Credo? The Question of Belief in Medieval Christian Devotion (CUNY Spring 2019 Course)

November 15, 2018

MSCP 80500: Credo? The Question of Belief in Medieval Christian Devotion

Prof. Lauren Mancia ([email protected])

CUNY Graduate Center

Mondays, 11:45am-1:45pm

There are limits to what we can know as historians about what medieval people “really” believed and felt. For this reason, modern scholars often feel more comfortable focusing on how medieval people used religion as a tool to some more worldly end. But did medieval people really believe, and did they feel their faith as deeply as they claimed? What methods can we employ, and what evidence can we uncover, that will give us access to the lived experience of medieval religion and belief? To answer this question, we will focus on performative devotion, holy matter, devotional art and praxis, theology and prayer, healing texts and miracle stories. But our investigations will also reach beyond traditional “religious” sources for evidence, looking at medieval theories of “authenticity” in sigillography, for example, and experimenting with modern theoretical lenses such as affect theory. Students will each complete a final research paper that delves into questions of medieval belief and lived religious experience in any period of the Middle Ages and in any medieval media they choose.