Spring 2008 Courses

Art History

AHIS G4480 Art and the Reformation, K. Moxey. Artistic production in Germany and the Netherlands in the 16th century and the transformation of the social function of art as a consequence of the development of reformed theories of art and the introduction of humanist culture: Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Holbein the Younger, Albrecht Altdorfer, Quentin Massys, Lucas van Leyden, Jan Gossaert, Jan van Hemessen, and Pieter Aertsen.

AHIS G8434 The Venetian Scuole, D. Rosand. Studies in the architecture and pictorial decoration of the scuole grandi, the confraternities that were essential elements of the civic organization of Renaissance Venice.

English and Comparative Literature

CLEN W4021y Medieval English and French Romance (Susan Crane) TR 4:10-5:25. Lecture. From its appearance in the later twelfth century through the end of the Middle Ages, romance was the dominant long narrative genre in western vernaculars. As such, it was an important imaginative space for developing and reconsidering ideologies of identity, justice, conquest, sexuality, faith, history, and more. This course will only begin to introduce the genre's capacious reach. We will place English romances in their Anglo-Norman and continental French context, emphasizing just a few of their many preoccupations. The works to be read in the first few weeks concentrate, though not exclusively, on courtship, homoeroticism, and gender definition; those of the next few weeks on chivalric identity, honor, and performance; and those of the last weeks on nation, race, and faith.

ENGL G4791y Medieval Drama (Christine Chism) T 2:10-4. Seminar. During the medieval period, drama had not yet become a profession, yet all over Europe and England for 500 years before Shakespeare, plays and spectacles were a crucial part of social life. Liturgical dramas and mystery cycles, cautionary allegories, and festive interludes were seasonally performed, often at great expense and with elaborate props, costumes and stage effects. For two hundred years the Corpus Christi cycles were staged yearly by guilds of merchants and artisans, counterposing artisanal, mercantile, clerical, and popular interests. At the same time, there were no institutionalized theaters with invisible walls to separate the actors from the audience, but rather mobile stagings that could take the itinerary of Christ's life or the shape of providential history and lay it like a web over an entire city.

This class explores the beginnings of English drama with attention to recent developments in gender studies, performance theory, and cultural studies. What are the most profitable theoretical approaches to a drama that predates realism and falls between the abstractions of allegory on the one hand and the absorptions of individual psychology on the other, between the spectacular and the domestic? How do the plays negotiate the relationships between the material objects and bodies upon the stage, the historical and biblical narratives they embody, the verities they signify, and the conflicting social urgencies of their audiences. What civic spaces are realigned by these itinerant dramaturgies? What institutional orthodoxies are perplexed by the scandalous spectacularization of Christ's wounded body or Mary's virginal, pregnant body? How can a theater be both popular and sacramental? How were the plays materially produced, and with what itineraries, stage-machines, censorships? How does the distinction between theater and performance break down when audiences went not only to watch but to participate? How did sixteenth-century humanism, the English reformation and the gradual professionalization of the theater affect the many forms of medieval drama and what continuities can we trace into subsequent periods?

The course begins with early church drama, centers on the Corpus Christi cycles, explores the English saint and morality plays, and pursues its line through the Reformation and the beginnings of the English professional theater. Its focus will be on English drama with only a few Continental plays. Primary readings may include the York and Wakefield cycles, Medwall's Nature, several humanist plays, and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. Secondary readings may include articles by Sarah Beckwith, Pierre Bourdieu, Joseph Roach, Elin Diamond, Kathleen Ashley, Theresa Coletti, Mervyn James, Gail McMurray Gibson. We may also screen Jesus of Montreal.

Requirements: weekly short 1-p. response papers, a class presentation, and two conference-length (10 pp.) papers.

CLEN G6031y Martyrs, Mystics, and Memory (Patricia Dailey) T 6:10-8:30. Seminar. This course will examine texts from late antiquity and the early and later Middle Ages in relation to memory, inscription, temporality, and embodiment. Our key texts will include Augustine's The Trinity and On Christian Doctrine as well as other theological and literary works (including works by Hadewijch, Julian, Porete, and pseudo-Dionysius). Texts will be available in the original as well as in translation. Theoretical works on memory, time, and embodiment will include work by Butler, Derrida, Agamben, Dimock, Caruth, and others.

ENGL W4702y Tudor Stuart Drama (Jean Howard) TR 9:10-10:25. Lecture. While Shakespeare has become to us the pre-eminent early modern playwright, many other dramatists shared the theatrical limelight in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This course will examine the work of a number of Shakespeare's contemporaries by focusing on plays representing London life, a kind of play which Shakespeare did not write, but which was hugely popular in the period between 1598 and the closing of the theaters in 1642. Plays will include Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday, Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part II, Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, Jonson's Bartholomew Fair and Epicoene, Middleton's Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Michaelmas Term, Chapman, Jonson, and Marston's Eastward Ho, Beaumont and Fletcher's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Massinger's City Madam and A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Shirley's Hyde Park, and Richard Brome's The New Academy. Among topics discussed will be urban sexualities, the commercialization of culture, the emergence of a culture of manners, conventions for depicting urban life, place and space, and the role of particular theater companies in establishing the terms for competing versions of urbanity. Undergraduates will take a mid-term exam and write two eight page papers. I will decide about a final exam as the course progresses. Graduate students will have the same requirements if they are taking the course for lecture credit only. They will write one eight page paper if they are taking the course for R credit. If graduate students are taking the course for seminar credit, they will write one eight page paper and a twenty-page seminar paper.

CLEN W4122y Renaissance Women Writers (Anne Prescott and Laurie Postlewate) MW2:40-3:55. Lecture. An exploration of women writers in England, France and Italy from the 15th to 17th century. Poetry, narrative and theater focusing on topics such as love, sex, society, power, and God by Christine de Piza, Marguerite de Navarre, Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labe, Elizabeth Cary, Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Madame de Lafayette, and others.

CLEN G6090y Women and Literary Communities in Early Modern England and France (Julie Crawford) W 4:10-6. Seminar. This class will look at specific literary communities in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England and France that were characterized not only by the dominant roles that women played, but also by complex kinship ties and political alliances. The class has two main goals, the first to reconsider authorship from the perspective of the community or faction rather than the individual, and the second to look at the relationships between literary exchange and other forms of social, religious, and political activism. For France, we will look at the poems, prose tracts and letters exchanged both between Madeleine and Catherine des Roches and between the des Roches and other poets, historians, political activists, and members of the royal family. Texts will include works by the des Roches, Madeleine de Scudery, Louise Labé, Pierre Ronsard, and Joachim Du Bellay. (Knowledge of French is preferable, but we will be reading all French works in dual translation). For England, will look primarily at the intertwined Sidney/Herbert circle. Texts will include Philip Sidney's Arcadia, Mary Sidney Herbert's poems, Mary Wroth's Urania, and Anne Clifford's diary, as well as lesser known poems, letters, translations, and miscellaneous manuscripts by other members of their circle. In addition to these literary texts, we will be reading historical, literary critical, and theoretical works on gender and sexuality, kinship, inheritance and property rights, community, regionalism, and political economy.

ENGL G6133y Renaissance Poetry: Donne, Herbert, Marvell (Molly Murray) M 6:10-8.Seminar.

History

HIST G8117y. Knowledge Networks and Information Economies in the Early Modern Period. This course is designed to introduce students to major topics in the developing historical literature on the relationships between intellectual and economic history, centered on Europe's global reach in the first two centuries after Columbus and Da Gama.

Spanish and Portuguese

SPAN G6109, The World of Romance in Medieval Spain, Patricia Grieve. Hispanomedieval romances, long fictions, represent an amalgamation of storytelling elements and the reworking of myths, legends, and historical events, both western and non-western. In addition to the love stories so often found in the genre, romance can include physical and spiritual quests, and searches for knowledge about the world and our place in it. Romance is not neutral storytelling: the tales typically reflect and explore social ideologies of their time. The course readings are Iberian versions of Byzantine, Carolingian, and Troy romances, hagiographic, chivalric-hagiographic romances, and sentimental romances. We will compare some of them to their eastern and western analogues in order to ascertain Iberian innovations and to enable us to understand what changes from earlier versions held clear significance for the Iberian storyteller.