Course Description
A history of how the forms, definitions, and goals of Christianity changed in late antique and medieval societies across Europe and the Mediterranean. Examines how the religion responded to and affected the way these societies understood their government, their wealth, their responsibilities, the cosmos, and themselves.
Athena Title
MEDIEV CHRISTIANITY
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Students will track how the practices and principles of Christianity changed from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, as the persons who practiced and defined it faced new challenges, converted different peoples, and responded to questions that arose with circumstance and curiosity. They will develop and refine critical approaches to primary sources: through class discussion and in three analytical papers, they will examine the rationalities behind their sources' perspectives and connect those rationalities to the larger social structures and conversations that they were a part of.
Topical Outline
This course investigates that dynamic relationship between Christianity and the societies of late antique and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. It returns again and again to the complicated concepts of paganism, heresy, orthodoxy, and devotion by looking to the context for Christianity’s un- inevitable emergence as a religion of great political power, to see how a religion based on biblical tradition nevertheless sustained many varieties of belief and practice and a changing set of expectations about what it meant to be a Christian. *Prosecution and Persecution: The Martyrs *Philosophy and Violence *"More onerous than honorable": The Professionals *Wealth and Poverty *"Micro-Christendoms" *Contiguous Cultures: The Golden Age of Syriac, Iconoclasm *Sin and the Hereafter *God and the State *Social Media: The Liturgy and Preaching *The Papacy *The Crusades *Christianity on the Cutting Edge: Science and the Musical Avant Garde *Public Outreach and Private Piety *Inner and Outer Demons *"The Stripping of the Altars": The End of Medieval Christianity
Syllabus