Course Descriptions

MEDIEVAL STUDIES

MEDIEVAL STUDIES

CENTRAL EURASIAN STUDIES

CLASSICAL STUDIES

ENGLISH

FRENCH AND ITALIAN

GERMANIC STUDIES

HISTORY

HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

HISTORY OF ART

HONORS COLLEGE

JEWISH STUDIES

LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE

MUSIC

NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES & CULTURES

PHILOSOPHY

MEDIEVAL STUDIES COURSE DESCRIPTIONS:

Why do dragons hoard gold? Can humans transform into animals, or animals into humans? Why is the lion the king of the animal world? These were serious questions to medieval audiences, and the answers they formulated through literature, mythology, and scientific inquiry still affect our culture today. Before genetics, before Darwin, even before Linnaeus, how did Western thinkers define the relationship between human and animal? Was this limit more or less solid than in the modern world? Does the way a culture thinks about animals and monsters influence the way they will think about human endeavors like the arts, politics, history, or philosophy? These are the questions we will explore in our class. Readings will include Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Lais of Marie de France, Bestiaries, Fables, Romances, and more.

We will begin with authors who provide a baseline portrait of what it meant to be a Roman under the Empire, and then investigate how later writers used and changed their Imperial models, always maintaining the firm belief that they themselves were living examples of "Romanitas," Roman-ness. Authors will include Suetonius, Juvenal, Apuleius, Perpetua, Augustine, Boethius, Gregory of Tours, Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, Einhard, and others. Evaluation: Three substantive essays. Prerequisites: Students are expected to have a basic working knowledge of Roman Culture (C102 or equivalent), and the ability to write an analytical essay.

This course is an introduction to the history of the world area known as Central Eurasia, which stretches from the southern sub-Arctic to the Indian Subcontinent and from eastern Europe to northern China and the Sea of Japan. The focus is on the unique social, political, religious, and economic structure of the nations founded in this area by speakers of Indo-European, Japanese-Koguryoic, Mongolic, Tibeto-Burman, Tungusic, Turkic, and Uralic languages, and on their ethnolinguistic origins and historical achievements, including intellectual history and history of the arts. We will cover the period from the migrations of the early Indo-Europeans down to the Mongol Conquest. The steppe zone (for example, the nomadic empires of the Scythians, Attila and the Huns, the Turks, and the Tibetans), the ‘Silk Road’ (for example, the great cities of Bactria, Gandhara, Sogdiana, and East Turkistan), the interrelationship of the two, and the intrusion of the non-nomadic colonial empires of the Chinese, Persians, and Arabs, will be covered in depth. The course corrects the traditional view of Central Eurasians as ‘barbarians’, but the emphasis is mainly on Central Eurasians as bearers of an advanced, complex culture with many subcultures and regional variants, which dominated Eurasia during most of the period covered.

While literary histories of early Italian literary culture tend to identify a straight-line trajectory from a Latin to an Italian vernacular tradition, Italy’s linguistic, literary and documentary relations with other traditions reveal a far more diverse set of traditions that influenced active vernaculars both within Italy and as part of its engagement with other political, linguistic and intellectual contexts outside Italy, including Arabic in the Duchy of Puglia, Old French in the Veneto and Tuscany, and Old Occitan throughout the peninsula. Studying especially the relations with and use of Old Occitan, this course examines the origins and diversity of linguistic and intellectual traditions engaged in diverse regions of Italy in relation to the early development of the local vernacular traditions from the late twelfth century until the early fourteenth century, including the composition (and abandonment) of the De vulgari eloquentia. Texts will include works by Italy’s earliest writers in the vernacular (from Rambertino Buvalelli, Sordello, Lanfranco Cigala, Bartolomeo Zorzi to Giacomo da Lentini, Percivalle Doria, Guittone d’Arezzo, Brunetto Latini and Dante) to early writers and copyists who found refuge and patronage at Italian courts (such as Uc de Saint Circ, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Aimeric de Peguilhan, Guilhem de la Tor, and Folquet de Romans), who introduced motifs, genres, and new questions of linguistic expression to wider circulation in Italy and Europe. While seminar participants should have a solid reading knowledge of Italian, the course will also provide the opportunity to study the basics of Old Occitan. One additional reading knowledge will be helpful, but not essential, either of Old French or Latin.

A course in the history of writing that enables students to read and research medieval philosophy, cosmology, psychology, history of science, and theology. M600 enables students to read the scripts and to evaluate the value of the witness provided by medieval manuscripts. Emphasis is on distinguishing characteristic letter forms and spelling peculiarities which date and place medieval manuscripts. Our primary medieval text is an introduction or summary of philosophy, a compendium of philosophy composed about 1240, but still considered a good basic introduction to philosophy in the fifteenth century. Intended for well-educated non specialists, the Compendium philosophiae tells us how medieval thinkers, poets and physicians as well as philosophers, believed the world worked – about matter and form, the soul and the senses, ethics and theology, but also about storms and earthquakes, pelicans and donkeys. The facsimiles on which our survey of Latin manuscripts from France, Germany, Italy, Iberia, and Britain is drawn is S. Harrison Thompson's Latin Book Hands of the Later Middle Ages, 1100-1500. Our guide to the classification and characteristics of the scripts is Albert Derolez's The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books. A graduate open to undergraduates with permission from the instructor. Requirements include a transcription and a final exam. Knowledge of Latin is a pre-requisite. The course website will be based on the Spring 2011 website for an earlier version of this course.

In this course we will explore the musical repertory developed in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, evaluating the information that music manuscripts and other textual/visual documents give us on authors, events and on the role of music in the culture and society of the time. The nature of the repertory and of the extant sources requires an interdisciplinary approach: we will discuss the relation of music with aspects of contemporary literary, artistic, philosophic and scientific production. As for the music itself, this was a period of experiments: new forms and techniques were developed, some very different from today’s practices, as different was the way composers, performers and listeners approached music. However, many pillars were erected that allowed greater musical edifices to be built in the centuries to come. The aim of the course is to develop a higher familiarity with authors, compositions, genres and manuscripts up to ca. 1400; to gain a better understanding of the social, political, cultural and artistic background of musical composition, performance and circulation in medieval Europe; investigate issues of orality and written circulation, authorship, intertextuality, authenticity in performance. The class time will include lectures, student presentations, class discussions and musical listening. One or more sessions will be held at the Lilly Library to examine some medieval music documents. The class sits with M651 (Jacobs School of Music) but all topics will be approached from an interdisciplinary point of view. Ability to read scores in modern music notation may be an advantage, but there are no prerequisites. Class attendance is mandatory.

M815 is an independent readings course, in which a student works with a member of the faculty to select a set of reading and writing assignments, based on the student's interests and how many credit hours the student wishes to receive for the course. The student sends the Director of the Institute the proposal with the faculty member's agreement to supervise, and the Director authorizes the student to register for 1-4 credits of M815. At the end of the semester, all the faculty who have supervised students for M815 send the Director the final grades, and the Director submits them to the Registrar's Office. (M815 is offered fall and spring semesters, as well as both summer sessions.)