HISTORY 221H: THE MEDIEVAL LEGACY

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 spanning the period between 400 and 1300.  I hope to give you a sense of the vibrancy, verve, and incredible vigor of the medieval world.  Yet the course will not merely be a slapdash collection of neat facts.  It will be organized in two primary ways.  First, I will roughly divide our period in half.  The first half (to roughly 850 AD) we will term the Early Middle Ages.  The second half (to about 1300 AD) we will call the High Middle Ages. Second, I will offer a consistent set of themes with which to interpret each of these two periods.  The topics covered in class and in the readings should, therefore, reflect the following important themes: 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.  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.
 

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