EUH 5934.1137: Medievalisms syllabus (PDF)
Spring 2012
Prof. Bonnie Effros
Historians have long pointed to the way in which the nineteenth-century industrial revolution stimulated yearning for a simpler and idyllic past. In Germany, for instance, the search began for a German history distinct from that of the Roman Empire. The Romantic movement signaled the desire of many Europeans to learn more about the Germanic peoples of the migration period, and its ideology contributed significantly from the 1820s to the development of antiquarian societies devoted to local history and material culture of the middle ages. In the United States, where conditions were significantly different, increased immigration spurred by the industrialization of the northeastern seaboard nonetheless caused fears among elites as to the changing composition of urban populations. Some of northern European ancestry thus sought a more narrow definition of themselves to distinguish them from newly arrived southern and eastern Europeans. One of the most popular terms they used to describe themselves, and the one that became the most pervasive, was that of Anglo-Saxons. Although the choice reflected an English heritage, the name was rooted in a Catholic, Germanic medieval past, one which was conveniently overlooked by Protestants employing this usage.
The purpose of this seminar will thus be to explore various manifestations of heightened attention in the nineteenth century to the medieval centuries, a period traditionally castigated as backward by progressive Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers. Growing knowledge of the Middle Ages and the corresponding desire to reinvigorate study (and in some cases use) of the history, literature, arts, architecture, and traditions of this period contributed fundamentally to nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual and artistic life both in Europe and the United States. The readings for the seminar will therefore address a number of different themes rising out of the study of the middle ages and its transformation at the hands of modern thinkers, artists and architects. Among the topics to be covered in readings and discussions will be the rise of the fields of medieval history, medieval art history, and Anglo-Saxon studies in the United States, the inspirational role played by medieval artifacts, architecture, and nineteenth-century philosophers such as John Ruskin on English and American artists and designers such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Louis Sullivan, the “restoration” of Gothic architectural sites by the likes of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and William Randolph Hearst, the literary studies of medieval texts and the recreation of the medieval period in nineteenth-century fiction and Worlds Fairs, and the impact of medievalism on emergent national archaeologies in Europe.
EUH 3931: Medieval Magic and Witchcraft (Section 4082) syllabus (PDF)
Fall 2011
Prof. Bonnie Effros
This senior seminar will assess the social, religious, and political functions of the supernatural in late antique, medieval, and early modern European society (400-1700 CE). Through primary and secondary readings, lectures, discussions, and films, students will gain a firmer understanding of the role played by magic, witchcraft, and the occult in shaping pre-modern European views of the cosmos. We will also study the ways in which the condemnation of demonic power existed side by side with miraculous tales of the deeds of saints, alchemical research, and Arthurian romances filled magic. Another important aspect of the course will be to address how accusations of magic and witchcraft and resulting persecutions marginalized particularly vulnerable individuals and social groups in Europe from the fourth to seventeenth centuries.
EUH 4930: History of Collecting syllabus (PDF)
Prof. Bonnie Effros
Spring 2011
The purpose of this seminar will be to assess in a very broad sense the human propensity to collect and arrange artifacts of various types. This practice, whether or not in each instance a manifestation of a conscious or clearly defined process, has traditionally played a variety of social, political, and cultural functions. The way in which collected artifacts are represented has often shaped the self-perception of the individual or members of the community doing the collecting. During the spring term, we will open our discussions with the Middle Ages, when the hoarding of relics, a limited but powerful resource, was the means by which clerics signaled their access to divine intervention. In the early modern period, we will study how antiquarian collections of natural wonders signaled not just the high status of their owners but mastery of a certain level of learning. In the nineteenth century, we will look at physical anthropologists and the collections of human skulls and artifacts that underlay their statistical analyses of race. We will also assess colonial attitudes toward "primitive" remains and the creation of museums to house plundered materials, and what this meant to European imperial identity. The semester will close with a survey of more modern phenomena, including studies of mass consumption in the industrial world (with the rise, for instance, of department stores), American history museums (whose data is sometimes reconstructed or invented but which nonetheless influence the population's understanding of its shared past), and the contemporary fascination with the idea of collecting "gone wrong" as displayed in reality shows on "hoarders" and the like. The course grade will be based on in-class discussion of the assigned readings each week, several short reaction papers to the assigned readings, and a research paper of 15-20 pages (consisting of two drafts and peer critiques) on an approved topic related to collecting.
EUH 3931: Britain before 1000 CE
Prof. Bonnie Effros
Fall 2010
This undergraduate lecture course charts the history of Britain, namely the mainland of Britain (excluding Ireland and the islands closest to it) from the time of the Roman conquest (to which we owe our earliest historical sources) to the Norman Conquest in 1066. Students use historical, archaeological, literary, and art historical sources to assess political events, cultural and religious change, intellectual advances, and technological innovations that affected the inhabitants of England, Wales, and Scotland during this long millennium. The assigned readings, lectures, assignments, and discussions, provide a framework in which students are able to contextualize events like the Roman Conquest, the Anglo-Saxon migrations and conversion, the Viking invasions, the unification of England, and many other facets of life in what some have wrongly denigrated as the "Dark Ages".
EUH 5934: The Gendered Body in Christianity, 200-800
Prof. Bonnie Effros
Spring 2010
This graduate seminar bridges the disciplines of European history and archaeology in late antique Christianity and the European early Middle Ages by focusing on the differential representation and treatment of male and female bodies. Its point of departure is the ancient belief that women's reproductive organs were inverse versions of male genitalia. The logical implication of this view was that a woman's body, as opposed to a man's body, was incomplete and thus less than fully human; in order to attain full humanity and the dignity of a soul, a woman had to, in some sense, become a man. Students in the seminar explore some of the ways in which the dominant male standard and the desire to control and transform an inadequately formed body constituted a central intellectual preoccupation in the medieval Mediterranean and later in Western culture.
Some of the themes addressed during the semester include monastic claustration (permanently imprisoning the body), self-mutilation, martyrdom (fragmentation), cross-dressing and gender slippage in late antique and early medieval written sources. Readings include translated selections from the Church fathers, histories of saints, monastic Rules, visionary texts, theological works and ancient and early medieval medical treatises. We also treat where possible archaeological representations of Christian bodies, and supplement the primary sources with modern interpretations of this complex source material. It is hoped that in looking at the ways in which men and women were conceptualized and represented, we can recuperate a body of literary texts and practices that without such contextualization seem incomprehensible and bizarre. The central problems that the readings variously thematize, namely the exercise of power, control and interpretation with regard to human bodies, are highly "modern" and relevant to us today.