FALL 2007

In the Fall 2007 semester, the Medieval Studies Certificate Program offers the following courses.

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MSCP 80500	Performing Conjugality: The Medieval Heterosexual Marriage Debate
	Wednesday,  2:00-4:00p.m. (PLEASE NOTE TIME CHANGE) Rm. 4433, 3 credits [90404]
	Professor Glenn Burger Cross listed with ENGL 80700 & THEA 86000
	From the twelfth to the sixteenth century the married estate underwent a profound revaluation. The emphasis on marriage as a sacrament whose core was the consent of its two participants, and the conferring on this conjugal union of much of the signifying power previously reserved for friendship between two men, worked to elevate the lay married estate to a level on par with or even superior to that of the celibate clergy. The newly gendered and sexualized identities of self-controlled husband and good wife, conjoined in one flesh through sacrament and marital affection, not only founded a new household unit but also, to the extent that they showed how such marital relations could act as a systematic guide to a virtuous life, provided a model for civic society dramatically different from previous aristocratic or clerical ones. If by the Early Modern period, these changes had effectively ushered in a new sex/gender system—what we have come to know as modern heterosexuality—by selecting and controlling what and how marriage signified, the late medieval period’s engagement with conjugality remained much more open-ended and conflicted. This course will consider some of the ways that attempts to represent late medieval conjugality as something “good to think with,” and thus useful in defining and authorizing selfhood for newly emergent groups in that culture, might also mark a certain experimentation with the real that is frequently difficult to align with traditionally normative clerical or chivalric gender roles organized around virginity or noble bloodline. We will begin by considering the legal, theological, and political discourses producing this new emphasis on the value of the married estate in relation to Chretien de Troyes’ romance Eric et Enide. We will consider the variety of conduct literature that developed to regulate and define this new gender system, particularly the wealth of literature related to “the good wife,” her carefully husbanded femininity, and the productive bourgeois household such conjugality makes possible. Here we will consider such works as Le Menagier de Paris and The Knight of La Tour Landry. In particular, we will focus on the enormously popular story of the absolutely patient wife, Griselda, as it travels across Europe. In addition to an important French play version of Griselda, we will consider the English Corpus Christi cycle plays’ depictions of Noah and his Wife, as well as Mary and Joseph. We will conclude with Early Modern assimilations of conjugality within an increasingly patriarchal and heterosexual social system, notably in an early seventeenth century play of Griselda as well as in Milton’s depiction of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost.Middle English texts will be read in the original. For all other texts we will use modern English translations.
MSCP 80500	The Relevance of Medieval Theories/Philosophies of Language
	Tuesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits [90405]
	Professor Alex Orenstein Cross listed with LING 79300 & PHIL 76100
	No period in the history of western intellectual life is closer to the present in its contributions to the study of language than the later middle ages. The aim of this class is to introduce students to discussions of central topics (by figures such as Ockham and Buridan) and their relation to current views. Both periods take a compositional approach wherein more complex language/sentences are treated in terms of their simpler component parts. This is an indispensable theme of authors such as Chomsky and Davidson. These sentences were considered in works on philosophical logic and also in works called Sophismata (The study of sophisms/puzzles/paradoxes.). The method of the latter was to examine opposing sides of a question. Hamlet fresh from a medieval university was using this method when he posed and examined answers to the question: ‘To be or not to be?’.Compositionality requires that one starts with simple singular sentences such ‘Socrates is human’ and proceeds to more complex ones constructed from them. These are treated in terms of a semantical version of Aristotle’s correspondence theory of truth. A current version is found in Alfred Tarski’s famous paper and is the basis for model theoretic semantical approaches to language (found in texts such as Cherchia and Ginet’s Meaning and Grammar-An Introduction to Semantics). One takes up problematic negative sentences such as ‘That chimera does not exist’. This is the topic of negative existentials. It is also dealt with in works by many current authors, e.g., Meinong, Bertrand Russell, Quine, etc. From there one goes on to general sentences and the treatment of quantifiers, such as ‘All’ and ‘some’. This material is dealt with in current writers such as Quine, Barcan Marcus and Kripke. After that modal sentences and what Bertrand Russell called propositional attitudes. Here is a variation of a sophism: You believe the object coming to you covered in a donkey’s skin is a donkey. The object coming to you is your father. So you believe your father is a donkey. This sophism and others deal with the same question posed by Frege’s morning star-evening star case. Last but not least are discussions of the Liar’s Paradox: [This sentence is false]. Which paradoxically if true, is false and if false, is true. One treatment is known today as ‘The Buridan Peirce solution’ crediting Charles Saunders Peirce for reviving a theme from John Buridan. Course requirements: class participation, presentation, and a 15-20pp paper.
MSCP 80500	The Passion/The Body/The Christ
	Monday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA., 3 credits [90403]
	Professor Michael Sargent Cross listed with ENGL 80700
	In this course, we will look at one of the most remarkable forms of the material culture of spirituality in the later middle ages: the mapping of the passion of Christ and its sacramental simulacrum onto the body of the devout believer. Using theoretical/critical approaches drawing upon gender and film theory and the social sciences, we will talk about the cultural work that various “texts of the passion” performed. We will read and discuss works of guided meditation, narratives of mystical trance and ecstatic performance of the arrest, torture and crucifixion, and the public re-enactment of the passion in civic drama – as well as the parallel experience of public torture and execution. The majority of the writings that we will be studying will be in Middle English, but most are available in modern English versions as well – as well as in the original continental languages in which some of them were composed. The texts that I am thinking of including are the lives of three Belgian beguine mystics (Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Christina mirabilis and Marie d’Oignies), the meditations on the passion and the eucharist from Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, selections from the writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe and from the late-medieval English Corpus Christi plays, as well as the abjected mirror-image of the passion in such blood-libel texts as Chaucer’s “Prioress’ Tale” and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. A good time will be had by all.
ART 71100	Art & Architecture of Spain: Middle Ages-Renaissance
	Tuesday,  4:15-6:15 p.m., 3 credits [90439]
	Professor Jerrilyn Dodds Prerequisite: Open to Art History students only. Permission of instructor and executive officer required for all others.
	This course will explore the diverse, unique artistic interactions of Spain in the Medieval and Renaissance periods. It will include art and architecture that grows from both Christian and Islamic rules, and put particular emphasis on hybrid traditions. These arts will be explored against the backdrop of a new historiography for Renaissance Spain that sees the contribution of this diverse and plural past in the character and development of Spain as a nation state, and in the artistic values it bequeaths to Baroque and to the New World. Topics Include Roman and Visigothic Arts The Umayyads in Cordoba and "The Ornament of the World" The Kingdom of Leon, the Pilgrimage to Santiagoand the Creation of Spanish Romanesque Intimacy and Desire: Poetry and the Arts of the Taifa Kings Synagogue, Mosque and Church in a Cosmopolitan Age The Arts of: The Almohads and the Papacy Mudejar Arts: Spanish Identity; Plural Identity Murcia and the birth of Castillian Colonialism Seville: A Capital through Time Gothic Painting in the Kingdom of Aragon The Alhambra in Granada and changing meaning ofa monument: The Alhambra under the Catholic Kings and Carlos V Early Isabelline Painting: Portraits of Spain, and of Spaniards El Escorial and Spanish Classicisms Painting and Sculpture of 'Modern Devotion': The Plateresque: 'Romano' vs 'Morisco' Preliminary Readings: Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, 2003.
C L 80101	Jewish-Christian Encounters Middle Ages-Present
	Thursday, 3:30-6:10 p.m., NYU Room TBA, 4 credits [90432]
	Professor Javitch
C L 80103	Dante's Prose Works
	Wednesday, 3:30 – 5:10 p.m., NYU Room TBA, 4 credits [90437]
	Professor Ardizzone
ENGL 70700	Literature & Identity in Medieval Britain
	Friday, 11:45 a.m. – 1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 2/4 credits [90505]
	Professor Gordon Whatley
	The course selects works both “canonical” (the kind we are often required to teach in undergraduate surveys) and non-canonical, from the broad range of vernacular medieval British literature (not all of which is “English”), and will focus on the literary construction of idealized religious and secular human identities (with some attention to beasts, birds and monsters). Some attention will be given to manuscript contexts. Works from the Old English period will include the “heroic” verse narratives Beowulf, Genesis B (the fall of Lucifer, Adam & Eve), Judith (a biblical “apocryphon” featuring the Hebrew heroine’s decapitation of an Assyrian warlord, Holofernes); and Ælfric’s rhythmic prose legends of the virginal Saint Agnes and King Edmund. From the late 12^th-early 13^th century, when England’s dominant literary language was French, we will encounter a group of texts written by or about women and ostensibly for women: Old French lais by the mysterious Marie de France (Guigemar, Lanval, Bisclavret, Yonec), the Barking nun Clemence’s Anglo-Norman “Life of Saint Katherine,” alongside the early Middle English treatise on Holy Maidenhood (“Letter on Virginity”) and the martyr’s legend of Seinte Margarete. Two further groups of texts from the later Middle English period emphasize male, if not always “masculine,” identities. Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (both late 14^th century), well-known today, will be read in relation to one another and against more marginal romances such as Sir Orfeo and Amis and Amiloun (early 14^th c.). These secular productions will be juxtaposed with “popular” Christian legends such as those of Saint George (England’s patron saint) and Saint Francis of Assisi (“the last Christian”) from the South English Legendary (late 13^th c.) and the visionary subjectivities of Langland’s Piers Plowman and Juliana of Norwich’s Showings. Most of the course readings will be available in modern translations, but there will be opportunities for the specialist or afficionado to work also with the original versions; everyone will be expected to handle Chaucer’s English (for which there are numerous online aids). Students will report regularly on recent critical scholarship, and will be encouraged to research issues of textuality, intertextuality, and historicism, or to explore and test theoretical models for further understanding of the course readings.
PHIL 77800	Greco-Roman Ethics/Infl Christianity GC
	Tuesday & Thursday, 11:45 a.m.- 1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 4 credits [90392] Course given the first 7 weeks of the semester
	Professor Sorabji Begins September 11, 2007 Ends October 25, 2007 Registration limited to 12 Cross-listed with Classics
	A set of translations in the region of 100 pages will be prepared as required reading for the course and handed out at the beginning. The reading below, ordered for library reserve and partly available on-line, follows the descriptions of the topics, and is to help with the two papers due, a short paper on Oct 1st on the first topic, Conscience and a term paper on Oct 21st on any of the topics. The term paper may be on a new topic or a substantial development of the short paper. The first half of the course will be on topic 1: Conscience. The second half will be on Will, which is the seat of conscience according to Bonaventure, while the misnamed weakness of will in Aristotle is treated by Aquinas as a model of how conscience can go wrong. The topic of Will brings in the Struggle against Temptation and Freedom from emotion, and so I have broken up the description of topic 2 into four inter-related topics. A more complete course description is available at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/philosophy/courses/07-08_fall_sorabji.pdf
P SC 70100	Ancient & Medieval Political Thought
	Tuesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits [90279]
	Professor Wallach
	Prerequisite: Permission of instructor required for those not enrolled in the Political Science Program.
	This course consists of interpretive analysis of selected, major texts that fall within the conventional category of "ancient and medieval political thought" with an eye toward the theoretical subject of political ethics. The works from the "ancient" world may also be works of history, drama, literary dialectic, rhetoric, and philosophy(e.g., works by Thucydides, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine), while the works from the "medieval" world will have distinctly "religious" dimensions as well (e.g., works by Al-Farabi, Maimonides, and Aquinas). Selections will be made so as to enable serious examination of philosophical and political principles found in various texts as well as the constitutive role of the authors' contexts in the production of their texts and principles. We will also attend to major, modern (post-War to contemporary) interpretations and appropriations of ancient and medieval ideas for contemporary political theory--such as work by Strauss,Arendt, MacIntyre, Nussbaum, Agamben, and Ranciere
Past schedules:	Spring 2007; Fall 2006; Spring 2006; Fall 2005; Spring 2005;Fall 2004;Spring 2004;Fall 2003; Spring 2003; Fall 2002; Spring 2002; Fall 2001; Spring 2001

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