There will be weekly readings and discussions on topics across the spectrum of the discipline. The final project will be developed around an individual topic selected by each student.
 

Medieval European culture has an allure for some people today because they regard it as being both like and unlike our own.  Studying its “texts”—broadly conceived to include both verbal and visual material—is like looking into a “distant mirror” where we may see both reflections and distortions of modern culture.  Examining the records left by women and men six and more centuries ago may deepen our understanding of our own time, as we observe certain constants among society’s concerns while also imagining lives and values quite different from our own.  For others, the very word “medieval” is a synonym for simplemindedness, cruelty, religious piety coupled with intolerance, and a general monotony that they consider pretty much inevitable since they generally assume that the people who lived during those “dark” centuries were waiting for the Renaissance to come along and the idea of the “individual” to be discovered. 

In this seminar we will read literature written over a period of seven centuries in Europe with an aim to see both its specular qualities—how it reflects particular medieval times and how it may contribute to a deeper knowledge of our own age—and its speculative nature.  Something remarkable, even dangerous, is unleashed in such fictional moments as when Chaucer describes a woman near a rocky seacoast addressing her prayers to a God she candidly suggests may be a malevolent being, or when virile Sir Gawain exchanges a promise with the lord of a castle to share with him everything he gets on each of three days when he is left alone with the lady of the house.

A modern historical work of fiction set in the Middle Ages—Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose—will underlie the group of readings in this seminar, the novel itself functioning as a kind of mirror.  We will cover a wide variety of medieval works relating to themes that emerge the chapters of Eco’s book, including crime and law, sexual and spiritual love, orthodoxy and heresy, good and bad government, and the trustworthiness and unreliability of the written word.  We will read excerpts from historical writing by the Venerable Bede and the scholarly Layamon, religious and secular lyrics, narrative poems such as Sir Orfeo and King Horn, tales by Chaucer and the Gawain-poet, and a fifteenth-century play. 

This course is designed for students who have little or no background in medieval literature or in Middle English (the class will include instruction in the language).  One of my central aims is to equip instructors-in-training to teach a literature survey class that includes medieval literature on its syllabus.

Assignments will include four short (two-page) essays on specific class readings and (in lieu of one lengthy term paper) two papers of around eight-to-ten pages in length that will cover a practical issue related to pedagogy, such as designing an undergraduate course with medieval content and gaining some acquaintance in reading a manuscript from before the age of printing.  Many readings will come from a recent anthology of medieval literature, and seminar members will become aware of the range of textbooks available in the subject.

Major painters and sculptors to be studied include Nicola, Giovanni, and Andrea Pisano, Cimabue, Giotto, Duccio, Simone Martini, and Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti.

Topics to be discussed include: the evolution of the altarpiece, the development of large-scale fresco decoration, Giotto and Duccio and the growth of visual narratives, the role of secular art, and the effects of the "Black Death" on the art of its time. Auditors permitted.
 

It will begin with an introduction to Islamic Architecture, and an exploration of issues surrounding the formation of visual identity in a multi-confessional landscape. It will continue with a number of case studies ranging from the 8th century to the present, that include introductions to some of the theoretical discourses that have emerged concerning cultural representation and exchange and appropriation in art and architecture.

Auditors by permission of instructor.
 

Thus we will emphasize the hybridity of structures of social and generic identification represented in Chaucerian fictions, and the processes of creolization and métissage at work in Chaucer’s attempts to "translate" dominant French and Italian cultural and social forms into the multilingual/multicultural mix that constitutes late medieval "English." We will also attend to the various medieval subaltern voices—Jewish, Muslim, heretical, peasant, and lay—as they are heard or not heard in Chaucerian texts.

Although the course does not assume any previous course in Chaucer, students who have not had an undergraduate Chaucer course would be advised to read Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales in translation before September.
 

Some of the important topics to be considered include: the ethnogenesis of Germanic peoples, the Christianization of western Europe, the role of law in stateless societies, the beginnings of the European economy, gender and the family, the relationship of secular and ecclesiastical powers, and the nature of the Carolingian state and the development of its successors, France and Germany.

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the history of this period, making them aware not only of the historical developments themselves, but of recent historiographical problems and trends through the reading of a number of recent monographs. We will also read several exemplary primary sources in translation and survey the means of doing research in the range of Latin sources available for this period.

Note to Consortium students: This is an intensive reading seminar with only short writing assignments; it is intended as an introduction to research, not as a research seminar.

Information: thomas.head@hunter.cuny.edu
 

M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits 

In the Fall 2003 semester, selected texts of representative thinkers (chiefly Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, St.Augustine and St.Thomas) will be discussed. Special efforts will be made to ascertain the formative process of the Western tradition in political thought.

No term paper is required and the final semester grade will be based on class discussion and a written examination at the end of the semester.