Celtic Studies
Undergraduate Course
Celtic 173 | Celtic Christianity
Location: Dwinelle 79
Time: Tu, Th - 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Instructor: Myriah Williams
This course considers the evidence for the presence of early Christian believers in the so-called "Celtic" areas of western Europe. Students will examine how the Celtic peoples received Christianity in the context of native (pagan) religion; they will look specifically at how the Roman Church doctrine influenced the doctrinal stands of the early Celtic church(es), and vice versa, with particular attention to the Pelagian controversy, the date of Easter, the monastic tonsure, and the use of penitentials. The period covered is approximately 70 CE to 800 CE.
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Undergraduate Course
MONGOLN 116 | The Mongol Empire
Location: Dwinelle 251
Time: Tu, Th 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
This course examines the Mongol Empire founded by Chinggis Khan. We will study the empire from the time its founding in 1206 until its decline in the mid-14th century. The greater extent of the course covers the matter of the Mongol conquest: military technologies, methods and strategies, logistics, and the events of specific battles and actions. These events are framed in the context of the Mongolian culture: its scientific, political, and economic systems and over-arching worldview. The course also covers what comes from the conquest in terms not only of destruction but what the Mongols make of the world they've won. Readings for the course are of primary sources in translation.
English
Graduate Seminar
English 212 | Readings in Middle English
Location: Wheeler 337
Time: M 3:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Instructor: Maura Bridget Nolan
Rapid reading of selections in Middle English, from the twelfth century through the fifteenth.
French
Undergraduate Course
French 112A | Gender, Space, and Diversity in Medieval French Literature
Location: Dwinelle 4114
Time: M, W, F - 10:00 am - 11:00 am
Instructor: Henry Ravenhall
All work in this class is conducted in French. Completion of French 102 at UCB or its equivalent is required for enrollment.
What makes a human? How is gender constructed? How might sex, class, and race be connected? Medieval literature presents intriguing, sometimes challenging, answers to these important questions. This course examines a range of early texts in French that address, respectively, the animal-human divide, the gender binary, sexuality and play, race and power, and feminist community-building. You will learn how to read medieval texts in their original forms, and you will get to handle manuscripts in the impressive collections at the Bancroft Library. No prior knowledge of medieval language is required as all texts will be available in modern French translation.
Graduate Seminar
French 210B| Introduction to Manuscript Studies: Practice and Theory
Location: Dwinelle 4226
Time: M - 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Instructor: Henry Ravenhall
Powered by massive efforts at digitizing archives, a range of disciplines has seen a turn toward the materiality of texts. It is now easier than ever to consult the physical objects through which literature was transmitted in the past. This course provides some tools and frameworks to approach this extraordinary and largely untapped resource for literary and historical scholarship. While the focus will be on the medieval European manuscript, the readings and assignments are designed to appeal to graduate students in different areas of study. Up until Spring Break, our goal will be practical training, and students will learn how to describe, catalogue, transcribe, and edit a manuscript, as well as understand important contextual issues relating to orality and literacy, reading practices, and scribal variance. The final weeks will open onto new theoretical directions in manuscript studies and medieval literature (such as phenomenology, sociology, digital humanities/media studies, queer theory, and animal studies). Two sessions will be held with the collections at the Bancroft Library, and students will have the option of devoting their final research paper to a manuscript in its holdings.
History
Undergraduate Courses
History 4B | Origins of Western Civilization: Medieval Europe
Location: Social Sciences Building 170
Time: Tu, Th - 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Instructor: Maureen C Miller
This course surveys medieval European history from Constantine's conversion to Christianity in 310 to 1400, emphasizing the creativity of the new peoples populating Europe in adapting the heritage of the Roman world and the role of economic change in transforming European societies after the millennium. Topics include the development of kingship and states, courtly literary and material cultures, economic change, the environment, and religious movements. Discussion sections will explore medieval sources—heroic epics, biographies of kings and saints, letters and chronicles, documents, social satires, and material artifacts—while lectures narrate the changes transforming Europe over the Middle Ages in conversation with our contemporary world.
History 150B | Medieval England: from the Conquest to 1485
Location: Anthro/Art Practice Bldg 155
Time: M, W, F - 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
Instructor: Robert John Iafolla
This course explores the history of medieval England from the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the end of the Wars of The Roses in 1485. The conquest radically changed English politics and society. The new rulers drew the kingdom into the politics and conflicts of continental Europe. At the same time England expanded at the expense of its neighbors in the British Isles, and faced recurring internal conflicts among its aristocracy and royal families. Alongside the history of kings and battles, we will study the economic, social, cultural and intellectual life of the realm, the development of its distinctive political and legal systems, and the social and religious upheavals which rocked England in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
History 188D | Shipwrecked: Conversion, Redemption, and Salvation in Shipwreck Narratives
Location: Wurster 102
Time: Tu, Th - 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Instructor: Susanna Elm
The course focuses on several crucial shipwreck narratives in Homer’s Odyssey, the Ancient Egyptian Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, a shipwreck survived by Apostle Paul, in imperial Roman romance novels, and in Shakespeare’s Tempest to examine long-distance trade and the impact of maritime catastrophes on narratives that encapsulate encounters with the divine, conversions, shifts in religious and personal identity, and concepts of paradise. We will look at ship-building innovations and trade routes to provide context and use cultural anthropology and literary theory to identify how the narrators use shipwrecks to fashion the relation between nature, the divine, and humans as individuals and members of a society.
History of Art
Undergraduate Course
HISTART 192D | Undergraduate Seminar: Perception & Creativity in Italian Medieval / Early Modern Art
Location: Doe Library 425
Time: F - 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Instructor: Henrike Christiane Lange
This seminar provides an opportunity for students to investigate what “creativity” meant in specific historical contexts that defined Italian medieval, early modern / Renaissance, and Baroque visual art and architecture. This class is adaptive to student interest in content and spread of assignments: You will have influence on the choice of objects for the entirety of the term.
Italian Studies
Undergraduate Courses
Italian 120 | Creativity, Reason, Imagination in Italian Art, ca. 1200-1700
Location: Online
Time: W - 3:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Instructor: Henrike Christiane Lange
This course provides an opportunity for students to practice interdisciplinary art-science-humanities approaches to Italian medieval, early modern / Renaissance, and Baroque art. This class is adaptive to student interest in content and spread of assignments: You will have influence on the choice of objects for the entirety of the term.
Italian 140 | Boccaccio’s Decameron: Tales in a Time of Plague
Location: Wurster 102
Time: Tu, Th - 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
Instructor: Akash Kumar
We tell each other stories to live. This course will center around Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of stories written in the wake of the plague that devastated Florence in 1348. We’ll consider the connection between storytelling and survival, whether in the wake of devastating disease or political crisis, as we move across the medieval world through Indian, Persian, and Arab traditions of storytelling. And we’ll make our way to global contemporary reflections of this impulse to tell stories in a time of plague, with authors such as Salman Rushdie, Mona Awad, and Margaret Atwood.
Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures
Undergraduate Course
MELC 126 | Silk Road Art and Archaeology
Location: Hearst Mining 310
Time: Tu, Th - 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Instructor: Sanjyot Mehendale
The course will outline art and archaeology of the Silk Roads from the 5th century BCE to the 10th century CE. A number of specific sites located along the Silk Roads will be selected and explored in depth, as examples which reveal the manifold cultural currents along the trade routes. Special attention will be paid to the eclecticism in Silk Road cultures brought about by the movement of peoples and merchandise which facilitated the spread and fusion along these trading routes of various ideas, cultural forms, art styles, and religious concepts. The social and political underpinnings of this eclecticism will be examined.
Graduate Seminar
MELC 298 | Avicenna
Location: Social Sciences Building 252
Time: W - 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Instructor: Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed
This class will examine Avicenna’s philosophy in English translation, aided by relevant secondary scholarship that also serves to highlight current debates in the field of Islamic philosophy. We will take as our focus Avicenna’s epistemology and philosophy of mind, encountering his thinking on the nature of the soul, rationality, and the relationship between the human and the larger cosmos.
Medieval Studies
Graduate Course
MEDST 200 | Introduction to Research Materials and Methods
Location: Dwinelle 6220
Time: Tu 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Instructor: Emily Zazulia
The gradute proseminar. Basic materials and resources in fields represented in the Medieval Studies program, and in some subjects involving expertise in more than one discipline (e.g., liturgy, codicology). Emphasis on methods of interdisciplinary research, research tools, and critical evaluation of their use.
Philosophy
Graduate Course
PHILOS 155 | Medieval Philosophy
Location: Moffit Library 103
Time: M, W, F - 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Instructor: Timothy D Crockett
This course will be a study of some of the major philosophical texts from the Medieval Period with a focus on issues in metaphysics and epistemology. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which the philosophers in this period assimilate Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy into religious thought and how they anticipate certain aspects of modern philosophy. Topics will include the nature of universals, individuation, the nature and existence of God, faith and reason, skepticism, freedom, human nature and human cognition.
Scandinavian
Undergraduate Courses
SCANDIN 60 | Heroic Legends of the North
Location: Dwinelle 182
Time: Tu, Th - 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Instructor: Kate Heslop
Exploration of the heroic narratives of the Northern Middle Ages with a focus on both the hero and the heroic ethos in a period or radical cultural, social and religious change and on a particular body of literature, the Scandinavian versions of Germanic heroic narrative. Required of majors.
SCANDIN 101B | Introduction to Old Norse II
Location: Dwinelle 6415
Time: Tu, Th - 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Instructor: Jonas Wellendorf
Introduction to Old Norse literature through readings of Old Norse texts in their original language and translation. Critical essays on Old Norse literature and scholarship illuminating the historical context in which the texts were written, transmitted, and read will supplement the readings of primary texts. The class will also deepen the students’ understanding of Old Norse grammar and metrics, and introduce them to sub-fields of Old Norse studies such as paleography and runology.
SCANDIN 160 | Scandinavian Myth and Religion
Location: Moffit Library 102
Time: Tu, Th - 9:30 am - 11:00 am
Instructor: Jonas Wellendorf