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[Graduate students completing a two-quarter research seminar must enroll in 435A in Winter and 435B in Spring.] This seminar explores global travel, knowledge, curiosity, experience, and understanding, ca. 1500-1800. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of global realignments, an age of empires, missionaries, embassies, and trading companies. This seminar takes students around the world, following global travelers, merchants, missionaries, and mapmakers. Students will work extensively with rare books, manuscripts, maps and other artifacts, especially in the Rumsey Map Center to design an exhibit. Urbano Monti's 1587 world map and Francesco Carletti's accidental circumnavigation of the world, 1594-1603, will guide our global voyage, contextualized by sources, artifacts, and histories from many other parts of the world.

In 1633, the Italian mathematician Galileo was tried and condemned for advocating that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the cosmos. The Catholic Church did not formally admit that Galileo was right until 1992. Examines the many factors that led to the trial of Galileo and looks at multiple perspectives on this signal event in the history of science and religion. Considers the nature and definition of intellectual heresy in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and examines the writings of Galileo's infamous predecessor Giordano Bruno (burned at the stake in 1600). Looks closely at documents surrounding the trial and related literature on Renaissance and Reformation Italy in order to understand the perspectives of various participants in this famous event. Focal point of seminar involves the examination of the many different histories that can be produced from Galileo's trial. What, in the end, were the crimes of Galileo?

( History 235J is an undergraduate course offered for 5 units; History 335J is a graduate course offered for 4-5 units.) Across two centuries of social, political, and religious upheaval and transformation, modern Europeans confronted a series of interconnected ¿big questions¿: What is humanity¿s relationship with deity? Where does life, including human life, come from, and where is it going? What considerations should shape human beings¿ relationships with, and actions toward, one another? What is socially and morally acceptable¿or transgressive? Is there life after death, and a spiritual realm distinct from the material world? Through case studies in the history of religion, evolutionary thought, gender and sexuality, and the aims and ends of empire, this course will examine European engagement with these questions across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (with some background in earlier periods), paying attention to the ways in which the questions people asked¿and the conclusions they drew¿were shaped by social, religious, and political institutions and structures.