Medieval and Renaissance Worlds: Memory & Invention

Overview

We all inhabit one world, one planet, but any sense of unity this might convey is swiftly fractured as we negotiate our way in, around, and through a multiplicity of worlds on a daily basis.  In the process, we invariably work to further shape these worlds.  On a more mundane level, each of us is confronted daily by physical and physiological ideals.  All facets of our modern world have parallels in Medieval and Renaissance Cultures.  This cluster will explore the negotiations and clashes that took place between the Arab and Christian worlds, and the worlds of Church and State.  Ranging across the formative periods of Western culture from late ancient to early modern eras, and examining historical, religious, literary, and art historical materials, we will examine women’s and men’s lived experience.  This cluster will explore two concepts vital for the understanding of Medieval and Renaissance cultures: memory and invention.  The men and women of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance shaped their present – whether real or ideal – by endlessly reinterpreting, revising, recombining, and innovating upon the traditions, ideologies, values, and social structures that they had inherited from their forebears, or that they acquired through contact with other cultures.

Courses

Seminar: History 89FCS From Hellmouth to Heaven & Everything In Between: Sinners & Saints in the Medieval World

Katharine Brophy Dubois, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of History

Everyday religion was far from a simple issue to medieval people.  It included the things we normally consider under the umbrella of religion today, like prayer, churches, community, and rituals at meaningful life events (e.g. marriage and death).  It also encompassed politics, social institutions, notions of gender, the after life, demons, tourism, architecture, sexual love, warfare, festivals, agriculture, higher education, disease, inquisition, and just about everything else.  In studying medieval religion, we will look at the most common forms of religious expression, and how these reveal to us what medieval people were taught to believe as well as what they actually believed.  We will also explore extraordinary modes of religious expression — like extreme fasting, martyrdom, and religious persecution — to understand how medieval people defined heroism, and who they revered as heroes.  We will read medieval documents and literature, as well as study a handful of modern representations of medieval religion, to come to a broad understanding of how different (or perhaps alarmingly similar) medieval notions of religion were to ours today.  This course is reading intensive.
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Seminar: The World of Venice, the ‘Most Serene’ City

Valeria Finucci, Professor, Department of Romance Studies

Summing up what Venice meant for him, Petrarch wrote: “The august city of Venice rejoices, the home today of liberty, peace and justice, the one refuge of honorable men... Venice — rich in gold, but richer in renown, mighty in her resources but mightier in virtues, solidly built on marble but standing more strong on a solid foundation of civic concord, ringed with salt waters, but more secure with the salt of good council.”  Venice was indeed “La Serenissima,” a most serene city combining incomparable beauty and urban charm, beautiful women and lavish art.  How was the self–glorifying myth of Venice constructed?  What made Venice an empire?  Why was the city’s republicanism admired throughout Europe?  Why were its patricians’ nonchalant ways and solid business mentality so valued?  Early modern tourists came to Venice from all over Europe and the East to sin and trade; even dying in its maze–like calle and canals had its allure.  But there was also the reverse side of empire: poor and exploited people, diseases brought from afar, continuous wars, religious intolerance.  This course aims at recreating all the various facets of Venetian life in the early modern period by concentrating on plays, poetry, novellas, letters, trial transcripts, contemporary accounts, travel literature, and films.
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Seminar: Music in Renaissance England

Kerry McCarthy, Assistant Professor, Department of Music

In this seminar, we will explore the music of sixteenth–century England in its cultural context, along with its relationship to other contemporary arts.  Topics will include music in Shakespeare, the lives of composers and performers, the transformations of English sacred music during the Reformation, and the role of women in the English musical Renaissance. We will study a wide variety of music— including madrigals, masses, motets, anthems, and dances — along with original readings from the period and a selection of more recent scholarship.  Our primary focus is on England, but we will also study the place of English music in the wider context of early modern Europe.  Students will participate through listening, discussion, debate, and music–making.   No previous musical experience is required.
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Seminar: English 81FCS Medieval Utopias: Dreams & Visions of Alternative Possibility

Fiona Somerset, Associate Professor, Department of English

Writers of the present day often imagine alternative possibilities for their society’s conduct and government by placing them in a future world, or an imaginary parallel universe.   Medieval writers also imagined other worlds, but they tended to contrast their own world with an ideal (often patently imaginary) past, with visions of heaven or hell, with a far–off, difficult–to–attain earthly paradise, or with some perilous magical half–world existing alongside their own.  Dreams, visions, and supernatural or fantastic elements highlight the ways in which these stories draw out possibilities beyond mundane, everyday reality.  We will read a range of historical, pseudo–historical, and otherworldly narratives produced in medieval England — in a time of political upheaval, plague, international crisis, and war — and consider both how their writers view their own society, and what alternatives they imagined.  Readings will include selections from Malory’s Morte Darthur, Chaucer’s “The Former Age”, Pearl, The Land of Cokayne, Mandeville’s Travels, Thomas of Erceldoune, and Sir Orfeo.  Students will be taught to engage confidently with these works in the Middle English dialects, and even the manuscript contexts in which they were originally written.  A small selection of films of visionary, fantastic, or utopian themes will enrich our readings and give us a new sense of how the medieval world can function for our contemporary society as the stuff of both fantasy and nightmare.
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Focus 99 Special Topics in Focus: Memory & Invention

Aurelia E. D'Antonio, PhD candidate, Department of Romance Languages

The weekly interdisciplinary discussion group will serve as a base for students to interact socially and to create intellectual touchstones relevant to all of the courses.  One way the cluster will do this is by holding a film festival throughout the term, watching and discussing several noteworthy films on medieval and early modern subjects, such as the hugely popular Lord of the Rings series, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Seventh Seal, Anchoress, Braveheart, Shakespeare in Love, and others.  On field trips, students will explore the many resources in the Durham area for learning about the medieval and early modern periods: art museums, special library collections, architectural sites, and dramatic and musical performances.  These experiences will allow us to think about how we today make use of ideas about medieval and Renaissance cultures, to consider how the past is made to contribute to our culture today.
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