The following courses have been suggested by Early Cultures faculty as especially relevant to interested students. Courses marked with an asterisk have also received PEC funding for additional programming. Many of our Affiliated Departments also include course listings for the current year, as well as past or future years, on their websites. To view all courses being offered at Brown University in the current academic year, visit the university's online listings, Courses@Brown.
Program in Early Cultures
Relevant Courses (2020-2021)
ANTH 1030: Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture: A World That Matters
Survey of ancient art and building in ancient America, with a focus on Mexico, Central America, and the Andes. Underlying concepts include: meaning and method, cosmos and kingship, narrative and symbol, personality and authorship, empire and royal court. Rich collections of the Haffenreffer museum will form the focus of work in the class.
Stephen D Houston
Morgan Clark
ANTH 2501: Principles of Archaeology
Examines theoretical and methodological issues in anthropological archaeology. Attention is given to past concerns, current debates, and future directions of archaeology in the social sciences.
Stephen D Houston
ARCH 1765: Pandemics, Pathogens, and Plagues in the Greek and Roman Worlds
Terror of mass illness is nothing new; as long as there have been humans, there has been disease. These pandemics and plagues have had mortal impacts on past societies, much as contemporary plagues affect today’s economies, social and political structures, and populations. This class considers disease and society in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, beginning with the Plague of Athens in 430 BC and continuing to the outbreak of the ‘first pandemic’ of bubonic plague in AD 541. We will examine these case studies through archaeological material, written accounts, DNA analysis, palaeoclimate reconstruction, and palaeopathology.
Tyler V Franconi
ARCH 2245: Rural Landscapes and Peasant Communities in the Mediterranean
The aim of this course is to explore rural settlement and agrarian production in the Mediterranean, both in the ancient and the recent past. The archaeological starting-point is provided by the numerous scatters of surface remains that archaeological surveys across the Mediterranean have collected and that are usually interpreted as 'farmsteads' broadly datable to Classical Antiquity. We will look beyond these scatters to examine the social and economic significance of rural settlement through comparison with ethnographic and historical rural studies from across the Mediterranean and to explore household and community organisation and agrarian production in Classical Antiquity.
Peter Van Dommelen
ARCH 2710: The Archaeology of Nubia and Egypt
Egypt and Nubia share the distinction of ancient civilizations along the Nile river, but Nubia remains much more poorly known than Egypt. This seminar will examine the archaeology of Nubia, including its relationship to Egypt, from the introduction of ceramics and agriculture to the medieval period. This long-term perspective will allow comparative study of issues such as state formation, imperialism and religious change. Enrollment limited to 15 graduate students.
Laurel D Bestock
HIAA 1307: Politics and Spectacle in the Arts of Ancient Rome Fall
This seminar investigates the intersection of politics and spectacles in the artistic production of ancient Rome. We will explore a variety of public monuments to reveal how they codify essential aspects of Roman culture. Topics include the architecture of entertainment spaces such as theaters, amphitheaters, and circuses, as well as the social functions of spectacles such as gladiatorial games and triumphal processions. We will look at expressions of imperial propaganda in monuments such as tombs and honorific arches. The class also considers how these ideas entered the private realm in the form of domestic wall paintings, mosaics, and sculpture gardens.
Gretel Rodriguez
CLAS 1130: The Fragility of Life in Ancient Greece
This interdisciplinary course explores the fragility of life in the Ancient Greek city-state form multiple perspectives: those of state-building, the population stress in the city, the capacity for the family to maintain and sustain itself, to those of the individual: man, woman, and child, whose life experiences left them vulnerable to disease and economic hardship. This course explores Ancient Greek socio-economic history addressing health, disease, fertility and childbirth, migration, mobility, and population and family ‘management’ as well as topics fundamental to historical demography (mortality, birth rates, and growth) over the longue durée approach (Archaic through Roman Imperial eras).
Graham J Oliver
CLAS 1320: Roman History II: The Roman Empire and Its Impact
The social and political history of the Roman Empire (14-565 CE). Focuses on expansion, administration, and Romanization of the empire; crisis of the 3rd century; militarization of society and monarchy; the struggle between paganism and Christianity; the end of the Empire in the West. Special attention given to the role of women, slaves, law, and historiography. Ancient sources in translation.
John P Bodel
CLAS 1930C: Parasites and Hypocrites
The course is a study of the many forms of toadying, groveling, feigning friendship, flattery, ass-kissing, and so on, that were such a large of source of concern — and comedy — in antiquity. The anxieties over hypocrisy in a democracy and parasites in client-patron systems will be explored historically, in literary representations, and in their social, political, and economic contexts. Authors to be read include Aristophanes, Plutarch, Lucian, Plautus, Horace, and Petronius.
Kenneth Haynes
CLAS 2011: Critical Approaches to Classical Texts: Theory and Methods
These seminars will examine categories fundamental to the study of ancient literature and historiography, highlighting the relevance of ancient philosophy, rhetoric and poetics to modern critical/theoretical approaches. Topics can include: text, author, context, literature, genre, representation, emulation, narrative, historiography, commentary, reception. Contradictions in the idea of ‘classics’ can also be considered, in connection with questions of diversity and ethical approaches to Greco-Roman texts. The course aims to draw on participants’ needs and experiences to offer firm and constructive guidelines for professional academic writing, eliminating common errors and misconceptions (intentional and biographical fallacies, confusion between allusion and intertextuality, ‘topoi and ‘tropes’.)
Andrew J W Laird
HIAA 1213: The Bureaucracy of Hell: Envisioning Death in East Asian Art
This seminar examines the material and visual cultures of death in premodern East Asia. Topics include the materiality of funerary rites, the practice of entombing the dead with miniatures, and the visual tradition associated with the influential Scripture on the Ten Kings, which envisioned the afterlife as an infernal bureaucracy. We will discover that the way people in premodern East Asia envisioned death had a lot to do with the way in which they experienced life. By thinking through the continuities, we will use the present traces of death to envision the absent world of the living.
Jeffrey C Moser
HIAA 1307: Politics and Spectacle in the Arts of Ancient Rome
This seminar investigates the intersection of politics and spectacles in the artistic production of ancient Rome. We will explore a variety of public monuments to reveal how they codify essential aspects of Roman culture. Topics include the architecture of entertainment spaces such as theaters, amphitheaters, and circuses, as well as the social functions of spectacles such as gladiatorial games and triumphal processions. We will look at expressions of imperial propaganda in monuments such as tombs and honorific arches. The class also considers how these ideas entered the private realm in the form of domestic wall paintings, mosaics, and sculpture gardens.
Gretel Rodriguez
HIAA 1882: Indigenous Art, Issues and Concepts
This seminar will map out the field of indigenous art with an emphasis on artworks from English-speaking settler colonial countries, concentrating on Native North American and Aboriginal Australian artists. We will approach indigenous art theoretically, outlining major issues and concepts of this global topic. Units will include defining indigeneity and indigenous art terms, anthropology in relation to art, and curatorial practice. We will begin by addressing the concept of indigeneity through legal and sociopolitical frameworks, continuing with museological display of indigenous art across time, and seeing how museums are working to better contextualize their anthropological collections.
Marina Tyquiengco
HIAA 2440F: Reframing Medieval Art
The seminar will look critically at the history of medieval art and architecture. We will examine the voices of past scholarship, and the ways in which topics like cultural contact, race, and the movements (forced and unforced) of people and objects have been handled. Each student will construct a syllabus that develops new pedagogic strategies for teaching medieval art and architecture in a global and postcolonial context.
Sheila Bonde
RELS 1440A: Japanese Buddhism
An exploration of key ideas and debates in the study of Japanese Buddhism. Influential paradigms of medieval Japanese Buddhism, including “original enlightenment,” “transfer of merit,” and “harmonization of gods and buddhas,” will be brought into conversation with aspects of Japanese religious life in premodern and modern contexts, such as healing; care of the dead; bodily self-denial; and ritual uses of language. Materials include primary texts in English translation, modern secondary interpretations, and related literary and visual expressions.
Janine T Anderson Sawada
RELS 2380D: Chinese Buddhism
This graduate level course offers an in-depth review of the academic study of Buddhism in China. We read major works and students explore their own position in the field. Weekly monographs will introduce Chinese Buddhism as historical phenomena and an object of knowledge. Discussions emphasize methods, sources, and scholarly assumptions. We revisit foundational debates from the 20th century, such as the ‘Sinification of Buddhism,’ and read recent publications that study Buddhism in China through lenses of cultural and material history. The course includes a series of writing assignments, culminating in a seminar paper.
Jason A Protass
HIST 1202: Formation of the Classical Heritage: Greeks, Romans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims
Explores essential social, cultural, and religious foundation blocks of Western Civilization, 200 BCE to 800 CE. The main theme is the eternal struggle between universalism and particularism, including: Greek elitism vs. humanism; Roman imperialism vs. inclusion; Jewish assimilation vs. orthodoxy; Christian fellowship vs. exclusion, and Islamic transcendence vs. imminence. We will study how ancient Western individuals and societies confronted oppression and/or dramatic change and developed intellectual and spiritual strategies still in use today. Students should be prepared to examine religious thought from a secular point of view. There is no prerequisite or assumed knowledge of the period.
Kenneth S Sacks
HIST 1956A: Thinking Historically: A History of History Writing
Philosopher George Santayana famously warned that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Ten years later, industrialist Henry Ford perhaps even more famously dismissed that notion: “History is more or less bunk.” What we mean by history and how we construct and use it are essential questions in all societies. Thinking Historically explores how we view and employ the past. The course examines major ways of interpreting the past through a survey of historians and methods and studies how history is produced, used, and misused, by professionals as well as by the public.
Kenneth S Sacks
HIST 2971I: New Perspectives on Medieval History
Over the past several decades, the field of medieval history has been reshaped radically. New approaches have changed the ways in which medievalists think about old subjects. Our understanding of medieval society itself has expanded as previously marginalized or unexplored subjects have become central to medievalists’ concerns. This seminar explores the ways in which medievalist historians have altered how they practice their craft in response to these developments. Readings in classic older works are juxtaposed with newer ones on the way to becoming classics themselves.
Jonathan P Conant
HIST 2981O: Seascapes of History
This seminar explores the recent “oceanic turn” in history, examining how and why the sea and the maritime matter to interpretations of the past. Key readings will include general works that theorize new maritime history and thalassography, and studies focused on the history of specific oceanic and maritime areas (e.g. the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean), which illuminate sub-themes such as migration, colonization, empire building, trade, sailors’ culture, piracy, cultural attitudes toward the sea, religion and sea, and maritime environmental history. Readings will be drawn from a wide range of chronologies as well as geographies.
Amy G Remensnyder
ANTH 1201: Introduction to Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Analysis
This course offers an introduction to the concepts and techniques of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Through weekly lab assignments and work on independent projects, students develop skills in cartography and coordinate systems, spatial database design, image processing, basic spatial analysis, hydrological modeling, and three-dimensional modeling. Discussions and case material draw primarily from the application of GIS in archaeology, anthropology, and cultural geography, including the study of archival materials and the ethics of geographic representation. Provides foundation for upper division coursework in spatial analysis. Software focuses on ESRI products (ArcMap, ArcScene, ArcCatalog, ArcGIS Pro).
Parker VanValkenburgh
parker_vanvalkenburgh@brown.edu
Morgan Clark
ANTH 1505: Vertical Civilization: South American Archaeology from Monte Verde to the Inkas
This course offers an introduction to the archaeology of indigenous south American Civilizations, from the peopling of the continent around 13,000 years ago, to the Spanish Invasion of the 16th Century C.E. Throughout, we seek to understand the often unique solutions that South America indigenous peoples developed to deal with risk and to make sense of the world around them. Course lectures and discussions focus on recent research and major debates. Weekly sections draw on viewings of artifacts and manuscripts from the Haffenreffer Museum and the John Carter Brown Library.
Parker VanValkenburgh
parker_vanvalkenburgh@brown.edu
Bethany Whitlock
ANTH 1650: Ancient Maya Writing
Nature and content of Mayan hieroglyphic writing, from 100 to 1600 CE. Methods of decipherment, introduction to textual study, and application to interpretations of Mayan language, imagery, world view, and society. Literacy and Mesoamerican background of script.
Stephen D Houston
ARCH 1025: Greece-Egypt-Anatolia-Mesopotamia: Transcultural Interactions in the Ancient World
The ancient Mediterranean and Near East were intensely interconnected: myth, art, materials, technologies, and political institutions flowed between Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, Greece, and beyond. For as long as those flows have existed, there have also been complex and protracted reflections about their directions, causes, and consequences. This class takes a long-term, cross-cultural perspective to study both ancient (e.g, Herodotus, Manetho, Berossus) and modern discourses (e.g., Bernal, Burkert, Broodbank) about the dynamics of such transcultural interactions and the changing political stakes of the debate.
Felipe A Rojas Silva
ARCH 1712: Ruins: Cross-cultural Understandings of the Material Traces of the Past
What is a ruin? How, when, and why does something become a ruin? What sorts of ruins (e.g., nuclear, digital, biological) are we leaving behind us? This class probes the widely varied understandings of the relationship between time and matter that inform people’s ideas about the traces of the past. And it surveys how people across the globe and in many time-periods – from ancient China and Greece, to the early Americas and Islamic Arabia – have explained their own and others’ historical, ethical, aesthetic, and emotional connections to those traces.
Felipe A Rojas Silva
ARCH 2228: Prosperity in Antiquity
What did it mean to be prosperous in antiquity, and how do we identify this in the archaeological record? What methodologies can we use to conceptualize and evaluate privilege in the ancient world? This course investigates material evidence for prosperity at individual, community, and state levels, seeking to understand how lives were affected by broader societal prosperity. We’ll address questions of inequality, explore the impact of technological developments, and consider how literacy, art, and entertainment contributed to a different quality of life for the wealthy.
Candace M. Rice
ARCH 2240: Key Issues in Mediterranean Prehistory
This course's scope is the entire Mediterranean basin, from its first peopling until ca. 500 BC. The focus is on key transformations in economic, social, and political structures and interactions; on explanations for these changes; and on current issues where fresh data or new approaches are transforming our understanding. This seminar is intended for students both with and without prior knowledge of this field, and particularly for those preparing for the Joukowsky Institute's Mediterranean Prehistory field exam. Enrollment limited to 15 juniors, seniors, and graduate students.
John F Cherry
HIAA 1308: Arts of Memory in Ancient Rome
In ancient Rome, art and architecture were important vehicles for preserving memories, both individual and collective. Works of art such as reliefs, stelae, paintings, and monumental tombs, perpetuated the memory of historical events and honored the legacies of notable individuals. This seminar will explore the multiple forms of commemoration in ancient Roman art and architecture, considering a variety of media including burials and cenotaphs, triumphal arches, honorific columns and statues, among others. We will analyze the monuments built by and for members of the Roman elite, as well as private memorials dedicated by ordinary citizens.
Gretel Rodriguez
CLAS 1120E: Slavery in the Ancient World
Examines the institution of slavery in the ancient world, from Mesopotamia and the Near East to the great slave societies of classical Greece and (especially) imperial Rome; comparison of ancient and modern slave systems; modern views of ancient slavery from Adam Smith to Hume to Marx to M.I. Finley. Readings in English.
John P Bodel
CLAS 1141: Ancient India in Modern America: Yoga, Ayurveda, and More
One finds, in modern America, a variety of modes of engagement with aspect of India's ancient cultures, and debates about how to understand this engagement, as genuine appreciation or illicit appropriation. The course will prepare students to make a more informed critique or defense of such engagement, by closely comparing the modern American manifestations with aspects of ancient Indian culture which ostensibly inspired them. Readings will consist of ancient texts in translation paired with scholarship on their modern counterparts. Topics include: Yoga, Ayurveda, Buddhism, Kamasutras, Monistic Vedanta, and Vaishnava Theism.
David Buchta
CLAS 1210: Culture Wars: Archaic Greek History, c. 1200 to 479 BC
From the end of the Bronze Age to the end of the Persian Wars is a period of considerable change in the Mediterranean and beyond. The Greek polis challenges the powers of the ancient Near East. Over seven centuries we meet Greek writing, Homeric epic, and the first historian (Herodotus). But the Greek world lay on the edges of the Ancient Near East and this course tries to offer a more balanced approach than the typically Hellenocentric perspective of the standard textbooks. CLAS 1210 addresses cultura, political, social, and economic histories. Literary, epigraphical and archaeological cultures provide the evidence. This is a hybrid course, with synchronous (recorded) meetings Tu/Th and one section (online only; time to be arranged) per week from week 3. There are no written exams for this course. No previous knowledge of the ancient world is required.
Graham J Oliver
Erica Meszaros
CLAS 1441: Merchants, Trade, and Commerce in the Roman World
Exotic spices, fermented fish sauce, mass-produced pottery, olive oil, fine wine, not so-fine wine, marble, bricks, metals, people, art, elephants – these are just a few of the things that the Romans traded. This course draws on archaeological, literary, and epigraphic material to investigate the world of Roman trade from the goods that were moved, to the logistics of transport, to the merchants and traders themselves. Who ventured to India in search of spices? Who ran the local wine shop? How were colossal columns transported across deserts?
Candace M. Rice
Christopher Cox
CLAS 2021R: Ancient Bucolic Poetry
This seminar studies the corpus of ancient Greek and Latin bucolic poetry (including Theocritus, Virgil’s Eclogues, and other texts) and its reception through the early modern period. How is bucolic to be delimited as a genre? What are its intertextual and cultural origins within the Hellenistic, specifically Ptolemaic, culture in which Theocritus worked? What persists, and what changes, in the reception of Theocritus’ dialogues through the later Hellenistic, Augustan, later Roman, and early modern periods? We will pay special attention to the ways this poetry mirrors or filters political changes and implies different ideological positions.
Joseph D Reed
EGYT 1030: Collapse! Ancient Egypt after the Pyramid Age
How does a civilization or a kingdom collapse after building some of the most enduring monuments from the ancient world? What happens in Egypt after the Pyramid Age? This course uses texts, objects, and monuments to delve into the history and archaeology of the Late Old Kingdom up to the beginning of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt (c. 2160–2055 BCE), often described as a Dark Age characterized by chaos, decline, and natural disasters. We will discuss how ancient history is written with a particular focus on the narrative of collapse in ancient cultures. The class will be based on presentations and discussions focused on controversies linked to the following topics: politics; kings, kinglets, and rulers; monuments and funerary architecture; climate change; religion and beliefs; (auto-)biographies; literature; and art. There are no prerequisites.
Christelle Alvarez
Xiaofan Zhao
EGYT 1420: Ancient Egyptian Religion and Magic
An overview of ancient Egyptian religion from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. Examines such topics as the Egyptian pantheon, cosmology, cosmogony, religious anthropology, personal religion, magic, and funerary beliefs. Introduces the different genres of Egyptian religious texts in translation. Also treats the archaeological evidence which contributes to our understanding of Egyptian religion, including temple and tomb architecture and decoration.
James P Allen
Rafa Saade
ASYR 2710: Babylonian Astronomy
An advanced seminar on Babylonian astronomy, taking both a technical and a cultural perspective on the history of this ancient science.
John M Steele
ASYR 2720: Greek Astronomy
An advanced seminar on ancient Greek astronomy, taking both a technical and a cultural perspective on the history of this ancient science.
John M Steele
HIAA 1202: Mountains and Waters: Art and Ecology in East Asia
For more than a millennium, painters and poets across East Asia have acclaimed soaring peaks astride expansive rivers as the most sublime of all subjects. Often termed “landscape” in modern English, these images of “mountains and waters” (shanshui) offer fascinating insights into the ways in which what we now call “the environment” was conceptualized in premodern East Asia. Drawing upon recent eco-aesthetic perspectives, this seminar examines these celebrated monuments of East Asian painting as ecological entities, investigating their relationships with the human and nonhuman beings that participated in their reproduction, and interrogating the moral implications of their enduring appeal.
Jeffrey C Moser
HIAA 1308: Arts of Memory in Ancient Rome
In ancient Rome, art and architecture were important vehicles for preserving memories, both individual and collective. Works of art such as reliefs, stelae, paintings, and monumental tombs, perpetuated the memory of historical events and honored the legacies of notable individuals. This seminar will explore the multiple forms of commemoration in ancient Roman art and architecture, considering a variety of media including burials and cenotaphs, triumphal arches, honorific columns and statues, among others. We will analyze the monuments built by and for members of the Roman elite, as well as private memorials dedicated by ordinary citizens.
Gretel Rodriguez
HIAA 1440B: The Architecture of Solitude: The Medieval Monastery
Religious men and women, as well as their patrons, sought to establish places of devotion and learning across the medieval landscape. This course examines the rise and development of the medieval monastery from its late antique beginnings in the deserts of Africa to the rise of the preaching orders in early thirteenth-century Europe. Emphasis will be placed upon the material expressions of western monasticism and upon the notion of the monastery as an architectural, archaeological and historical research problem through examination of individual case study examples. Instructor permission required.
Sheila Bonde
HIAA 2213: Chinese Image Theory
This seminar prepares students to interrogate the languages of the visual arts in premodern East Asia. Beginning with foundational claims made in the Classic of Changes (Yijing) and other early texts, it traces the ways in which graphic terminology was refined and redefined through its encounter with Sanskrit and Buddhism, the medieval advent of new technologies of visualization, and the emergence of representationalism in the Song-Yuan period. Reading knowledge of Literary Chinese is required. Open to qualified undergraduates with instructor’s permission.
Jeffrey C Moser
RELS 1325E: Ecotheology in Ancient Christianity
How did early Christians understand the relationship of humanity to the natural world, the animal kingdom, and the created order? What were the obligations and responsibilities of Christians regarding care for the world? How did they manifest a relationship to God? A study of the ancient Christian conception of humanity's place in the cosmos, as lived out in the daily life of the Christians in the Roman Empire. The course will focus on the first seven Christian centuries, with attention to how legalization and ascendancy reshaped Christian ideas on these matters. Seminar.
Susan Ashbrook Harvey
RELS 1330A: The Life and Afterlives of the Apostle Paul
While the writings of the Apostle Paul are commonly understood as early Christian scriptures, the Apostle Paul never converted to “Christianity.” He was and remained Jewish. We must therefore reexamine his writings within his Jewish context, not apart from it. We also need to see how the earliest “Christians” talked about Paul within the context of an emerging “Christianity.” In this course, we will first dive into both the authentic and spurious letters of Paul in the New Testament. We will then turn to the figure of Paul in later Christian texts, both canonical and non-canonical.
Jae Hee Han
RELS 1610: Sacred Sites: Law, Politics, Religion
Sacred sites have long been flashpoints for inter-communal conflict the world over, as well as posing challenges to sovereign State authority. Such sites range from natural landscapes to architectural masterpieces. They often come to symbolize the perennial clash between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the political, tradition and modernity. We will discuss a diverse array of specific disputes and ask whether one may even speak of “sacred sites” cross-culturally. Can legal frameworks embrace different notions of the sacred? We will also examine the historical contexts that provoke such disputes, particularly the aftermath of colonialism.
Nathaniel A Berman
HIST 1211: Crusaders and Cathedrals, Deviants and Dominance: Europe in the High Middle Ages
Popes named Joan, Gothic cathedrals, and crusaders-all these were produced by rich world of the western European Middle Ages. The cultural, religious, and social history of this period are explored with special attention to the social construction of power, gender roles, and relations between Christians and non-Christians.
Amy G Remensnyder
HIST 1213: Memories of the Medieval in the Age of White Supremacy
This course explores how the idea of a “medieval” period helped to create nationalist and racist identities in Europe and America—and continues to provide the bedrock for white nationalist identities—over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through an exploration of literature, art, architecture, and film.
Leland Grigoli
HIST 1835A: Unearthing the Body: History, Archaeology, and Biology at the End of Antiquity
How was the physical human body imagined, understood, and treated in life and death in the late ancient Mediterranean world? Drawing on evidence from written sources, artistic representations, and archaeological excavations, this class will explore this question by interweaving thematic lectures and student analysis of topics including disease and medicine, famine, asceticism, personal adornment and ideals of beauty, suffering, slavery, and the boundaries between the visible world and the afterlife, in order to understand and interpret the experiences of women, men, and children who lived as individuals—and not just as abstractions—at the end of antiquity.
Jonathan P Conant
HIST 1963Q: Sex, Power, and God: A Medieval Perspective
Cross-dressing knights, virgin saints, homophobic priests, and mystics who speak in the language of erotic desire are but some of the medieval people considered in this seminar. This course examines how conceptions of sin, sanctity, and sexuality in the High Middle Ages intersected with structures of power in this period. While the seminar primarily focuses on Christian culture, it also considers Muslim and Jewish experience.
Amy G Remensnyder