MEMS Courses in Spring 2008

Including two MEM courses

ARH 4930: Renaissance Masters

Robert Westin

ENG 4133/sec. 6439 Medieval Film and Media

Richard Burt

We will examine the Middle Ages on film in relation to medieval media that have been regarded as proto-cinematic.

Syllabus and more information.

ENL 4220: Spenser

Peter Rudnytsky

The course will consist of a close reading of Edmund Spenser’s unfinished epic poem, The Faerie Queene. There will be no bells and whistles, just lots of reading and thinking about Elizabethan poetry. All students who complete the course with a grade of “C” or better will receive a certificate of membership in the “I finished The Faerie Queene” club. Course requirements include a midterm, a final, and one five- to seven-page term paper.

ENL 4311: Chaucer

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 less commonly read and known dream allegories. We will also look at Latin and Italian source materials included in our two textbooks. 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.

ENL 4333: Shakespeare: Rhetoric

Al Shoaf

This course will focus on the tragedies, all 10 of them, with some attention paid to the narrative and lyric poetry. Shakespeare’s language, his rhetoric and figuration, will be the principal topic of our work

EUH 3182: Medieval Archaeology

Florin Curta

During the last few decades,  the discipline of medieval archaeology experienced a spectacular growth.  The medieval history of material culture raises some important issues, all of which are of historical importance. The study of urban history, for example, cannot be conceived today with a solid training in medieval archaeology. Problems of production and distribution, as well as intricate questions of group identity, gender, and social status can now be re-phrased in the light of the archaeological research. Increasingly, medieval archaeology has become a major component of Medieval Studies.

EUH 4145: Human Nature and Gender, 1350-1450

Stephen McKnight

Between 1350 and 1650 the understanding of human identity, or “human nature,” underwent substantial changes within both the circles of the intellectual elite and in the broader culture.  Gender identity, a key component of the conception of human nature, was re-examined as well.  The reconsideration of gender, however, did not apply the new Renaissance emphasis on human dignity, creativity and autonomy equally to men and women, and western society has inherited often confusing and even contradictory interpretations of human nature and gender. Though our present rhetoric seldom presents it in this manner, many of our current presuppositions about gender, as well as the basic challenges to those assumptions, have their origin in the turbulent clash of ideas of the early modern period.  This course will explore the changing views of human nature and gender during this critical time period and give students the opportunity to investigate key topics.

EUH 4185: The Viking Experience

Florin Curta

"In the year of our Lord 845, the vast army of Northmen breached the frontiers of the Christians. This was something that we never heard or read of happening before." This is how a Frankish monk from the monastery of St. Germain-des-Pres near Paris described one of the first attack of those whom we now call Vikings. Ever since that attack, the Vikings have fascinated European and American audiences of many persuasions.  But who were the Vikings? What made them so difficult to represent by the traditional means of Western historiography and so easy to manipulate in contemporary culture? What were the historical conditions in which this name, Vikings, was first used and for what purpose? How was Viking ethnicity formed and under what circumstances did the Vikings come into being? Above all, this course aims to provide answers to some of these questions. We will explore social and political issues of Scandinavian medieval history and examine various aspects of daily life and Church organization. Following a chronological order, we will look, each week, at the questions and problems raised by the study of this region, and at some of the primary sources from which historians draw their analysis.

EUH 4511: England 1509-1660

Angela Ellis

EUH 5934: Heresy in Premodern Europe

Nina Caputo

HIS 3463: History of Science, Origins-Newton

Maria Portuondo

GET 3200: The Literature of Knighthood

See MEM 3730.

GET 3930: German Folk and Fairytale

Barbara Mennel

HIS 3931

Nina Caputo

ITW 3431: Italy and Pilgrimages

Mary Watt

The course explores the extent to which Rome, as a city and as an ideal, has engendered and entrenched the notion of pilgrimage and return in the literature, history and art of Italy as well as how these ideals have influenced international culture, including that if the U.S.  In this course students will find themselves immersed in a culture that is, at times quite different from, and at others quite similar to mainstream U.S. culture.  The course aims to give students new lenses through which to view, and thereby understand world events that have often left theft their mark on American culture.
To that end students will consider a variety of texts in English, ranging from literary works (literature) to political treatises, from the classical to the contemporary with a particular focus on the Middle Ages, together with photographs, videotape and internet sources.

JPT 3300: Samurai War Tales

Yumiko Hulvey

Explores the historical and cultural stimuli that led to war, recorded later as war narratives. Supported by images of architecture, narrative picture scrolls, and extant military accoutrements.

LIN 4930: Old English and its closest relatives

D. Gary Miller and Jules D. Gleische

A survey of Germanic, including early runic inscriptions, Gothic, Old English, Old High German, and Old Norse (the language of the Vikings). Include structure of Germanic, comparative Germanic phonology and syntax.

LIT 3041: Tudor/Stuart Drama

Ira Clark

We will read about one non-Shakespearean play per week from the greatest era for English drama, perhaps the greatest era for drama in any language – from the middle of Elizabeth’s reign to the closing of the theaters in 1642. We will focus on understanding these plays in a number of contexts such as stage conditions; illusion/reality/representation; language, rhetoric, and style; the development of techniques and genres; and social, political, and theological conditions.

LNW 3490 Medieval Latin: Augustine's Confessions

Victoria Pagán

Often regarded as the first autobiography of western literature, the Confessions of Saint Augustine is rich and provocative text.  In narrating his life, from his infancy and childhood through puberty and his adult years, Augustine gives an extraordinary picture of what it was like to grow up in provincial Roman North Africa, to be educated in Carthage, to be a schoolteacher at Rome, and a professor of rhetoric at Milan.  The result is a unique document for social history, filled with details about daily life in late antiquity and offering rare glimpses of ordinary experiences.  Augustine lived on the edge, in a world between worlds, between Christian and pagan religions, between Punic and Latin languages, between classical and medieval Latin, between the influences of the distant city of Rome and the local, provincial home town, between the political stability of the longest lasting empire of the ancient Mediterranean and its imminent sack by Alaric and the Goths.  Somehow, Augustine did not fall through these cracks; instead, he seems to have thrived in the interstices, to become one of the most central figures of the western canon.

MEM 3730: The Holy Roman Empire

Will Hasty

A study of the chivalric literature written in the northern, German-speaking regions of the Holy Roman Empire during the High Middle Ages (ca. 1200). Students will explore the political and historical foundations of knighthood in these regions, the narrative traditions to which the different chivalric works are related, and the cultural significance of adventures, tournaments, and quests. Check back later for a more detailed syllabus.

MEM 4931: Renaissance Music Literature

Jennifer Thomas

(MUL 4334)  A survey of music in cultural context, 1450-1600.  Course will be organized around cultural centers their artistic  patronage. Musical emphasis will be on the major genres of Mass, motet,  chanson, and madrigal, but other traditions will also make brief  appearances. Both music majors and non-music majors are welcome, and  the course is designed to accommodate both.

MUL 4334: Renaissance Music Literature

See MEM 4931.

SPW 3100: Introduction to Spanish Literatures I: Crossroads (Encrucijada de caminos)

Shifra Armon

In Spanish. Spain’s legacy of Moslem, Jewish and Christian interaction enriched by Catalonian, Galician and New Worldvoices unfolds in selected readings from the Middle Ages to the “Golden Age.” Texts are approached critically with attention to literary form and historical position. Text: Selections from Rodney Rodríguez, Momentos cumbres. (H, I) Credits: 3; Prereq: SPN 3300 or SPN 3350, or the equivalent.

SPW 4930/sec 6995: El Cortesano Español

Shifra Armon

This course will examine various representations of the ideal subject in Imperial (16^th and 17^th c.) Spain, the courtier. Since the perfect gentleMAN of court was always male, the course also analyzes the ways that gender was understood during this period.
Readings include literary works that portray the courtier positively, critically and humorously as well as courtesy manuals designed to “civilize” the new urban gentleman. Pre-req.: 2 SPW 3000-level courses or permission. Readings will include selections from:

Tirso de Molina, El burlador de Sevilla
Lope de Vega, La cortesía de España
Gracián Dantisco, El galateo español
Fray Antonio de Guevara, El despertador de cortesanos
Fray Luis de León, La perfecta casada
Salas Barbadillo, El caballero perfecto, El caballero puntual
Cervantes, Don Quijote>> top