MDVL 506/HIST 506/CLSS 856 Human Migration in Antiquity
Noel Lenski M 3:30-6:00
MDVL 585/HIST 535 Problems in Church History, 800-1500
Paul Freedman W 9:25-11:15
MDVL 596/HIST 596 Jewish History and Thought to E. Modern Times
I. Marcus T/TH 11:35-12:50
MDVL 603/HIST 603 Jews and Christians in the Formation Of Europe, 500-1500
I. Marcus T 1:30-3:20
MDVL 663/REL 945 From House Churches to Medieval Cathedrals
V. Marinis TH 9:30-11:20
REL 955 The Cult of Saints in Early Christianity and the Middle Ages
Vasileios Marinis and Felicity Harley Tu 1:30-3:20
For all its reputed (and professed) disdain of the corporeal and earthly, Christianity lavished considerable attention and wealth on the material dimension of sainthood and the “holy” during its formative periods in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Already in the second century Christian communities accorded special status to a select few “friends of God,” primarily martyrs put to death during Roman persecutions. Subsequently the public and private veneration of saints and their earthly remains proliferated, intensified, and became an intrinsic aspect of Christian spirituality and life in both East and West until the Reformation. To do so, it had to gradually develop a theology to accommodate everything from fingers of saints to controversial and miracle-working images. This course investigates the theology, origins, and development of the cult of saints in early Christianity and the Middle Ages with special attention to its material manifestations. The class combines the examination of thematic issues, such as pilgrimage and the use and function of reliquaries (both portable and architectural), with a focus on such specific cases as the evolution of the cult of the Virgin Mary. Area V and Area III.
MDVL 665/ENGL 500/LING 500 Old English
Emily Thornbury M 1:30-3:20
MDVL 680 /REL 680 Churches of the East: Syrian Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Churches
Bryan Spinks T/ TH 1:30-2:50
MDVL 712/REL 712 History of Early Christianity: Origins and Growth
Gabrielle Thomas MWF 9:30-10:20
MDVL 736/REL 3612 Medieval Latin Workshop
John Dillon T/ TH: 9:30-10:50
MDVL 946/CPLT 658aU/ITAL 946a Early Modern Ecologies: Representing Peasants, Animals, Land
Jane Tylus TH 3:30-5:20
How did the surge in writings about the land in early modern Europe reflect new interest in engaging the boundaries between the human and non-human? And what does it show about the ethical responsibilities of poets and intellectuals to cultures and environments not their own? Finally, how did writers and artists seek to legitimize their intellectual labors by having recourse to the language of agricultural work? The literature of peasants and shepherds has long dwelled on precisely these questions, even as much of that literature has chosen to make the countryside and its human and non-human denizens symbols of other things: leisure, song, patriotism, erotic sensibilities, parsimony. Our course will take up these questions of representation and ethics, focusing on the origins of interest in the peasant in ancient literature, and then turning to the early modern period when pastoral novels, plays, paintings, and poems became the rage– a period not incidentally one that coincided with new world discoveries and new possibilities for ‘golden ages’ abroad.
Along with a series of literary and artistic works from antiquity through the 17th century by Virgil, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Tasso, Petrarch, and others, we will read a number of theoretical works by Gayatri Spivak, Ken Hiltner, John Berger and others on the imaginative constructions of the other and the ethics and emergence of new aesthetic and literary forms. While our main focus is Italy and England, we will also be exploring texts from classical antiquity as well as some Spanish and French works, along with the visual depictions of the countryside in Northern European traditions.