311 - 320 of 788 results for: HISTORY

This seminar investigates the central role of the Christian Bible in European religion, culture, and society from ca. 1000-1700 CE. In the medieval and early modern periods, the Bible not only shaped religious attitudes, practices, and institutions, but also exercised profound influence over learning and education, politics, law, social relations, art, literature, and music. Students will obtain an overview of the role of the scripture as both a religious text and a cultural artifact, exploring the history of biblical interpretation in commentaries and sermons; textual criticism, study of biblical languages, and the translation of scripture; manufacturing of Bibles in manuscript and in print; the commercial dimensions of Bible production; illustrated Bibles, biblical maps, and biblically-inspired artwork; religious uses of scripture in monastic houses, public worship, and domestic settings; biblical foundations for political and legal traditions. Students will also have the opportunity to suggest topics consonant with their own fields of interest and use the seminar to workshop on-going projects related to the Bible in this period. All of the readings will be in English, though students with the ability to read German, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew will be encouraged to pursue projects that utilize their linguistic skills. Students will have the opportunity to utilize materials in Special Collections. Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor. Send an email to pitkin@stanford.edu explaining your interests and background. Undergraduates register for 200-level for 5 units. Graduate students register for 300-level for 3-5 units.

From its inception the term "Middle Ages" carried negative connotations. Renaissance humanists bewailed the fall of the Roman Empire and its replacement with "barbarian" kingdoms. Enlightenment philosophes abhorred the Middle Ages even more intensely than their Renaissance forerunners and decried medieval "superstition" and "barbarism." Nevertheless, as part of their rejection of the Enlightenment, nineteenth-century Romantics embraced the Middle Ages and sought inspiration for political and cultural renewal within medieval civilization. From nationalist movements, to colonialism, to movements within high and popular culture interest in the Middle Ages helped fashion the modern world in important ways. This class will explore the complex history associated with the images of the Middle Ages in the modern world.

Romantic love, it is often claimed, is an invention of the High Middle Ages. The vocabulary of sexual desire that is still current in the twenty-first century was authored in the twelfth and thirteenth, by troubadours, court poets, writers like Dante; even by crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean. How did this devout society come to elevate the experience of sensual love? This course draws on primary sources such as medieval songs, folktales, the "epic rap battles" of the thirteenth century, along with the writings of Boccaccio, Saint Augustine and others, to understand the unexpected connections between love, death, and the afterlife from late antiquity to the fourteenth century. Each week, we will use a literary or artistic work as an interpretive window into cultural attitudes towards love, death or the afterlife. These readings are analyzed in tandem with major historical developments, including the rise of Christianity, the emergence of feudal society and chivalric culture, the crusading movement, and the social breakdown of the fourteenth century.

Examines the cult of saints in medieval religious thought and life. Topics include martyrs, shrines, pilgrimage, healing, relics, and saints' legends.

This course interrogates the theory and reality of war-making and peacemaking across the first millennium of Islamic history (c.600-c.1600 CE). We will examine major historical events (e.g. the struggle of the early community of Muslims against the pagan tribes of Arabia; Arab expansion and conquest during the seventh and eighth centuries; a sequence of civil wars, dynastic struggles, and schisms within Islam; and external invasions of the Islamic world by crusaders and steppe nomads, etc.). We will also investigate the development of major normative concepts across the Islamic tradition concerning peace and war (e.g. holy war; treaty- and truce-making; treatment of conquered enemies and prisoner; diplomacy with Muslims and non-Muslims, etc.). With respect to these concepts, we will attend especially to change over time and diversity across various sects. Mix of lecture and discussion. Readings will consist of both primary sources (in English translation) and modern scholarship. No previous experience with pre-modern or Islamic history required.

What did it mean to be "free" or "enslaved" in premodern Europe? How did bondage and forced labor differ from late antiquity to the ninth century, or from the ninth to the fourteenth century? How did they differ across geographies, people groups, and religious traditions? This History colloquium focuses on the most recent scholarship concerning slavery in pre-modern Europe to reflect on such questions, while examining the implications of the "global turn" for historiographies of European slavery.

( History 221B is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 321B is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) Russian radicals believed that the status of women provided the measure of freedom in a society and argued for the extension of rights to women as a basic principle of social progress. The social status and cultural representations of Russian women from the mid-19th century to the present. The arguments and actions of those who fought for women's emancipation in the 19th century, theories and policies of the Bolsheviks, and the reality of women's lives under them. How the status of women today reflects on the measure of freedom in post-Communist Russia.

Explores criminal law in early modern Europe and Russia, ca 1500-1800, in law and in practice. Engages debates about use of exemplary public executions as tactic of governance, and about gradual decline in "violence" in Europe over this time. Explores practice of accusatory and inquisitory judicial procedures, judicial torture, forms of punishment, concepts of justice.

What makes a small, shallow and cold sea surrounded by very poor farming land stand out? Can we talk about a sea surrounded by nine countries as a single unit? This course traces and analyzes the interconnectedness and interdependence that shaped the region, side by side with the cataclysms that repeatedly fragmented it from the Viking marauders; warring empires; WWI and the Russian Revolution; WWII and the totalitarian nightmare of Nazi & Soviet policies; the Cold War and present-day geopolitics.