Cluster Programs: Knowledge at the Crossroads: Religious & Scientific Cultures of the Middle Ages & the Renaissance
This cluster of nine courses examines both the intersections and the conflicts between religious and scientific beliefs, institutions, and practices from around 1300 until 1750. During this period of extraordinary intellectual ferment and religious and political conflict, writers and thinkers in various disciplines – poets and playwrights, painters and musicians, theologians and scientific practitioners, and moral and political philosophers – actively and variously reconfigure the relationship between faith and reason, between scripture and nature, and between religious belief and “scientific” knowledge. Each of the courses included in this cluster expose students to the historical dimensions, and in many cases the intellectual origins, of questions and conflicts still current in academia as well as in contemporary American and global culture at large: the origins of religious tolerance and pluralism; the potential for conflict (or reconciliation) between reason and faith and between secular and sacred authority. In addition to providing students with a much improved understanding of the historical foundations of conflicts still germane to our own culture, “Knowledge at the Crossroads” will also offer students an excellent venue to improve their own skills of critical thinking and writing by exposing them to cultures and texts actively engaged in the persistent renegotiation of competing knowledge claims and ways of knowing.
ENGL 227, Literature of the Earlier Renaissance (Core course) [HM]
ASTR 205: The Medieval Foundations of Modern Cosmology [NS]
ENGL 229, Renaissance Women Writers [HM]
ENGL 325: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries [HM]
HIST 454, The Reformation [SS]
MUSC 251, Studies in Music History to 1650 [FA]
PHIL 220, History of Philosophy, Descartes through Hume [HM]
The four Divisions of the College of Arts and Sciences, with their abbreviations:
[HM]: Humanities
[FA]: Fine Arts
[SS]: Social and Behavioral Sciences
[NS]: Natural Sciences and Mathematics