Fall 2009

In the Fall 2009 semester, the Medieval Studies Certificate Program offers the following courses.

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MSCP 80500	Writing the Lyric Self From the Troubadours to Guillaume de Machaut
	Friday, 11:45 a.m. – 1:45 p.m. Room TBA, 3 credits [96595]
	Professor Anne Stone
	Cross listed with MUS 86400 The advent of vernacular writing, or in Sylvia Huot’s words, the journey “from song to book” that took place in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, profoundly affected the transmission, performance, and reception of late medieval songs. Without writing, songs constituted a staged outpouring of vocal emotion, performed by someone whom the audience took to be the “author” of the emotions of the text, or the poetic “I” of the text. Writing disrupted this oral exchange in every possible way. Among the most dramatic disruptions had to do with constructions of authorship and textual subjectivity. At the same time, new technologies of music writing permitted musical pitches and rhythms to be notated in ever more complex ways so that the oral phenomenon of “song” became increasingly textualized as “musical composition.” This course will survey song manuscripts of these two centuries, focusing on the contemporaneous developments of the notation of music, the expression of the lyric persona, and the notion of authorship. We will engage closely with individual manuscripts from both “Old” and “New Philological” perspectives, considering details of manuscripts composition and compilation as well as how modern scholars have attempted to derive meaning from the material circumstances of surviving songs in manuscripts. Manuscripts to be considered include Troubadour manuscripts both with and without music, single-author collections of Adam de la Halle and Guillaume de Machaut, and selected manuscripts of the Italian tradition, culminating in the spectacularly-illustrated Squarcialupi manuscript. While the ability to read music would be helpful, this course does not require any formal background in music; we will learn the various medieval musical notations that pertain to the manuscripts we study and students will be invited to engage with the musical texts to whatever degree they can.
ART 83000	Gothic Art in the Burgundian Court
	Monday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits [96894]
	Professor Jennifer Ball Open only to Art History students. Permission of EO required for all others.
	The Burgundian Court (1363-1477) is often cited as a place of tremendous artistic output – the beginnings of modern portraiture and fashion, some of the finest manuscript illumination, a major center for tapestry weaving, as well as goldsmithing work. In addition the beginnings of a modern concept of patronage, where the court directly supported artists, such as Claus Sluter and Jean de Beaumetz, and building projects, developed under the Valois Dukes at Burgundy. While it is not unusual to find courtly settings that provided exceptional support for the arts in history – Charlemagne’s court, Constantinople under the Macedonians in the 10^th century and later the Komnenians of the 11-12^th century, The Capetian court of Paris, Prague of 15^th century Bohemia, to name a few medieval examples – the Burgundian court is distinct for its being a provincial court. It is the court of a line of dukes, who were vassals to the French King and the Holy Roman Emperor, which raises interesting questions about the concepts of center and periphery.  The period also develops a material culture used for political ends, not just among the Dukes, but also between nobles jockeying for position at court. This class will focus on dynastic succession as reflected in the arts of the Valois Dukes and Duchess Mary of Burgundy as well as the material culture of Burgundy in general. It also will examine the historiography of this period in light of the claims made on the beginnings of Renaissance phenomena, such as naturalism and individuality. One (1) auditor by permission of instructor. Preliminary Reading: Please read the review of the Cleveland Museum of Art exhibition by Stephen N. Fliegel which gives an overview of the period, Patronage and the Burgundian court (1364-1419 )In The Magazine Antiques (1971) v. 166 no. 4 (October 2004) p. 142-51.
C L 81014	Dante: Divina Commedia: Interno
	Tuesday, 3:30-6:10 p.m., NYU Room TBA, 4 credits [96828]
	Professor Freccero Course taught in English
	Information: italian.dept@nyu.edu
ENGL 70700	Medieval Literature in Britain: Women’s Authority and Men’s Mediation in Late Medieval English Books
	Thursday,  2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 3421, 2/4 credits [96640]
	Professor Michael Sargent Cross listed with WSCP 81000
	In this course, we will be looking at ways in which women’s authorship/authority in creating texts in the late medieval period was mediated by male spiritual advisors, hagiographers, translators, scribes and printers. The texts that we will focus on include the Middle English versions of the lives and revelations of several medieval “holy women”, all written by men who functioned as “spiritual fathers”, as examiners for orthodoxy, or as amanuenses – or some combination of these roles – for three Belgian beguine saints (Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Christina mirabilis and Marie d’Oignies), Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. We will look at the adaptations of the revelations of Catherine and Birgitta that were made for the nuns of two preeminent English houses, Barking and Syon Abbeys, and at the ways that they were edited and structured – mediated, that is, not only in the most direct textual sense of recording and translating, but also of shaping and commenting upon the texts, aiming them toward particular ways of reading. Another text that would be particularly interesting to look at in this context is the glossed Middle English translation (i.e. written with explanatory passages added in) of The Mirror of Simple Souls, a treatise of mystical theology that was burned together with its author, Marguerite Porete, in Paris in 1310. Finally, we will look at the revelations of Julian of Norwich and the Book of Margery Kempe, paying attention to their (very) limited medieval circulation as complete texts in manuscript, and their redaction as sets of pious devotional extracts by fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century printers; and we will end with Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, a book originally written at the end of the fourteenth century for a woman recently enclosed as a recluse that became popular among the well-to-do laity of fifteenth-century London, and was (like a number of similar pious works) eventually printed at the request of Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of King Henry VII. We will also be looking at facsimiles of the original manuscripts and early prints (and the originals themselves in some cases), in order to examine how book format and production influenced (controlled? determined?) the perception of the text. Hmmm. That’s a lot of texts: we’ll see what we can do.
ENGL 80700	Medieval Literature in Britain: Lovely Money
	Tuesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 2/4 credits [96634]
	Professor Valerie Allen
	Coins and words behave in very similar ways. They circulate, they have symbolic value, they fade out of existence. So it is no surprise that literary theory and economic theory share many concerns and have generated a growing body of work devoted to the “economy of literature,” as Marc Shell terms it. Taking money as our theme, we read a diverse spread of the literature of late medieval and early modern England that both reflects the economic preoccupations of the period and fashions a theory of money as aesthetic and hermeneutic principle. By the end of the course, the student can expect to have read a representative selection of texts from the fourteenth to early seventeenth centuries, all of which address the monetary in some form; to have gained an overview of the economic history of this period in England; and to have been introduced to some of the main ideas and texts in the philosophy of money and value. Final grade will be allocated on the basis of class preparation and discussion, in-class presentation, written summaries of critical arguments, and a research paper Representative literary texts: Piers Plowman; Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, Shipman’s Tale, Canon Yeoman’s Tale, and Thopas; London Lickpenny and other medieval political poems; Thomas More’s Utopia; Arthur Barlowe’s 1584 trip to Virginia; Ben Jonson’s the Alchemist. Representative historical texts: Marc Bloch, “Natural Economy or Money Economy”; Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century; Jacques LeGoff, Your Money or Your Life; Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe; John A. Yunck, “Dan Denarius.” Representative philosophical texts: Aristotle and Aquinas on the just price; Nicholas Oresme, De Moneta; Karl Marx, chapters on money in Capital; Georg Simmel, Philosophy of Money; Otto Fenichel, “The Drive to Amass Wealth”; Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies. If you have questions, please email me: vallen@jjay.cuny.edu
HIST 80800	Literature of Medieval European History II
	Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 5 credits [96581]
	Professor Thomas Head
	Literature of Medieval European History II is a course which covers the major trends in the history and historiography of western Europe from roughly 1000 to 1400. The intent is to prepare students specifically for written, but also for oral, exams.
PHIL 76100	Late Medieval & Renaissance Philosophy
	Monday, 6:30-8:30 p.m. Room TBA, 4 credits [96728]
	Professor Douglas Lackey
	In 1775 Edward Gibbon wrote that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire presented “the greatest, and perhaps the most awful, scene in the history of mankind.” In the history of philosophy the greatest and perhaps most awful scene is the decline and fall of the Aristotelian synthesis, which reached its pinnacle in the two magisterial summae of Thomas Aquinas in the third quarter of the thirteenth century. This course will begin with a summary of Aquinas and what he and his Aristotelian predecessors achieved, and then charts the various forces that, like wolves surrounding a stag, brought Aquinas’s great system of interlocking natural kinds crashing down by the middle of the 17^th century. These forces included (a) Scotus’s rejection of matter as the principle of individuation (b) Ockham’s exultation of divine omnipotence, and the Ockhamist doctrine that God can violate the basic laws of Aristotelian logic and undermine relations among formal causes, (c) Ockham’s nominalism, and his rejection of universals that brought with it a rejection of natural kinds, (d) the rise of numerous 14^th century mystical movements, for whom the difference between a man and a dog is less important than the fact that both of parts of God, (e) the rise of Platonism and Neoplatonism in 15^th century Italy and its attendant anti-Aristotelian supernaturalism, (f) the rise of Lutheranism in the early 16^th century and the Deus abscondit doctrine, which deprives the created world of any natural goodness, (g) the corresponding Italian rejection of natural law that brings forth the “murd’rous Machiavel,” (h) the rise of vitalist materialism in southern Italy towards the end of the 16^th century in Telesio and Campanella and other anti-Aristotelians, (i) last and perhaps least, the development of modern astronomy and physics, those Jovian satellites, those new stars, etc. that cast doubt on particular empirical theses of Aristotle. The course will also consider various rearguard actions on the part of Aristotelians, Suarez versus the Platonists, Bellarmine versus Galileo, and so forth. Some attention will be given to 17^th century anti-modernists, like the Cambridge “Platonists” (Aristotelians, actually) who thought that the New Science was hopeless as a foundation for either biology or psychology. Finally, some attention will be given to relations between philosophical movements and artistic currents, for example, the relation between Nominalism and the development of 15^th century Flemish painting, and Neoplatonism and the doctrine of ideal form in Italian Renaissance art.
P SC 70100	Ancient & Medieval Political Thought
	Tuesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room TBA 3 credits [96642]
	Professor John Wallach
	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 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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