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Spring 2010
In the Spring 2010 semester, the Medieval Studies Certificate Program
offers the following courses.
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MSCP
70100
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Introduction
to Medieval Studies
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Wednesday, 11:45
a.m. – 1:45 p.m. Room TBA, 3 credits [10253]
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Professor David Greetham
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The
course will deal with some of the broad disciplinary issues (e.g., what is
medieval history? the nature of the medieval book, the role of classical
literature and philosophy in medieval consciousness, the influence of
Islamic culture), while also concentrating on three or four major
interdisciplinary “moments” that can illuminate the tensions, conflicts,
and cultural challenges faced during the period(s).
While the selection of such “moments” will in part depend on student
interests,# possibilities might include the Albigensian heresy/crusade, the
Black Death (“great mortality”), the invention of printing, and
childhood/the family (as a tie-in with the Spring medieval conference at
GC). These “moments” will each be placed in an interdisciplinary context
usually involving literature, politics, art history, and religon.
We will probably use the recent Lansing & English Companion
to the Medieval World (Blackwell 2009) as an initial source,*
together with such classic works as Le Goff’s Medieval
Civilization (Blackwell, 1988). The opening and
closing sessions will attempt a current definition of “medieval studies,”
and will probably use Van Engen’s The Past and Future of Medieval Studies
(Notre Dame, 1994) and/or Powell’s Medieval Studies
(Syracuse, 1992), supplemented by more recent critiques of the field.
Requirements: preparation for, and participation in all class discussions,
with probably two oral presentations and a final paper.
# I would be interested in receiving student suggestions for these
interdisciplinary “moments,” ideally well in advance of the semester. You
can send me an e-mail david.greetham@gmail.com
*As with most Blackwell Companions,
this is a very expensive book ($200) and students will not
be asked to purchase it. I have ordered it for the library and will also
make my own copy available.
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MSCP
80500
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Foundations
of Monasticism
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Wednesday, 4:15 – 6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits [10254]
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Professor Jennifer Ball
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The
course will be arranged both geographically, as well as by the various
types of monasticism practiced (hermetic, coenobitic, etc.).
Texts, especially early monastic rules and saints’ lives, alongside
architectural and archaeological remains will be used to piece together the
everyday life and development of these communities, and their relationship
with the secular world around them, which was sometimes fraught with
tension.
Special attention will be paid to issues of gender and sexuality, as groups
ranged from those based on sexual renunciation to communities in which
entire families took up the monastic life.
Additionally, the involvement of monasteries in cultural production will be
examined, as monastics were generally literate and monasteries often housed
scriptoria, textile producing workshops or artist workshops of other kinds.
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ART
83000
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Medieval
Art: Objects of Devotion and Desire
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Thursday, 11:45 a.m. – 1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits [10326]
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Professor Cynthia Hahn
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This
course will be devoted to working out the intellectual and practical issues
in putting on an exhibition “Enclosures” during Spring 2011 at the
Leubesdorf Gallery at Hunter.
The exhibition will present “reliquaries,” both medieval
and modern, that enclose, hide, or reveal precious contents.
It will investigate art both medieval and modern that explores certain
issues: the play of the hidden and the revealed; the use of luscious
materials to indicate preciousness of enclosed contents (also, a beautiful
container and ugly contents); the aggregation of elements to show honor to
the core element; the power of the body, even in its disgusting bits, as
the enclosed or enclosing; and as a correlate, the claim of certain
material things (revealed by measure, material, history) to be more “real”
and “powerful” than others.
It will also examine the relationship of such art work to the viewer: the
use of language: labels, stories, and inscriptions to engage the viewer’s
participation and imagination; and the call upon the viewer to complete the
imaginative “whole,” to respond and interact.
Readings will range widely across the medieval and modern
fields. Suggestions from students are encouraged (in the first few
weeks).
Students will be called upon to choose the modern artists to be represented
and to write the catalogue entries for both medieval and modern objects as
well as, perhaps, a catalogue essay.
Guest discussions from modern art historians and artists are planned.
A second seminar will be offered in the Fall and student participants
should plan to wrap the show during break in January 2011. No auditors
allowed.
Preliminary readings:
Henk van Os, The Way to
Heaven: Relic Veneration in the Middle Ages, 2000
Eleanor Heartney, Postmodern
Heretics: Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art
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CLAS
72600
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Latin
Paleography/Textual Criticism
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Ford: Friday, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA 3 credits
[10097]
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Professor Clark
Course meets at Fordham University
- Rose Hill Campus.
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C L
70300
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Literature
& the Ancient World: Latin
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Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 4 credits [10258]
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Professor Jacob Stern
Permission of instructor required.
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This
course will begin with a review of Latin grammar and syntax.
We will then read weekly selections from various classical, medieval and
Renaissance authors; these will be translated and discussed during class
meetings.
Readings will be chosen from the following: Augustine, Bede, Boccaccio,
Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Jerome, Livy, Lucretius, Medieval lyrics, More,
Nepos, Ovid, Pliny, Vergil.
This course, if passed with the grade of B+ or better, will satisfy the
ancient language requirement for the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature.
A suitable knowledge of Latin is prerequisite for the course and therefore
permission of the instructor is required in order to register.
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C L
80100
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The
Tristan Legend
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Thursday, 6:30 – 8:30
p.m., Room TBA, 4 credits [10261]
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Professor
Paul Oppenheimer
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For
at least a thousand years, torturous human conflicts between passion, or
undying, obsessive love, and politics, or public responsibility, as well as
between love and art, have found some of their most influential and
fascinating representations in versions of the Tristan legend.
The legend itself has exerted a profound influence, persisting into the
present, on Western cultures, poets, musicians, painters, film-makers, and
novelists.
Starting with what may be its earliest-known appearance, in the eleventh-century
Persian epic Vis and Ramin by Fakhraddin Gorgani (to be read in
translation, as will other works, unless students have the languages), the
course explores the Tristan story’s extraordinary movement westward into
such masterpieces as the medieval Tristan
by Béroul , Gottfried von Strassburg’s thirteenth-century Tristan, and the Morte D’Arthur by Malory, plus
important modern changes in its characters and situations brought about by
Swinburne, Richard Wagner (whose operatic inventions will be considered in
detail), Thomas Mann, and F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is the Night will be considered from the point of view
that it reflects many of the poisonous, seductive, psychological, and
mystical motifs of the original story.
Cinematic treatments will be investigated, and where possible, shown.
A brief, in-class presentation of a research topic. One research essay.
Texts (addenda to be supplied later):
Fakhraddin Gorgani. Vis and Ramin.
Dick Davis trans. Penguin Classics.
Gottfried von Strassburg. Tristan.
A. T. Hatto trans. Penguin.
Béroul. The Romance of Tristan: The
Tale of Tristan’s Madness. Alan S. Fedrick trans. Penguin Classics.
Malory. Le Morte D’Arthur, etc.
Keith Baines trans., Robert Graves intro. Signet Classics.
Richard Wagner (TBA): both opera and libretto.
Charles Algernon Swinburne. Tristram
of Lyonesse. Various editions: see also editions of his complete poems.
Thomas Mann. Death in Venice and
Seven Other Stories. Lowe-Porter trans. Various editions.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender Is the
Night. Various
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C L
80101
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Dante
& Medieval Thought
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NYU Tuesday, 3:30-6:10
p.m. Room TBA, 4 credits [10269]
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Professor Ardizzone
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Course taught
in English
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ENGL
80700
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The
High and Late Medieval Dream Vision
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Thursday, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Room TBA 2/4 credits
[10128]
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Professors Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger
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Medieval
theorists conceived the dream as potentially revealing or commenting on
individual psychology, the social and the political, and cosmic truth, all
at the same time.
Perhaps this capacious definition of dreams helps account for the
extraordinary popularity, from the twelfth century to the sixteenth, of the
literary genre of dream vision.
Many of the major European writers of the period – Alain de Lille,
Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machaut, Chaucer, Shakespeare – produced works that
are in conversation with the tradition of dream literature, and dream
poetry is central to the high and late medieval English literary tradition.
In this course, we will examine a wide range of medieval dream visions,
thinking about how these works engage, in complex ways, with questions
about the individual psyche, sociality, and the metaphysical.
We will read works selected from among the following authors and texts:
Boethius, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun (The Romance of the Rose),
Guillaume de Deguileville, Jean Froissart, Geoffrey Chaucer, William
Langland (Piers Plowman), Pearl, John Lydgate, Robert
Henryson, James I of Scotland, The Assembly of Ladies, Lancelot
of the Laik, The Court of Sapience, John Skelton, and Stephen
Hawes.
In considering such works, we will attend to the ways in which the dream
vision was used to explore the experience and ideology of courtly love; its
involvements with theological and devotional discourses; its navigation of
the complexities of medieval gender and sexuality, and of such social institutions
as marriage, the family, the court, and pilgrimage.
We will consider, throughout, how historicist approaches to medieval
material might be useful, as well as what kinds of critical theoretical
approach (psychoanalytic? Deleuzoguattarian? queer? postcolonial?) might be
particularly fruitful in the reading of such medieval texts.
Students will be expected to prepare two oral presentations in the course
of the semester, and to write a 20-page seminar paper.
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ENGL
80700
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After
the Bible: Saints' Legends in Late Antiquity
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Tuesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 2/4 credits [10149]
Professor E. Gordon Whatley
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Hagiography
(i.e. writings about the saints) is probably the most successful narrative
mode in European literary history, flourishing uninterrupted from the 2nd
to the early-16th century, far surpassing secular narrative and lyric
genres in quantity of extant compositions and manuscript copies.
Only in recent decades, however, has this rich and influential corpus of
texts begun to engage the attention of a wider critical community; it still
lacks an authoritative modern discussion or theory.
This course will explore the main hagiographic sub-genres (acta apocrypha,
vita, passio, miracula, inventio) through a selection of representative
saints' legends originally composed in Greek and Latin, and medieval
English verse and prose.
Representative readings will be selected from the following:- early “apocryphal
gospels” and "acts" (Virgin Mary, Andrew, Paul & Thecla); the
"passions" of early martyrs, both historical and dubious
(Polycarp, Perpetua & Felicity, Agnes, Cecilia, and George), and later
martyrs such as the English King Edmund of East Anglia, and Archbishop
Thomas Becket; the "lives" of “confessor” saints: Anthony (desert
hermit), Martin (missionary bishop), Benedict (monk, monastic founder),
Radegunde (nun, monastic founder), Christina of Markyate (English recluse
and abbess), and Francis of Assisi (“the last Christan”); individual
"miracle" tales (Andrew, Virgin Mary, Erkenwald of London,
Augustine of Canterbury); the “invention” and “translation” of relics
(Swithun of Winchester). Also included, for comparison’s sake, will be some
partial selections from pre-medieval works traditionally regarded as “biography”
(Plutarch’s Life of Julius Caesar, Augustine of Hippo’s autobiography), and
some post medieval texts, including an opera and early movie. While the
authors of many of the classic hagiographical sources are anonymous, among
the known authors of our selections are (in roughly chronological order)
Athanasius, Jerome, Sulpicius Severus, Venantius Fortunatus, Baudonivia,
Gregory the Great, Gregory of Tours, Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, Ælfric of
Eynsham, Bonaventura, Jacopo da Voragine, Chaucer, Lydgate, Dryden,
Flaubert, France, and de Mille.
While it will be convenient for some texts to be purchased from, e.g.
Amazon, the majority of our texts, most of them quite short, will be
available on the Internet, or in Blackboard as pdf files, and occasionally
on Library Reserve.
Although many of the readings are available in modern (or early modern)
translations, there will be a few encounters with Middle English, but help
will be available for non-medievalists.
Some opportunities for work with original manuscripts.
Class members will present brief, occasional reports on our primary texts
and relevant secondary sources throughout the first eleven weeks of the
course; during the last three weeks they will report on, and write up, a
longer, focused study of a hagiographic text of their choice.
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HIST
77950
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Islamic
History, 600 - ca. 1200
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Wednesday, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits [10177]
Professor Chase Robinson
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This
course presents an introduction to the political and social history of the
central Islamic lands from the seventh century until the beginning of
Seljuk rule in the twelfth.
We shall be especially concerned with charting the emergence of the
political and social order and with understanding some of the principal
debates in the field of early and ‘classical’ Islamic history.
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HIST
82100
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Advanced Seminar: Pre-Modern
European & Non-American History
Wednesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m.,
Room TBA, 5 credits [10182]
Professor Eric
Ivison
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SPAN
71000
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Medieval Epic
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Monday,
6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits
[10152]
Professor
Ottavio DiCamillo
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This
course will deal the epic poetry of medieval Castile and will focus on
those works that have been deemed representative of the genre: the Poema
de mio Çid, the Poema de Fernán González as well as the Mocedades
de Rodrigo and other fragments of supposedly epic cycles.
Aiming at redefining both the genre and the canon, often
associated with cantares de gestas and romances, we will
begin by reexamining the various theories thus far advanced on medieval
epic and then proceed to analyze classical epic material in the Libro de
Alexandre and the absence of such material in the works under
examination,.
In this context, attention will be paid to the chroniclers of the later
Middle Ages which are believed to have incorporated many of these epic
fragments in their prose narrative. Special emphasis will be given to
textual problems, to the transmission of the material text as well as to
the organization of the literary text (language, use of rhetoric,
techniques of artes poetriae, intended readers, reception
etc.).
Text to be used in the course: Cantar de mio Çid. Ed. Alberto
Montaner, Barcelona: Crítica; Poema de Fernán González. Ed. Juan Victorio, Madrid: Cátedra; Libro
de Alexandre. Ed. Jesús Cañas Murillo, Madrid: Cátedra.
Other epic fragments will be distributed in photocopies throughout the
course.
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Past schedules:
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Fall 2009; Spring 2009; Fall 2008; Spring 2008; Fall 2007;
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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