History
Undergraduate Courses
History 177A: Armenia and Armenians from Ancient to Medieval Eras
Location: Social Sciences Building 581
Time: TU, TH - 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Instructor: Dzovinar Derderian
This course provides a survey of Armenian history from the earliest mentions of Armenia more than 2500 years ago to the end of the last Armenian Kingdom in Cilicia and the rise of the Ottomans in the 1400s. It will focus on the connections of Armenians and Armenian kingdoms with neighboring empires (including Persian, Roman, Abbasid, Byzantine, Seljuk, and Mongol), ethnic and religious groups and cultures. The aim of the course is to explore various social, political, and economic transformations that both linked Armenians with their neighbors and differentiated them as an ethno-religious group.
History 150B: Medieval England: from the Conquest to 1485
Location: Wheeler 204
Time: M, W, F - 12:00 PM - 1:00 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.
Graduate Seminar
History 281: Paleography and Other Auxiliary Sciences
Location:
Time: TU - 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Instructor: Maria Mavroudi
This is a general introduction to the use of primary documents pertinent to Mediterranean history and culture during the ancient and medieval periods. It addresses issues of paleography, codicology, textual tradition, and the critical edition of sources. The focus will be on Greek manuscripts, but problems shared between Greek and other manuscript cultures (especially Arabic) will also be discussed. The bulk the primary source material will be medieval, but the course is of potential interest to scholars of the ancient Graeco-Roman world, since the works of ancient authors survive mostly in medieval manuscripts. We will mainly study books, but will also refer to administrative documents. The unifying theme for covering such a great chronological, geographical, cultural, and linguistic gamut will be the common developments regarding the technology of book production and the logic of authoring, editing, and reproducing texts before the advent of printing. Differences will also be discussed.
This seminar will meet in a room in the Bancroft Library.
English
Undergraduate Courses
English 104: Introduction to Old English
Location: Wheeler 224
Time: TU, TH - 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Instructor: Shu-han Luo
Hwæt! This course introduces the earliest English literature, with focus on giving students the skills to read its vibrant corpus in the original language. Step by step, we will build our grasp of grammar and vocabulary; from there, we will read a wide-ranging selection of verse and prose, including medical recipes and schoolbooks, love-laments and travel narratives, riddles, heroic poetry, guides for decoding dreams and even advice on haircuts. Throughout, emphasis on close reading will help us solidify our grasp of grammar and syntax, and attend to the ways early English writers themselves approached and valued the discipline of words. You will also practice reading from medieval manuscripts, and learn to use scholarly tools (lexicographical, codicological, digital) for conducting research in Old English. By the end of the course, you will be able to read most Old English texts with the help of a dictionary, and be well prepared for further study in medieval languages and literature. No pre-requisites, nor is prior knowledge of Old English or medieval literature expected. This class satisfies the "pre-1800" requirement for the English major.
English 110: Medieval Literature
Location: 151 Social Sciences
Time: M, W - 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Instructor: Jennifer Miller
Development of literary form and idiom throughout the Christian West from the first to the fifteenth century.
Please contact the instructor (j_miller@berkeley.edu) for information about this course. This class satisfies the "pre-1800" requirement for the English major.
English 190: Myth, Mythology, Mythography
Location: Wheeler 301
Time: TU, TH - 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Instructor: Michelle Ripplinger
This research seminar concentrates on Greco-Roman myth, mythology, and mythography in early English literature, with special interest in how it can make the reader a co-creator of meaning. We start with Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an influential instance of Greek mythography in the Roman world, before turning to medieval and early modern writers in this tradition: Boccaccio, Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Dante, Gower, and Shakespeare. Rather than pitting Renaissance humanism against medieval scholasticism and moralization, as so often has been the case, or reading the contradictions between different versions of the same myth as mistakes or discrepancies, we instead approach myth as a multivalent “instrument of thinking.” We consider how meaning takes shape in the gaps between different accounts of the same myth, both within individual works and in the conversations that unfold between different authors. Along the way, we will consider how the texts and artworks of Greco-Roman antiquity have been used to legitimate and critique certain political agendas and ideologies, such as imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and the like. We will also attend to the rich tradition of Black classicisms, asking whether the appropriation of myth can be a subversive act.
French
Undergraduate Courses
French 112A: Gender, Space, and Diversity in Medieval French Literature
Location: Dwinelle 33
Time: TU, TH - 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Instructor: Henry Ravenhall
All work in this class is conducted in French. 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. Class discussion will be in French.
All Work for This Class Conducted in French; Completion of FR102, Placement Exam, or Native Language Fluency Required for Enrollment. MUST HAVE TAKEN FRENCH 4 AT UC BERKELEY OR A FRENCH DEPARTMENT PLACEMENT TEST - For placement testing, please contact vrodic@berkeley.edu.
Graduate Seminar
French 281: Touch: Philosophy, Art, Literature, Film
Location: Dwinelle 4226
Time: W, 2-5 PM
Instructor: Henry Ravenhall
In this seminar, we’ll read and dissect important works that deal with touch from a range of theoretical and critical perspectives. If touch, for Aristotle, is the base, most material sense, it is also what allows a thinking of sense to be possible at all. A thinking of touch pervades western philosophy, which Jacques Derrida took to task precisely for its “haptocentrism”. In the first few weeks of the seminar, we’ll work through some of the philosophical complexities linked to touch, paying particular attention to the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. We’ll then turn to more recent work on touching art, from cave painting to medieval icons, from oil painting to modernist sculpture. We’ll also put pressure on the “phenomenological” turn in Film Theory and especially the influential model of “haptic visuality” (as Laura U. Marks reads Gilles Deleuze). In the second half of the course, we’ll think about touch more expansively in relation to: queerness and the archive (Roland Barthes and Carolyn Dinshaw); affect and reading; Didier Anzieu’s “skin-ego”; ethics (Emmanuel Levinas’ caress); erotics and intimacy; and, finally, the digital. Although many of the readings are originally in French, English translations will also be made available, and discussion will be in English. Seminar members will work towards a research paper in which they reread a cultural artefact from a theoretical perspective informed by the figure of touch.
Celtic Studies
Undergraduate Courses
Celtic 128: Medieval Celtic Culture
Location: Dwinelle 109
Time: T, TH: 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Instructor: Myriah Williams
Using a range of sources from saints’ lives to chronicles, and legends to lawbooks, this class will introduce students to the rich and varied medieval cultures of Celtic-speaking peoples. Focusing on Wales and Ireland, we will explore such topics as the keeping of bees in medieval Ireland and the laws of the court in medieval Wales. Students will come away from this course with a better understanding not only of the social and legal structures of medieval Wales and Ireland and the histories of medieval Celtic peoples, but also of their languages, literatures and conceptions of themselves.
Italian
Graduate Seminar
Italian 244: Mediterranean Love: Medieval Italian Lyric from Ibn Hamdîs to Dante
Location: Dwinelle 6331
Time: W, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Instructor: Akash Kumar
This seminar will consider the wide range of medieval Italian poetry, from the Siculo-Arab poets of 12th-century Sicily to 13th-century poets such as Giacomo da Lentini, the Compiuta Donzella, Immanuel of Rome, and Dante Alighieri. We will emphasize points of Mediterranean connectivity, thinking medieval lyric in other vernacular traditions such as Occitan, Andalusian muwashshah, and Persian. We will also move through the various schools of the ltalian lyric tradition, thinking about voices both marginalized and canonical, as we make our way to a full reading of Dante’s lyric corpus and consider his role in establishing a literary history that codifies categories of his own creation.
Jewish Studies
Graduate Seminar
Jewish 103: Ibero-Jewish Voices from the Margins
Location: Dwinelle 6331
Time: W: 12:00 - 3:00 PM
Instructor: Adam Mahler
This is an ONLINE course. The literary production of medieval Spain and Portugal took place, by and large, in Hebrew. The Sephardic diaspora that began in the fourteenth century and peaked in the late fifteenth century— following edicts of expulsion and mass conversion—gave rise to a Jewish-voiced Romance language literature. Even so, the pressures of belletristic taste and religious doctrine meant that the Sephardic diaspora wrote many of its most intellectually significant works in Hebrew or other prestige languages. Meanwhile, Judeo-Spanish writers cultivated a hyper-literary style that betrays distinct cultural anxieties and does not always offer an affecting glimpse into the everyday lives of diasporic communities in the Levant. In the face of such circumstances, how do we recover authentic Jewish voices from the literary record? How can we productively speculate on Jewish lives through Christian writers’ impersonations? And what broader social insights can we glean from the elite Sephardic literature of later years? Conducted in Judeo-Spanish, this course attempts to answer these and other questions by interrogating primary sources that span the twelfth to twentieth centuries. Course authors include: Ibn Ezra, Yudah Harizi, Gil Vicente, Antón Montoro, Shem Tov ibn Isaac Ardutiel, Moshe Arragel, Sabbtai Tsvi, Samuel Usque, Viktor Levi, Sa’adi A-Levi, and Emma Lazarus. In addition to Judeo- Spanish materials, the course will also incorporate readings from the Old Spanish, Judeo-Portuguese, and early modern Castilian and Portuguese literary traditions, with English translations provided when necessary or as an interpretive aid. PREREQUISITE: Jewish Studies 102/Spanish 135 or equivalent. Please contact the instructor if you have questions regarding preparedness.
Scandinavian
Undergraduate Courses
Scandinavian 123: Viking and Medieval Scandinavia
Location: Dwinelle 219
Time: M,W,F: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Instructor: Kate Heslop
Viking and Medieval Scandinavia will explore developments and trends in the areas of social structure, trade and economy, religion, political organization, culture, literature, and technology during the Viking Age and Medieval periods (c. 750–1500). The course will cover the Scandinavian homelands (Denmark, Sweden, Norway) of the Vikings as well as the regions in which Scandinavians settled during the Viking Age. Developments in Scandinavia will be contextualized against broader trends in Europe and western Asia. Texts: John Haywood, The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings (1995), Else Roesdahl, The Vikings (2018, 3rd ed.), Anders Winroth, The Age of the Vikings (2014) and a selection of primary and secondary sources in translation.
Intro Old Norse
Location: Dwinelle 106
Time: M,W,F: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Instructors: Joshua Peter Lee, Kate Heslop
This is an undergraduate-level class which will introduce students to the vernacular written language of Iceland and Norway in the Middle Ages. Class time will focus on grammatical lectures, translations, and close-reading exercises of Old Norse texts. By the end of the semester students should be able to read saga-style Old Norse prose texts in normalized orthography with the help of a dictionary. Assignments will include weekly translations, grammatical exercises, quizzes, a midterm, and a final exam. Regular participation is required.
Texts: Zöega’s Old Icelandic Dictionary (any edition) Additional texts to be announced and distributed by the instructor.