero, Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective.
- Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence.*
- Roper, Oedipus and the Devil.
- Ruggiero, Binding Passions.
- Schutte et al, Time, Space, and Women's Lives in Early Modern Europe.
- Turner, Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe.
- Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edition.*
*Denotes books to be read in their entirety or nearly so.
HIST 290: Renaissance Encounters: Africa in Europe (T 12:30-2:50) Wiley distinguished visting professor Kate Lowe
This is a 'brand-new' topic so the course will have an adventurous feel. The focus will be on sub-Saharan Africa, but because of the vastness of the subject, there will only be time to consider aspects of the following three major elements. The course will examine the gamut of African people, animals, materials and artefacts transported to Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from slaves to ambassadors, from giraffes to carved ivory horns. It will also analyse the levels of knowledge and understanding about various parts of Africa within Europe by (for example) looking at maps, influential classical and medieval sources, and Renaissance travel journals. Finally, it will investigate visual representations of Africa and Africans across Europe and assess the gaps between the visual, the textual and the documentary. Its primary aim is to look at this encounter between two continents in a period before race was a concept, assess the impact of the Renaissance on the encounter, and introduce students to the possibilities for research offered by this kind of cultural history topic. The scholarly literature related to the encounter is very varied and scattered, and has not yet been synthesised; creating individual, relevant bibliographies will be part of the learning experience. Students will also be required to prepare short pieces of written work each week (to be presented in class or circulated), and must be willing to engage with all kinds of written and visual source material and artefacts. Enthusiasm and intellectual curiosity are more important than prior knowledge or subject-specific skills.
Religious Studies
RELI 34: Jewish History - Medieval and Modern (TR 9:30-10:45) Julie Mell
This course is an introductory survey of Jewish history, religion, and culture from the middle ages to the modern period. It focuses on the experience of European Jews from medieval settlements to early modern expulsions and ghettoizations, from modern resettlements, to emigration, Holocaust, and the foundation of the state of Israel. Readings and class lectures will discuss pivotal historical events, cultural, intellectual, and religious movements, including Talmudic commentary and rational philosophy in medieval Judaism, Kabbalah, Hasidism and Haskalah, emancipation and assimilation, the creation of modern Orthodoxy, Reform and Conservative movements, emigration and economic patterns, Zionism, the Holocaust, and the state of Israel. Readings will include both text-books and primary sources. (Permission required. Contact the instructor at mell@email.unc.edu)
RELI 194 (WMST 194): Christian Women Mystics in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (TR 2:00-3:15) Lance Lazar
While many people sense some dim consciousness of the beyond, some claim to be eyewitnesses to the ultimate truths, to have a direct pipeline to the divine. Women mystics often gained power and authority as prophets and living saints, or even "the secretaries of God," but frequently ecclesiastical authorities suspected or censured them as well. The treatises and letters that come down to us provide remarkable testimony to the embedded beliefs about gender roles, ascetic practices, attitudes toward the body, psychological and somatic experience, and popular devotions. This course explores the rich variety and diversity of female mystical experience in the West from the tenth through the seventeenth century. We will approach speculative thought, prophecy, calls to action, as well as "transcendental" experiences through the works of Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite Porte, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, Catherine of Genoa, Angela of Foligno, Teresa of Avila, Maria Maddalena de Pazzi, Jeanne de Chantal, and others.
Romance Languages
ROML 324: Romance Palaeography (TR 11:00-12:15) Ed Montgomery
French
FREN 60: Survey of French Literature I (WMF 9:00-9:50) de la Queriere
FREN 222: Eleventh- to Thirteenth-Century Literature (TR 9:30-10:45) Ed Montgomery
Italian
ITAL 330 (See CMPL 191)
Spanish
SPAN 78: History of the Spanish Language (MWF 12:00-12:50) H. Nittoli
SPAN 201: Beginnings of Castilian Hegemony to 1369 (MWF 11:00-11:50) Frank Dominguez
The course studies the early medieval romance period (11th century-1369). This is the period when Castilian is established as the literary and legal language of the land. We consider why and how this came about. How and why the texts studied are constrained by a particular vision of the world. In the process we look at the characteristics of certain types of works: the epic, the lyric, the chronicle, collections of law, fueros, miracles and exempla. The course can be coupled with SPAN 213 or 224 for the purposes of exam exemption.
For more details, consult the syllabus from last year.
Women's Studies
WMST 45 (See CLAS 45)
WMST 58 (See HIST 58)
WMST 194 (See RELI 194)