COURSE DESCRIPTION FOR HISTORY 221-01 and 221-02
This course explores the rich legacy of Medieval
Europe. The Middle Ages are generally thought to have lasted from
the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west (around 500 AD) to the Renaissance
(14th to 16th centuries AD). This is an enormous time span, and I
have no intention of trying to cover every event and every aspect of the
Middle Ages. Rather, I intend to focus on the period from 900-1300
(the “High Middle Ages”), which is, not surprisingly, both the period of
greatest medieval creativity and vigor and the period most stereotypically
familiar to modern students who think about ‘the Middle Ages.’ I
have organized the period into seven thematic units, each of which represents
an important aspect of the world of the High Middle Ages. The units are
Kingship; Religious Belief; Religious Institutions; Towns and Urban Life;
Lordship and Social Order; Women; and Chivalry.
The process of our trip through the Middle Ages,
however, will not merely be one of mastering names and dates (although
you certainly must do a fair amount of memorization). Indeed, a major
purpose of the class is to demonstrate to you the methods by which historians
approach the past. Thus we will be interested in learning about the
nature of the sources available to us, and, above all, in learning how
to interpret them. Interpretation, after all, is the keystone of
the historian’s craft, and it will be one of our purposes in this course
to subject all of the material at our disposal to careful prodding, questioning,
and criticism. By doing this, we will be learning to master the Historical
Method, a powerful analytical tool which you will be able to apply in many
other classes and life-situations.
Our approach in this task will be to learn two primary
techniques: 1) the criticism of primary sources, and 2) the evaluation
of modern scholarly argumentation. When you look at the readings
assigned for the course (see below), you will notice that they are divided
into three categories: Textbook Reading, Primary Source Reading, and Secondary
Source Reading. The Textbook (Hollister) is a very basic, very superficial
overview of the period under discussion. It is designed to familiarize
you with people, events and trends. The Primary Source Readings are the
meat of the course: they are the texts produced by medieval people. It
is our task to learn how to read those texts critically, so that they reveal
qualitative information to us about medieval society and culture.
The Secondary Source Readings that I have assigned are all articles written
by professional historians who study the Middle Ages. They should all have
an argument, which you should try to discern and evaluate. These articles
are all interpretive: that is, they have taken the primary sources, chewed
them over, digested them, and produced an interpretation.
[More description for History 221-02 ONLY (ie., the writing intensive
course)]
This is a WRITING INTENSIVE class (WI)
That means that you will do quite a bit of writing. Indeed,
you may feel that you are writing all the time. Don’t worry, this
is a good thing! The more you write, the easier you will find it to write
and the better your final product will become. Some of it will be
relatively informal - each week I’ll ask you to get into the practice of
analyzing primary sources by providing a one-page response to a question
about the readings for that week. The rest of the writing will be
graded. I have come up with what I think is a useful series of exercises
to help you begin to master the rudiments of historical writing; you will
write 4 short essays (of 3-5 pages in length) and one longer final essay
(6-9 pages long). For two of the four short papers you will be required
to turn in a revision of your first draft, and I will require that all
students turn in a first draft of the final paper approximately one month
before the end of the class.