COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course explores the
rich legacy of Medieval Europe. The Middle Ages are generally thought
to have covered the period from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the
west (which occurred around 500 AD) to the Renaissance (14th to 16th centuries
AD). This is an enormous time span, and I have no intention of trying
to cover every event and every aspect of the Middle Ages. Rather,
I intend to offer a broad variety of enticing slices of medieval culture.
We will briefly examine several of the cultures that contributed to the
creation of the Middle Ages and will then equally briefly examine the Early
Middle Ages (circa 500-850). The bulk of the course will focus on the period
from 900-1300, which is, not surprisingly, both the period of greatest
medieval creativity and vigor and the period most stereotypically familiar
to modern students who think about ‘the Middle Ages.’ Within this
period (known as the “High Middle Ages”) we will examine numerous topics,
events and individuals. These topics, events and individuals are grouped
so as to provide underlying which lend an analytical focus to the course.
Some of these themes incluce: 1) the changing ways in which kings
and other governmental authorities attempted to provide law and order to
the regions under their control; 2) the changing ways in which Medieval
Christianity influenced politics, society, and personal belief; 3) the
ways in which the organization of society changed over a thousand-year
span (here we will look at definitions of family and gender roles); and
4) the ways in which literature reflects the changing values and ideals
of medieval society.
The process of our trip
through the Middle Ages, however, will not merely be one of mastering names
and dates (although you certainly must do a fair amount of memorization).
Indeed, a major purpose of the class is to demonstrate to you the methods
by which historians approach the past. Thus we will be interested
in learning about the nature of the sources available to us, and, above
all, in learning how to interpret them. Interpretation, after all,
is the keystone of the historian’s craft, and it will be one of our purposes
in this course to subject all of the material at our disposal to careful
prodding, questioning, and criticism. By doing this, we will be learning
to master the Historical Method, a powerful analytical tool which you will
be able to apply in many other classes and life-situations.
Our approach in this task
will be to learn two primary techniques: 1) the criticism of primary sources,
and 2) the evaluation of modern scholarly argumentation. When you
look at the readings assigned for the course (see below), you will notice
that they are divided into three categories: Textbook Reading, Primary
Source Reading, and Secondary Source Reading. The Textbook (Hollister)
is a very basic, very superficial overview of the period under discussion.
It is designed to familiarize you with people, events and trends. The Primary
Source Readings are the meat of the course: they are the texts produced
by medieval people. It is our task to learn how to read those texts critically,
so that they reveal qualitative information to us about medieval society
and culture. The Secondary Source Readings that I have assigned are
all articles written by professional historians who study the Middle Ages.
They should all have an argument, which you should try to discern and evaluate.
These articles are all interpretive: that is, they take the primary sources,
chew them over, digest them, and produce an interpretation.