2014-2015 Catalog

ARTH 14215. Roman Art II: Late Antique and Early Christian Art and Architecture. 100 Units.

This course offers an introductory survey of the art and architecture of the Roman world starting from the beginning of the second century AD, when the Empire reached its point of greatest expansion. It then proceeds through a period of relative peace and prosperity before witnessing the effects of a political, social, and economic “crisis” of the third century AD, the adoption of Christianity as the state religion, and the tremendous consequences of moving the capital from Rome to Constantinople. Throughout the course, we will consider how the built environments and artifacts produced by an incredible diversity of peoples and places can make visible larger trends of historical, political, and cultural change. What, we will begin and end by asking, is Roman about Roman art?

Instructor(s): P. Crowley     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment. This course meets the general education requirement in the dramatic, musical, and visual arts.
Equivalent Course(s): CLCV 24215

ARTH 17015. Blood, Sweat, and Tears: The Sacred Image in Byzantium. 100 Units.

During the Middle Ages, icons—sacred images—played a pivotal role in the devotional practice of Byzantium, the eastern Christian empire that had its capital in Constantinople from 324 to 1453. “Windows to heaven,” sacred images provided access to the divine. Despite their spiritual function, icons also drew attention to their materiality by erupting into life—bleeding, weeping, and attacking foes. In this course, we will combine the study of Byzantine images with Byzantine primary sources (in translation) to explore a range of topics related to the icon, including medieval image theory, iconoclasm, visuality, enshrinement, the copy, and materiality. Our investigation of Byzantine images will be enhanced through comparison with responses to the image in Islam, Judaism, and the Christian west.

Instructor(s): H. Badamo     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment. This course meets the general education requirement in the dramatic, musical, and visual arts.

ARTH 17211. Arts of Medieval Japan. 100 Units.

The arts of medieval Japan are known for their material luxury and otherworldly splendor, as in images of Buddhist paradise, and, conversely, for their rusticity and understatement, as exemplified by developments in ink painting, architecture, and ceramics. This course will examine the worldviews, historical circumstances, and practices of making and appreciation that underscore both trends. We will explore how the aesthetic tensions within and between objects relate to the social and political tensions among groups during this age of unrest and instability. The course spans the period between 1200 and 1550.

Instructor(s): C. Foxwell     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment. This course meets the general education requirement in the dramatic, musical, and visual arts.
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 17211

ARTH 17612. The Art of Michelangelo. 100 Units.

The central focus of this course will be Michelangelo’s prolific production in sculpture, painting, and architecture while making substantial use of his writings, both poetry and letters, and his extensive extant body of preparatory drawings to help us understand more about his artistic personality, creative processes, theories of art, and his intellectual and spiritual biography, including his changing attitudes towards Neoplatonism, Christianity, and politics. Our structure will be roughly chronological starting with his highly precocious juvenilia of the 1490s in Florence at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent through his death in Rome in 1564 as an old man who was simultaneously already the deity of art and a lonely, troubled, repentant Christian, producing some of his most moving works in a highly personal style. Beyond close examination of the works themselves, among the themes that will receive considerable attention for the ways they bear upon his art are Michelangelo’s fraught relationship with patrons such as the Medici and a succession of popes; his complex devotion to and rivalry with ancient classical art and his living rivalry with Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Bramante, and others; his changing attitude towards religion, especially his engagement with the Catholic Reform and some of its key personalities such as Vittoria Colonna; his sexuality and how it might bear on the representation of gender in his art and poetry; his “official” biographies created by the devotees Giorgio Vasari (1550, 1568) and Ascanio Condivii (1553) during Michelangelo’s lifetime and some of the most influential moments in the artist’s complex, sometimes ambivalent, reception over the centuries; new approaches and ideas about Michelangelo that have emerged in recent decades from the unabated torrent of scholarship and, especially, the restoration and scientific imaging of many of his works. Through the concentrated art-historical material studied, the course will take seriously the attempt to introduce students with little or no background in art or art history to some of the major avenues for interpretation in this field, including formal, stylistic, iconographical, psychological, social, feminist, theoretical, and reception. Readings are chosen with this diversity of approach in mind.

Instructor(s): C. Cohen     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment. This course meets the general education requirement in the dramatic, musical, and visual arts.
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21411

ARTH 22550. Histories of Cairo. 100 Units.

This course examines the urban planning and architectural development of the city from the late antique era to the present. By studying urban planning and the main architectural types in different periods—churches, mosques, synagogues, palaces, defensive works, mausoleums, and houses—this course considers the role of architecture in shaping society. It combines study of monuments and primary sources with work on urban spaces from relevant disciplines, and addresses themes such as the temporalities of monuments, minorities within the Islamic city, orientalism, modernization, contemporary practices of preservation and accommodation, and the recent role of public spaces in politics.

Instructor(s): H. Badamo     Terms Offered: Autumn

ARTH 23005. Medieval Islamic Art and Architecture: Mongols and Mamluks. 100 Units.

The Mongol Conquest of Baghdad and the Islamic east in 1258 deepened cultural divisions between the eastern and western Islamic lands to an unprecedented degree. Under the Mongol Ilkhans in the Islamic east, artists and architects combined familiar and newly introduced visual forms to negotiate their place in a radically altered new world order. Under the Mamluk sultans in the Islamic west, artists and architects visually asserted the Mamluks' special claim to legitimacy as the defenders of Islam who had stopped the Mongol advance. And yet, artists, architects and objects moved frequently between Mongol and Mamluk courts, complicating what at first appears to be a simple dichotomy between experimental and traditionalist visual cultures in the eastern and western regions of the Islamic world in this period. Students will write research papers on topics chosen in consultation with the instructor.

Instructor(s): P. Berlekamp     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 33005,NEAA 23005,NEAA 33005

ENGL 11501. Chaucer and the Literary Voice. 100 Units.

This course serves as introduction and intensive exploration of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. Since Chaucer’s writings consistently foreground questions of who is “speaking” in his writing, we will take “literary voice” as our guiding heuristic, and examine relationships between speech, writing, translation, and dramatis personae. The class will read works from Chaucer’s lyrics, dream visions, and Canterbury Tales. (C, E)

Instructor(s): J. Orlemanski     Terms Offered: Winter

ENGL 14801. Monsters and Men: Difference and Fear in Medieval England. 100 Units.

In medieval England as now, depictions of the “monstrous” in popular culture provide insight into social pressure points: monsters represent cultural anxieties translated into bodily forms. In this class we will look at some notable medieval monster-narratives accompanied by modern critical works which strive to illuminate the ramifications of monstrosity. (C, E)

Terms Offered: Spring

ENGL 15600. Medieval English Literature. 100 Units.

This course examines the relations among psychology, ethics, and social theory in fourteenth-century English literature. We pay particular attention to three central preoccupations of the period: sex, the human body, and the ambition of ethical perfection. Readings are drawn from Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-poet, Gower, penitential literature, and saints' lives. There are also  some supplementary readings in the social history of late medieval England. (C, E)

Instructor(s): M. Miller     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 15600

FNDL 21103. Marsilio Ficino's "On Love" 100 Units.

This course is first of all a close reading of Marsilio Ficino’s seminal book On Love (first Latin edition De amore 1484; Ficino’s own Italian translation 1544). Ficino’s philosophical masterpiece is the foundation of the Renaissance view of love from a Neo-Platonic perspective. It is impossible to overemphasize its influence on European culture. On Love is not just a radically new interpretation of Plato’s Symposium. It is the book through which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe read the love experience. Our course will analyze its multiple classical sources and its spiritual connotations. During our close reading of Ficino’s text, we will show how European writers and philosophers appropriated specific parts of this Renaissance masterpiece. In particular, we will read extensive excerpts from some important love treatises, such as Castiglione’s The Courtier (Il cortigiano), Leone Ebreo’s Dialogues on Love, Tullia d’Aragona’s On the Infinity of Love, but also selections from a variety of European poets, such as Michelangelo’s canzoniere, Maurice Scève’s Délie, and Fray Luis de León’s Poesía.

Instructor(s): A. Maggi     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Course taught in English.
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 33900,CMLT 26701,CMLT 36701,ITAL 23900

FNDL 21714. Boccaccio's "Decameron" 100 Units.

One of the most important and influential works of the middle ages—and a lot funnier than the Divine Comedy. Written in the midst of the social disruption caused by the Black Death (1348), the Decameron may have held readers attention for centuries because of its bawdiness, but it is also a profound exploration into the basis of faith and the meaning of death, the status of language, the construction of social hierarchy and social order, and the nature of crisis and historical change. Framed by a storytelling contest between seven young ladies and three young men who have left the city to avoid the plague, the one hundred stories of Boccaccio’s Decameron form a structural masterpiece that anticipates the Renaissance epics, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the modern short story. Students will be encouraged to further explore in individual projects the many topics raised by the text, including (and in addition to the themes mentioned above) magic, the visual arts, mercantile culture, travel and discovery, and new religious practices.

Instructor(s): J. Steinberg     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ITAL 23502,ITAL 33502,REMS 33502

FNDL 26106. The Medieval Persian Romance: Gorgani's Vis and Ramin. 100 Units.

This class is an inquiry into the medieval romance genre through the close and comparative reading of one of its oldest extant representatives, Gorgâni’s Vis & Râmin (c. 1050). With roots that go back to Late Antiquity, this romance is a valuable interlocutor between the Greek novel and the Ovidian erotic tradition, Arabic love theory and poetics, and well-known European romances like Tristan, Lancelot, and Cligès: a sustained exploration of psychological turmoil and moral indecision, and a vivid dramatization of the many contradictions inherent in erotic theory, most starkly by the lovers' faithful adultery. By reading Vis & Râmin alongside some of its generic neighbors (Kallirrhoe, Leukippe, Tristan, Cligès), as well as the love-theories of writers like Plato, Ovid, Avicenna, Jâhiz, Ibn Hazm, and Andreas Cappellanus, we will map out the various kinds of literary work the romance is called upon to do, and investigate the myriad and shifting conceptions of romantic love as performance, subjectivity, and moral practice. An optional section introducing selections from the original text in Persian will be available if there is sufficient student interest.

Instructor(s): C. Cross     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLLT 26106,NEHC 26106

FREN 26700. Jeanne d'Arc: historie et legende. Cours introductorie. 100 Units.

Dans ce cours nous interrogerons la plasticité et l’utilité de la figure de Jeanne d’Arc. Nous commencerons avec une étude de Jeanne d’Arc dans son contexte historique en nous penchant sur des documents rédigés pendant sa vie et au cours de son procès. Ensuite nous considérerons les ré-inventions multiples et variées de Jeanne au cours des siècles suivants, prenant en compte les textes de Voltaire, de Michelet, d’Anouilh, et d’autres, ainsi que des films qui présentent la vie de Jeanne d’Arc. Pour terminer, nous verrons comment les gens de la droite ont manipulé l’image de Jeanne d’Arc pour la faire servir leurs objectifs idéologiques. Ce cours illuminera donc la manière dont nous transformons le passé à la lumière des besoins et des soucis du présent.

Instructor(s): D. Delogu     Terms Offered: Winter

HCHR 30200. History Christian Thought II. 100 Units.

For course description contact Divinity.

Equivalent Course(s): THEO 30200

HIST 21701. Byzantine Empire, 330-610. 100 Units.

A lecture course, with limited discussion, of the formation of early Byzantine government, society, and culture. Although a survey of event and changes, including external relations, many of the latest scholarly controversies will also receive scrutiny. There will be some discussion of relevant archaeology and topography. No prerequisite. Readings will include some primary sources in translation and examples of modern scholarly interpretations. Final examination and a short paper.

Instructor(s): W. Kaegi     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 31701,CLCV 24306,CLAS 34306

HIST 21702. Byzantine Empire, 610-1025. 100 Units.

A lecture course, with limited discussion, of the principle developments with respect to government, society, and culture in the Middle Byzantine Period. Although a survey of event and changes, including external relations, many of the latest scholarly controversies will also receive scrutiny. No prerequisite. Readings will include some primary sources in translation and examples of modern scholarly interpretations. Final examination and a short paper. Graduate students may register for grade of R (audit) or P (Pass) instead of a letter grade, except for History graduate students taking this as a required course.

Instructor(s): W. Kaegi     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 31702,CLCV 24307,CLAS 34307

HIST 23310. Animals in the Middle Ages. 100 Units.

“Animals,” the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once famously observed, “are good to think.” They are also good to eat, ride, look at, hunt, train for battle, make things out of, and keep as companions. This course considers the many ways in which medieval Europeans used and thought about animals: from the horses, hawks, and hounds of the hunt to the sheep, cows, chickens, and pigs of the home, as well as the lambs, doves, and lions of Holy Scripture, the talking foxes and cats of the beast fable, and the unicorns and dragons of saints’ lives, beastiaries, and travelers’ tales. Topics and questions to be addressed include the economic and social importance of animals, the symbolism of animals, animals in law, science, philosophy, and art, and whether animals were believed to have feelings and/or souls.

Instructor(s): R. Fulton Brown     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 33310

HIST 23510. The Arts of Language in the Middle Ages: The Trivium. 100 Units.

Throughout the Middle Ages, formal education began with the study of language: grammar, including the study of literature as well as the practical mastery of the mechanics of language (here, Latin); logic or dialectic, whether narrowly defined as the art of constructing arguments or, more generally, as metaphysics, including the philosophy of mind; and rhetoric, or the art of speaking well, whether to praise or to persuade. In this course, we will be following this medieval curriculum insofar as we are able through some of its primary texts, many only recently translated, so as to come to a better appreciation of the way in which the study of these arts affected the development of medieval European intellectual and artistic culture.

Instructor(s): R. Fulton Brown     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 23902,HIST 33510

HIST 23514. Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. 100 Units.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are often treated as autonomous religions, stable and independent of each other. But across the long course of their histories the three religions have developed in interaction with and thinking about each other. This course will explore how, from their beginnings to the present day, the three religions were and continue to be “coproduced”—shaping and reshaping themselves through processes of simultaneous identification and disidentification with their rival “siblings” and neighbors. We will pay special attention to the periods of scriptural formation in each religion, but will also sample moments of coproduction through the Middle Ages and modernity.

Instructor(s): D. Nirenberg     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 33514

HIST 25701. North Africa, Late Antiquity to Islam. 100 Units.

Examination of topics in continuity and change from the third through ninth centuries CE, including changes in Roman, Vandalic, Byzantine, and early Islamic Africa. Topics include the waning of paganism and the respective spread and waning of Christianity, the dynamics of the seventh-century Muslim conquest and Byzantine collapse. Transformation of late antique North Africa into a component of Islamic civilization. Topography and issues of the autochthonous populations will receive some analysis. Most of the required reading will be on reserve, for there is no standard textbook. Readings in translated primary sources as well as the latest modern scholarship. Final examination and ten-page course paper.

Instructor(s): W. Kaegi     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CLAS 30200,CLCV 20200,CMES 30634,CRES 25701,HIST 35701,NEHC 20634,NEHC 30634

ITAL 23502. Boccaccio's "Decameron" 100 Units.

One of the most important and influential works of the middle ages—and a lot funnier than the Divine Comedy. Written in the midst of the social disruption caused by the Black Death (1348), the Decameron may have held readers attention for centuries because of its bawdiness, but it is also a profound exploration into the basis of faith and the meaning of death, the status of language, the construction of social hierarchy and social order, and the nature of crisis and historical change. Framed by a storytelling contest between seven young ladies and three young men who have left the city to avoid the plague, the one hundred stories of Boccaccio’s Decameron form a structural masterpiece that anticipates the Renaissance epics, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the modern short story. Students will be encouraged to further explore in individual projects the many topics raised by the text, including (and in addition to the themes mentioned above) magic, the visual arts, mercantile culture, travel and discovery, and new religious practices.

Instructor(s): J. Steinberg     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): FNDL 21714,ITAL 33502,REMS 33502

LATN 25000. Augustine's Confessions. 100 Units.

Substantial selections from books 1 through 9 of the Confessions are read in Latin (and all thirteen books in English), with particular attention to Augustine's style and thought. Further readings in English provide background about the historical and religious situation of the late fourth century AD.

Instructor(s): P. White     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): LATN 20600 or equivalent
Equivalent Course(s): LATN 35000,FNDL 24310

NEHC 20411-20412-20413-30411-30412-30413. Medieval Jewish History I-II-III-I-II-III.

This sequence does NOT meet the general education requirement in civilization studies. This three-quarter sequence deals with the history of the Jews over a wide geographical and historical range. First-quarter work is concerned with the rise of early rabbinic Judaism and development of the Jewish communities in Palestine and the Eastern and Western diasporas during the first several centuries CE. Topics include the legal status of the Jews in the Roman world, the rise of rabbinic Judaism, the rabbinic literature of Palestine in that context, the spread of rabbinic Judaism, the rise and decline of competing centers of Jewish hegemony, the introduction of Hebrew language and culture beyond the confines of their original home, and the impact of the birth of Islam on the political and cultural status of the Jews. An attempt is made to evaluate the main characteristics of Jewish belief and social concepts in the formative periods of Judaism as it developed beyond its original geographical boundaries. Second-quarter work is concerned with the Jews under Islam, both in Eastern and Western Caliphates. Third-quarter work is concerned with the Jews of Western Europe from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries.

NEHC 20501-20502-20503-30501. Islamic History and Society I-II-III-I.

This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. This sequence surveys the main trends in the political history of the Islamic world, with some attention to economic, social, and intellectual history. Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required.

NEHC 20601-20602-20603-30601-30602-30603. Islamic Thought and Literature I-II-III-I-II-III.

This sequence meets the general education requirement in civilization studies. Taking these courses in sequence is recommended but not required.

PHIL 26000. History of Philosophy II: Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy. 100 Units.

A survey of the thought of some of the most important figures of this period, including Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

Instructor(s): B. Callard     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Completion of the general education requirement in humanities required; PHIL 25000 recommended
Equivalent Course(s): HIPS 26000

RLST 21801. Religion and Society in the Middle Ages. 100 Units.

This course examines some of the roles played by religion within medieval society. We consider topics such as the conversion of Europe to Christianity, monasticism, the cult of saints, the rise of the papacy, and the rise of heresy and religious dissent. We study medieval religious ideals as well as the institutions created to perpetuate those ideals. weighing the experience of the individual and the group. We read autobiographies, saints' lives, chronicles, miracle collections, papal documents, among other kinds of sources.

Instructor(s): L. Pick     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 27905

SLAV 22000. Old Church Slavonic. 100 Units.

This course introduces the language of the oldest Slavic texts. It begins with a brief historical overview of the relationship of Old Church Slavonic to Common Slavic and the other Slavic languages. This is followed by a short outline of Old Church Slavonic inflectional morphology. The remainder of the course is spent in the reading and grammatical analysis of original texts. Texts in Cyrillic or Cyrillic transcription of the original Glagolitic.

Instructor(s): Y. Gorbachov     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Knowledge of another Slavic language or good knowledge of another one or two old Indo-European languages. SLAV 20100 recommended.
Equivalent Course(s): LGLN 25100,LGLN 35100,SLAV 32000

SLAV 22302. Literatures of the Christian East: Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and Medieval Russia. 100 Units.

After the fall of Rome in 476 CE, literatures of the Latin West and—predominantly Greek-speaking—Eastern provinces of the Roman empire followed two very different paths. Covering both religious and secular genres, we will survey some of the most interesting texts written in the Christian East in the period from 330 CE (foundation of Constantinople) to the late 17th century (Westernization of Russia). Our focus throughout will be on continuities within particular styles and types of discourse (court entertainment, rhetoric, historiography, hagiography) and their functions within East Christian cultures. Readings will include Digenes Akritas and Song of Igor’s Campaign, as well as texts by Emperor Julian the Apostate, Gregory of Nazianzus, Emphraim the Syrian, Anna Comnena, Psellos, Ivan the Terrible, and Archbishop Avvakum. No prerequisites. All readings in English.

Instructor(s): Boris Maslov     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 32302,CLAS 31113,CLCV 21113,SLAV 32302,CMLT 22302