Courses

MDVL 5701/CLSS 5031/MHHR 5031 Introduction to Latin Paleography

Hannelore Segers

T 1:30-3:25pm

Latin paleography from the fourth century CE to ca. 1500. Topics include the history and development of national hands; the introduction and evolution of Caroline minuscule, pre-gothic, gothic, and humanist scripts (both cursive and book hands); the production, circulation, and transmission of texts (primarily Latin, with reference to Greek and Middle English); advances in the technical analysis and digital manipulation of manuscripts. Seminars are based on the examination of codices and fragments in the Beinecke Library; students select a manuscript for class presentation and final paper.

MDVL 5179/NELC 8100 Near Eastern Manuscript Research

Kevin van Bladel

F 1:30-3:25pm

Introduction to research using manuscripts in Near Eastern languages. Topics include codicology, palaeography, manuscript history, textual criticism and edition, and a variety of other matters specific to Near Eastern manuscripts.

Prerequisites: reading ability in one premodern Near Eastern language and permission of the instructor.

MDVL 5704 Introduction to Old Irish I

Michael Weiss (Cornell University)

MTWTh 1:25-2:15pm

• The course is taught through distance learning using videoconferencing technology from Cornell University. Enrollment limited; interested students should e-mail sci-cls@yale.edu for more information.

This course is an introduction to the grammar of the Old Irish language as it is attested in contemporary documents from the eighth and ninth centuries CE and as it is reflected in later manuscripts. Old Irish has a number of unusual features for a western Indo-European language including such oddities as verb-initial word order, initial mutations, conjugated prepositions, accentually conditioned allomorphies. These features are much easier to acquire with some knowledge of where they came from and how they relate to cognate features in more familiar European languages like Latin. In this course we combine instruction in the synchronic grammar of the language (learning paradigms, memorizing vocabulary, internalizing syntactic rules) with some degree of historical explanation. But in addition to its interesting grammar, Old Irish is also the vehicle for one of the earliest vernacular literatures of Western Europe. Authors writing in Old Irish produced a distinct literary tradition of great interest to students of Medieval Europe. In this class we start to read some of this literature, both prose and poetry as well as selections from the Old Irish glosses. The course is taught through distance learning using videoconferencing technology from Cornell University. Enrollment limited; interested students should e-mail sci-cls@yale.edu for more information.

MDVL 7229/HIST 6229/JDST 7261/RLST 7730 Jews and the World: From the Bible through Early Modern Times

Ivan Marcus

TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

The course is a comprehensive introduction for GS students as well as YC students.  It serves as a window course to pre-modern Jewish history.  For YC students this can lead to taking seminars on more limited topics.  For graduate students it is a good preparation for comprehensive exams and provides a model survey course to be offered later on as an instructor.

MDVL 8103/REL 7103 The Medieval Bible

Volker Leppin and John Dillon

M 1:30-3:20pm

The Bible has been transformed throughout its history. Commentaries helped believers understand the text according to the standards of their time, sermons applied Biblical doctrine to the existential needs of the faithful, and images made it visible. Translations even changed the text remarkably at times. The course traces the Bible’s trajectory in the Middle Ages, including a guided journey into the Latin originals that opens up access to language and concepts even for those who never learned ancient languages. The course includes visits to the Beinecke and the Yale University Art Gallery to kindle a feeling for the material basis of medieval Biblical culture.

Prerequisite: REL 7718, History of Christianity: An Introduction.

MDVL 8105/REL 6105 From Baumstark to Bell: Methods in the Study of Christian Liturgy

Nina Glibetic

TBD

This graduate seminar examines the development of methodological approaches in the study of Christian liturgy, attending both to premodern liturgical interpretation and to the emergence of liturgical studies as a modern academic discipline. From its earliest centuries, Christianity generated sustained reflection on the meaning, history, and authority of liturgical practice, as mystagogues, canonists, and commentators interpreted ritual action, shaped traditions, and narrated change long before the rise of modern historical scholarship. In early modernity, Reformation and Counter-Reformation polemics intensified attention to the historical origins and theological legitimacy of rites, laying groundwork for the discipline’s later critical formation. Liturgical studies emerged as a distinct academic discipline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning with the historical-comparative work of Anton Baumstark and other foundational figures, we examine how modern scholarship constructed its categories, methods, and narratives of development, and how intellectual commitments and institutional contexts shaped its assumptions. Alongside major figures such as Gregory Dix, Josef Jungmann, Robert Taft, and Catherine Bell, the seminar also considers methodological developments that have expanded the field in recent decades, including the material and sensory turn, gender and embodiment as analytic lenses, and historiographical reflections that question inherited frameworks. By placing classical comparative and historical-critical models in conversation with these new approaches, students assess the strengths and limits of competing methods and develop a critically informed methodological positioning within the study of Christian worship.

MDVL 8106 Byzantine Italy: Empire, Liturgy and Identity from Ravenna to Sicily

Gabriel Radle

M 1:30-3:20pm

s seminar examines Christian religious practice in medieval Italy as part of the broader Byzantine world, with particular emphasis on sacred institutions and ritual life. From late antique Ravenna and Rome to the medieval Greek monasteries of Salento, Calabria, and Sicily, we explore how liturgy shaped religious identity, social organization, and cultural exchange across the Mediterranean. Our approach to the topic draws on a variety of sources, including hagiography, liturgical manuscripts, and material culture, allowing participants to investigate how Byzantine Christian practices developed in Italy and endured long after the (Eastern) Roman Empire’s political retreat from the peninsula. Particular attention is given to migration, monastic networks, and the lived religious experiences of Christian communities through different political shifts and alongside other communities, including Jewish, Muslim, and Latin Christian. By approaching Italy through the lens of Byzantine religious practice, the course introduces liturgy as a primary historical source for understanding power, community and memory in the medieval Mediterranean, and restores Italy as a dynamic cultural protagonist of early and middle Byzantium.

MDVL 8745/REL 7745 Byzantine Art and Architecture

Vasileios Marinis

Th 1:30-3:20pm

This lecture course explores the art, architecture, and material culture of the Byzantine Empire from the foundation of its capital, Constantinople, in the fourth century to the fifteenth century. Centered around the Eastern Mediterranean, Byzantium was a dominant political power in Europe for several centuries and fostered a highly sophisticated artistic culture. This course aims to familiarize students with key objects and monuments from various media—mosaic, frescoes, wooden panels, metalwork, ivory carvings—and from a variety of contexts—public and private, lay and monastic, imperial and political. We give special attention to issues of patronage, propaganda, reception, and theological milieux, as well as the interaction of architecture and ritual. More generally, students become acquainted with the methodological tools and vocabulary that art historians employ to describe, understand, and interpret works of art.

MDVL 8747 Islamic Art and Architecture in the Mediterranean

Orgu Dalgic

W 1:30-3:20pm

This course surveys the history of Islamic cultures through their rich material expressions beginning from the time of the Prophet Muhammed in the seventh century to the present and extending across the Mediterranean from Spain to Syria. The course aims to familiarize students with the major periods, regions, monuments, and media of the Islamic cultures around the Mediterranean and with basic principles of Islam as they pertain to the visual arts and, in particular, their interactions with the Christian world. We discuss architecture (mosques, madrasas, mausolea, etc.) as well as works of art in various media (calligraphy, illuminated manuscripts, textiles, ceramics, etc.) within both the Islamic and the larger, universal, and cross-cultural contexts.

MDVL 8755/REL 7755 A History of Byzantine Monasticism

Vasileios Marinis

T 1:30-3:20pm

Monastics and monasteries constituted a quintessential element of Byzantine society. This seminar investigates Byzantine monasticism in its historical, theological, and social contexts from its origins in the third century to the codification of Hesychastic practice in the fourteenth. The course aims to familiarize students with the foundational texts of this tradition, inquire into lives of monastic saints as both rhetorical constructs and historical sources, analyze foundation documents that regulated liturgical and everyday life in Byzantine monasteries, explore the architecture of and artistic production in Byzantine monasteries, and understand the ways and means by which cults of saints were developed and cultivated in a monastic context.