MEMS Courses in Spring 2006 (MEMS)

Courses this term include Art History (ARH), History (EUH, HIS), and Literature (CLT, ENL, GEW, and LIT)

Don't forget to consider the Summer 2006 Compostella Pilgrimage mini-course!

ARH 4200: Early Medieval and Byzantine Art

Professor David Stanley
The art and architecture of Europe and the Mediterranean region from approximately the 4th to the 14th centuries A.D.

ARH 4310: Early Renaissance Art of Italy

Professor Elizabeth Ross
Italian art from 1200 to 1500. Emphasis upon painting and sculpture.

ARH 6916: Early Modern Prints, 1400-1700

Professor Elizabeth Ross
This course will offer a selective survey of the art of the print in Europe from its beginnings through the seventeenth century, featuring artists such as Mantegna, Dürer, Marcantonio Raimondi, Goltzius, and Rembrandt. As a new medium that was reproducible and widely distributed, prints challenged concepts of authorship, originality, and intellectual property; transformed visual culture and the art market; and encouraged the nascent culture of collecting. Through readings and class discussion, we will investigate the origins of European printmaking, the variety of print techniques, and the role of prints in the art history of the early modern era. How did artists use the new medium to fashion their artistic identity and express what it means to be an artist? How does the rise of printmaking change the nature of the work of art itself? We will also begin to consider the impact of print technology more broadly. The introduction of printing for both texts and images is considered one of the most significant revolutions in the history of Western culture. But how did print shape culture? And what role did printed images play in this development?

CHT 2123 :Pre-Modern Chinese Fiction in Translation

Professor Richard Wang
This course explores pre-modern Chinese narrative from its philosophical and historical origins to the fiction at the turn of the 20th century. Emphasis will be laid on 16th and 17th centuries when Chinese vernacular fiction flourished.

ENL 4221: Renaissance Literature: 17th Century Poetry

Professor Ira Clark
In this course we will be reading Paradise Lost plus what are often regarded as the greatest lyrics in English. We will attend first to understanding the poems, and second to establishing contexts within which and approaches from which to read poetry and write about it.

ENL 4311: Chaucer

Professor James Paxson
This course will familiarize students with the major narrative poetry of Chaucer. We will devote most of our study to several of The Canterbury Tales and to Chaucer’s great romance, Troilus and Criseyde. We will also examine at least one of Chaucer’s long allegorical poems, The House of Fame, along with Latin and Italian source materials included in our main textbook. Students will learn to read Chaucer’s Middle English (the form of the English language from about 1100–1500 CE), and they will be introduced to the principal methodological issues constitutive of contemporary Chaucer studies. That is, they will investigate how Chaucer studies incorporate modern critical theory – especially involving issues of narrative complexity, figurative discourse, the formalism of Chaucerian genre (especially the frame narrative or novella) and the poetic representation of gender. Particular focus will fall upon the issue of subjectivity, since Chaucer, who is often seen as the forerunner of modern novelistic art, lays claim to being the first major author in English to cultivate the poetics of the subjective, the personal, and the psychologically realistic. Class meetings will include lectures, discussion, and, especially early in the term, recitation and spot translation of Middle English. We shall also view together (most likely only in part) and study I Racconti di Canterbury (P. Paolo Pasolini, dir., 1971), the only film version of Chaucer’s grand novelle.

ENL 4333: Shakespeare

Professor Peter Rudnytsky
The course will offer a close reading of Shakespeare’s “greatest hits”: Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, 1 Henry IV, As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest.
Please note that this will be a “no frills” literature course – no movies, no acting, no secondary sources, just learning to read Shakespeare. The theoretical approach will be primarily feminist and psychoanalytic.

EUH-3182: MEDIEVAL ARCHAEOLOGY

Professor Florin Curta

GEW 4400: Medieval Studies in German

Professor Will Hasty

HIS 3465: The Scientific Revolution

Professor Robert Hatch
The emergence of modern science from Copernicus to Newton exploring the notions of empiricism, experiment, mechanism, materialism, and the historical concepts of continuity, change, revolution, and progress.

HIS 3931: Women and the Medieval Church

Professor Andrea Sterk

HIS 3931: Violence and Society in Pre-Modern Society

Professor Howard Louthan

HIS 3931: MEDIEVAL GERMANY

Professor Florin Curta

ITA 3500: ITALIAN CIVILIZATION

Professor Mary Watt
Come explore a world where vision and prophecy dictate foreign policy, where war, famine, pestilence and death hover constantly on the outskirts of life, where the glory of antiquity is but a distant memory and the wonder of the Renaissance a barely perceptible dream - come to the Middle Ages and explore the world of Dante Alighieri. Class is conducted in Italian.

LIT 3041: Studies in Drama: Citizen Comedy and Domestic Tragedy in the Age of Shakespeare

Professor Robert Thomson
A study of a group of plays unified by being set in the contemporary London and environs of their authors in the late sixteenth century or the opening decades of the seventeenth century. The main focus will be upon the texts and their social, political, historical and cultural contexts.
It has been suggested that City Comedy (however we define it) moved to the center of the Elizabethan Stage when Londoners started to reflect upon their new social roles and their urban setting. Social mobility with its attendant pretensions, hypocrisy, greed, pathos etc, arose in the midst of the new middle class society of trade and commerce and gave substance to these plays, as did the threatened state of an increasingly impoverished and newly dependent gentry.

The plays to be studied will be: William Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor; Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday; Ben Jonson, Bartholmew Fair; Phillip Massinger, A New Way To Pay Old Debts; Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside; Anon, Arden of Faversham; Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed With Kindness .

LIT 4322 : The Folktale

Robert Thomson
For the purposes of this course, the term folktale will be held to encompass all forms of orally transmitted prose narratives including myths, legends, memorates and wonder-tales. No knowledge of the folktale nor of the general field of folklore studies is assumed by the instructor. The first week or so of the course will attempt to orient all students to the place of the folktale in folklore studies. While covering the major aspects of the familiar European tradition, the texts will also bring to our attention the ethnic traditions of the United States, particularly the oral narratives recorded from Native Americans in Wisconsin at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries and African Americans in Eatonville, Florida in the 1920’s and 1930’s. In addition, we will address those issues that have for half a century kept theorists and analysts struggling with the complexities of these “simple forms.”

SPW 3100: Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Literature

Shifra Armon
Jews, Moslems, women and Ameroindians are four groups that resisted the emergence of a unified Catholic empire. Texts and lectures in Spanish.

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Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Will Hasty, 263 Dauer Hall, 273-3780
Email: hasty@ufl.edu

Mary Watt, 301 Pugh Hall, 392-2422
Email: marywatt@ufl.edu