Princeton University IUDC courses Spring 2013
ART 537/MED 500 Medieval Image/Concepts of Authenticity
Professor Nino Zchomelidse
T 7:30-10:20pm
The course examines the notion of the authentic in conjunction with medieval images. It investigates the construction, reception, and theoretical grounding of authenticity of reliquaries, icons, and imprints on cloth or seals. These objects elucidate the shift from mimesis towards other artistic strategies (stylization, abstraction, bricolage). Rather than studying different modes of representation, we will focus on the very validity of representation in the Middle Ages and approach this issue from the viewpoints of history, anthropology, philology and visual studies.
CLA 335/ HLS 335/ MED 335 Studies in the Classical Tradition: Ancient Friendship and the Modern Self
Professor Emmanuel C. Bourbouhakis
MW 11:00-12:20
We have never had so many ‘friends’ nor worried so much about the possible demise of “real friendship.” We are in good company though. The ancient Greeks and Romans asked themselves repeatedly about the nature of genuine friendship; indeed, they taught us how to do so by way of poets, philosophers, essayists and artists down through the millenia. We will follow this legacy of writings about friendship from its origins in Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and St. Augustine, through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, in a bid to arrive at an understanding of their contribution to accounts of the modern self.
CLA548/HLS548 Problems in Ancient History: Ancient and Medieval Numismatics
Dr. Alan M. Stahl
Seminar: 1:30-4:20 Th, Feb. 7 through May 2, 2013
West Meeting Room, Firestone Library
A seminar covering the basic methodology of numismatics, including die, hoard and archaeological analysis. The Western coinage tradition will be covered, from its origins in the Greco-Persian world through classical and Hellenistic Greek coinage, Roman imperial and provincial issues, the coinages of Byzantium, the Islamic world and medieval and renaissance Europe. Students will research and report on problems involving coinages related to their own areas of specialization. Open to undergraduates by permission of the instructor.
ENG 310/MED 310 The Old English Period
Professor Sarah M. Anderson
T TH 3:00-4:20
An intensive introduction to the English language spoken and written in the British Isles from ca. 500 to 1100 C.E. leading to a survey of Old English poetry and prose. Focus on the immediate manuscript context of OE works and on problems of editing and translating them.
ENG 313/MED 312 The Erotics of Medieval Literature
Professor Sarah M. Anderson
W 7:30-10:20pm
By reading a range of genres, from the concise obscenity of the fabliau through the philosophic dilation of the mystics, we will explore the principal erotic traditions of medieval literature. The interplay of sacred and sexuality, the formation and representation of desire, the categories of masculine and feminine will be our objects.
FRE 332/MED 333 Topics in the French Middle Ages and Renaissance: Censorship, Controversy and Literary Debate in the Middle Ages
Professor Jeanette L. Patterson
MW 1:30-2:50
This course explores medieval and early Renaissance texts that generated controversy, resistance and debate. We will read the texts in question as well as responses from readers, other authors, and institutions (church, university). We will also look at how practices such as selective translation and rewriting as a form of critique contributed to the dynamic literary traditions of this period. Finally, we will consider how fictional representations of such practices and debates reflect upon the social and intellectual life of literature.
FRE 510/MED 510 Voices in Medieval French Narratives
Professor Sophie Marnett
TH 1:30-4:20
This seminar will bring together literary and linguistic approaches in an interdisciplinary interrogation of the idea and manifestations of ‘voice’ in French literary texts from the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. The notion of ‘voice’ will be introduced both as a complex – yet elusive – concept spanning many different theoretical approaches (Genettian narratology, enunciation theory, gender studies, reception theory) and in its medieval materiality (representation of orality, use of vernacular vs Latin, manuscript paratexts). The seminar will then be divided in three main parts: 1) Voice and Genre; 2) Voice and Gender; 3) Voice as Concept.
FRS 110 The Arthurian Legend in Literature and Film
Professor Sara S. Poor
TH 1:30-4:20
King Arthur of Camelot has fascinated artists and most recently filmmakers, for centuries. This seminar examines first the grip the legend has had on 20th and 21st centuries in novels and film. How do works “read” Arthur and what do readings imply about their own contexts? After film, students trace legend back to the earliest (5th century) evidence in Latin chronicles. Students consider myth creation, deployment, and transmission over time in order to meet three objectives: improvement of textual analytical skills; critical engagement with present-day uses of the legend; and more nuanced understanding of the medieval past.
FRS 144 Knowledge, Holiness and Pleasure: The Illustrated Book in the Medieval World
Professor Nino Zchomelidse
W 1:30-4:20
The book was the primary source for the collection of knowledge in the Middle Ages. It also was the medium for the preservation and proliferation of the texts that underlay the three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Finally, the book served as a source for elite entertainment, perhaps most importantly in Late Antiquity and the later Middle Ages. This seminar investigates the role of the illustrated book within the political, religious and artistic developments that took place after the rise of Christianity — from the end of the Roman Empire until the early modern period in the medieval West and in Byzantium — permeating Jewish and Islamic traditions. We will examine how the different types of books, such as horizontal and vertical scrolls, large and miniature size codices — influenced the placement, conception and style of the illustrations. The seminar also will address processes of manufacture, issues of materiality (i.e., precious multimedia book covers, papyrus, parchment, paper), and the relationship between text and image. A major aspect of the seminar will focus on the performative aspect of the book in its wide range of functions: secular and liturgical, public and private.
ITA 302/MED 302 Topics in Medieval Italian Literature and Culture -Boccaccio
Professor Simone Marchesi
T 1:30-4:20
Boccaccio’s “Decameron” is the preeminent masterwork of early Italian prose. A complex set of stories, linked by the author’s convictions about literature and love, the “Decameron” offers both a panorama of fourteenth-century European society and a point of entry into some great traditions of European literature. This seminar will concentrate on a close reading of the “Decameron” in the original language.
Courses of Interest
CLA 350/ART 350 Archaeology of the Roman Empire
Professor Matthew M. McCarty
TTh 1:30-2:50
An introduction to the archaeology of the Roman Empire. Key themes include urban systems and lived experience, economies, agricultural production, resource extraction, trade, the army, and the provinces. Emphasis will be placed on methods of interpreting archaeological data by focusing on key sites and types of material, including hands-on experience with pottery and coins in the collections of the Art Museum. No experience in ancient history or archaeology assumed.
COM 515/ART 515 Word and Image: Interconnected Narratives, Ancient and Modern
Professor Leonard Barkan
Professor Michael Koortbojian
M 1:30-4:20
A seminar in cross-disciplinary and cross-chronological approaches. After considering methodological issues in studying relations between words and images and between antiquity and Renaissance, the course turns to its principal subject, the artistic presentation of multiple and diverse stories within single frameworks, whether visual (e.g., Pompeiian decoration, Isabella d’Este’s studio) or literary (e.g., Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s multiple plots). The class will ask how this matter of narrative, especially plural narrative, reflects on relations across media, disciplinary practices and periods of history.
ENG 390/COM 201/HUM 207 The Bible as Literature
Professor D. Vance Smith
TTh 2:30-3:20
This course will study what it means to read the Bible in a literary way: what literary devices does it contain, and how has it influenced the way we read literature today? What new patterns and meanings emerge? This course will examine the structures and modes of the Biblical books; the formation of the canon and the history of the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books; questions authorship; its literary genres; histories of exegesis, interpretation, and commentary; the redaction, division, and ordering of biblical texts; the cultural, political, and intellectual worlds within which these texts were written.
ENG 511 Special Studies in Medieval Literature – Love Without Object
Professor D. Vance Smith
TH 6:00-8:50pm
Moving from negative theology to fin amor to late psychoanalysis, we will explore the question of how love is possible when its object is unknown, unknowable, or impossible. We will examine attempts to represent a love without object, from Augustine to Chaucer; the pressure it puts on theories and practices of signification; the emergence and development of the romance and love lyric; theories of object relations, lack, and desire in, among others, Eriugena, Ramon Llul, Albertus Magnus, Marguerite Porete, Heidegger, Lacan, Kristeva, Badiou, and Irigaray.
FRE 221 The Rise of France: French Literature, Culture & Society from the Beginnings to 1789
Professor Jeanette L. Patterson
MW 8:30-9:50
Two 90-minute sessions weekly, the first largely given over to a lecture format, the second for discussion and student oral reports. The course aims to present masterpieces of French literature, art, and architecture from the Middle Ages to the 18th-century.
FRS 168 Joan of Arc
Professor Rob C. Wegman
TTh 1:30-2:50
In this seminar we will consider the historical phenomenon of Joan of Arc, tracing the events as they were recorded by contemporaries, and analyzing the discourses in which her image was shaped and contested, from her own time to the present.
HIS 210/ HLS 210 The World of the Late Antinquity
Professor Jack B. Tannous
MW 2:30-3:20
This course will focus on the history of the later Roman Empire, a period which historians often refer to as “Late Antiquity.” We will begin our class in pagan Rome at the start of the third century and end it in Baghdad in the ninth century: in between these two points, the Mediterranean world experienced a series of cultural and political revolutions whose reverberations can still be felt today. We will witness civil wars, barbarian invasions, the triumph of Christianity over paganism, the fall of the Western Empire, the rise of Islam, the Greco-Arabic translation movement and much more.
HIS 344/ CLA 344 The Civilization of the High Middle Ages
Professor William C. Jordan
MW 11:00-11:50
In lectures, to provide my interpretation (and a conspectus of differing interpretations) of the civilization of Western Europe, 11th-14th century; by the readings, to introduce students to the variety of surviving sources; through the paper, to give students a taste of doing medieval history.
JDS 306/REL 316/HEB 306 Elementary Biblical Hebrew
Professor Naphtali S. Meshel
MW 10:00-10:50
Students will achieve a basic ability to read the Hebrew Bible/Old Testamtent in its original language. During the semester, students will study the grammar and develop their vocabulary. Upon completing the grammar textbook, students will read large passages from the Bible from all genres.
NES 325/HIS 338 Christianity Along the Silk Road
Professor Emmanuel Papoutsakis
MW 1:30-2:50
Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic very similar to the language spoken by Jesus in first-century Palestine. Aramaic-speaking Christians in the Near East soon adopted Syriac as their literary language; by the early fourteenth century, Syriac Christianity spread from the western Mediterranean to China. In this seminar we shall be exploring the origins of Syriac Christianity in the Near East and its spread along the Silk Road before 1500.
NES 408/ JDS 408/ COM 365 The Hebrew Poetry of Medieval Spain
Professor Andras P. Hamori
TH 1:30-4:20
Covers the rise of the golden age of Hebrew poetry in Muslim Spain; the Arabic literary background; lyrical, liturgical, and contemplative verse by great poets of the 11th and 13th centuries (Shmuel ha- Nagid, Ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevi, Todros Abulafia, etc.); and narratives in rhymed prose. Two weeks will be devoted to developments outside Spain: the 12th through 13th century martyrdom poems from France and the Rhineland, and, in conclusion, the adoption of Romance forms, especially the sonnet, in the Hebrew poetry of Italy.
NES 532 Readings in Classical Arabic Literature
Professor
M 1:30-4:20
Topics vary according to students’ interest. Some possible topics: poety, narrative prose, “adab.”
MUS 502 Topics in Musical Notation
Professor Anna Zayaruznaya
T 10:00-12:50
This history of music notation is intimately linked with those of composition and performance. This course combines a study of musical paleography (i.e. how music is written down) with consideration of notation’s broader meanings and influences in Euro-American music cultures over the last millennium .
REL 251 The New Testament & Christian Origins
Professor Elaine H. Pagels
MW 11:00-11:50
This course investigates how the Christian movement began, using sources–Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Christian — about Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus; we read New Testament gospels, along with such recently discovered gospels as the Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Mary Magdalene. We will discuss the formation of the NT collection; views of Jesus and his message; attitudes toward sexuality, gender, race, community. This course will also include reading and analysis of contemporary perspectives. Accessible to students new to these sources, as well as to those familiar with them.
REL 398/JDS 397/ART 393 Jews and Christians in Ancient Palestine
Professor Zeev Weiss
T 1:30-4:20
The course will focus on the range of contacts and connections between Jews and Christians in Byzantine Palestine (Western Palestine and Transjordan) as corroborated by the archaeological finds. The similarities and differences between synagogues and churches will be the focus of the discussion, but other aspects relating to demography, art, cemeteries, everyday life, small finds, and more will also be examined. Through this material we will attempt to determine the relationship between the two communities in the 4th to the 7th centuries.
REL 504 Studies in Greco-Roman Religions: What Makes Exegesis “Orthodox”?
Professor Elaine H. Pagels
T 1:30-4:20
We will investigate major sources in second and third century tradition, especially the writings of Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Plotinus and Origen, comparing these with sources that such authors tended to regard as “heretical,” including writings identified as “Valentinian”, “Sethian,” or otherwise suspect–to see what criteria emerged to identify what later writers regarded as “orthodox” or “heresy.”