MSP 3501: Exploring the Middle Ages - Med. Identities and Cultures (McGrady)

T/Th,12:30-1:45

This course will (re)introduce you to the Middles Ages by decentering the common Eurocentric approach and prioritizing instead cross-cultural encounters that profoundly marked over a thousand years of shared history. Four units are planned for the semester: (1) early Iberia as an international center of  Muslim, Jewish, and Christian exchange; (2) crusading culture as portrayed in epic poetry, satire, the diary of a Byzantine princess and writings by Muslims living in occupied Jerusalem; (3) travel and discovery as recounted by the well-known Marco Polo as well as globetrotters from Africa and Asia; and (4) an early history of women, studied here through the Arabic epic tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman, writings by the first professional female writer – Christine de Pizan (d. 1431), and the lives of female spiritual visionaries. Our discussions will be enhanced by visits from numerous UVA professors who will discuss their research in relation to our topics. Course assignments include response papers, collaborative class activities, and a final research project that may take the form of a traditional paper, a podcast, or a creative work. This course can satisfy the Second Writing Requirement; fulfills the Artistic, Interpretative, and Philosophical Inquiry as well as Historical Perspectives; and is required for the Medieval Studies major. No previous knowledge of the Middle Ages is needed.

ANTH 3880 African Archaeology (LaViolette)

T/Th, 9:30-10:45

This course covers select topics in the African past, from the emergence of modern humans, to diversification of small- and medium-scale settlements and societies, to the development of medieval cities, states, and empires, to colonial encounters.  We also consider how archaeological methods work to produce knowledge in combination with studies of genetics, climate and environment, and historical methods. The course will provide exposure to the current debates within African archaeology, as we grapple with them.  How do we use archaeology to construct a nuanced picture of ancient African peoples?  We will explore the unique methodologies that African archaeology employs, bringing together data from ecological reconstructions, material culture, oral traditions, historical linguistics and historical documents.  And importantly, we will challenge the received wisdom about the ancient African past, an image born of the colonial period itself, and one used to legitimize and construct those hegemonies.  More than just showing how these narratives are to be supplanted by new ones, many African archaeologists are arguing that what we are learning about the deep African past has important implications for broader debates about the nature of humanity, power, identity, and complexity. 

ARTH 1507 Art and Global Cultures: Art and the Silk Road (Wong)

M/W 1-1:50

Stretching some 8,000 kilometers, the Silk Road is a network of trade routes that provided a bridge between the east and the west between the first and fourteenth centuries CE. Despite periods of disruptions, the Silk Road flourished as a commercial and at times military highway. But more than that, it was a channel for the transmission of ideas, technologies, and artistic forms and styles, with far-reaching impact beyond China and the Mediterranean world. This course introduces the art forms, trade objects, and religions that flourished along the historical Silk Road.

ARTH 2153 Romanesque and Gothic Art (Ramirez-Weaver)

Tu/Th, 9:30-10:45

The medieval monk, Raoul Glaber, described Europe in the year 1000 as a place of Christian renewal in which the continent “…[was] clothing herself everywhere in a white garment of churches.” From the Romanesque churches along the Pilgrimage Routes to the new Gothic architecture at St. Denis outside Paris and on to late medieval artistic production in Prague, this course examines profound and visually arresting expressions of medieval piety, devotion, and power made by artists from roughly 1000-1500. In this class, both sacred and secular artworks supply important records of the philosophical, theological, political, and scientific beliefs espoused by their different patrons from disparate time periods and the artists they commissioned to translate their visions into churches, castles, liturgical objects, sculptures, stained glass, tapestries, household items, and illuminated manuscripts. 

ARTH 2961 Arts of the Islamic World (Phillips)

Tu/Th 12.30-1.45

What’s Islamic about Islamic art? What makes a mosque in Indonesia different from one in Iberia? Where are all the pictures? Do materials matter, and can fine art be mass-produced? And what’s with all that ornament? To answer some of these questions, we’ll be exploring big themes, such as the requirements of worship and imperial building campaigns, daily life and its objects, conventions of representation (or picture-making), the absolute triumph of calligraphy as an art form, the way Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade connected different cultures, and how looting, plunder, and finally colonialism and nationalism also impact on the way we see and understand art and architecture in the twenty-first century.

ARTH 3151 Art and Science in the Middle Ages (Ramirez-Weaver)

M/W/F, 9-9:50

During the medieval period, power and knowledge required the endorsement of clerics.  Alongside secular courtiers they also cultivated creative expressions of their erudition, revealing the medieval interpenetration of art, science and religion.  The artworks surveyed in this course provide lasting records of critically creative confrontations between the scientific and spiritual traditions linked to medieval Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

ARTR 3245/5345, Arabic Literary Delights (Hermes)

Mo, 3:30pm - 6:00

In this course, we will comparatively explore the captivating worlds and words of premodern Islamic(ate) leisure and pleasure across the Mashriq (Islamic East) and the Maghrib (Islamic West), including al-Andalus and Sicily. Our focus will be on the literary representations and socio-cultural as well as theosophical debates surrounding humanistic themes such as humor, pleasantry, wit, frivolity, stinginess, charlatanry, erotology, abstinence, and more.

ENGL 1500 Vikings: Myths and Sagas (Hopkins)

Tu/Thu 3:30-4:45p

This course introduces students to Old Norse mythology and cosmology, and their adaptation into later medieval prose sagas. We will begin with Prose and Poetic Eddas, examining their tales and learning essential historical and cultural contexts necessary to appreciate these bodies of myth and legend. We will then consider how the conversion to Christianity (in the summer of 999) changed Iceland’s literary landscape. Yet the heathen myths survived the advent of this new faith, and even thrived. In the back half of the course, we will focus on texts composed well within the Christian era to investigate the various ways in which medieval Icelanders reckoned with the heathen past of their ancestors while working out their own identity in verse and prose. 

ENGL 3162 Chaucerian Dream Poems (Fowler)

Tu/Th, 12:30-1:45

Poetry can produce real bodily experiences—including laughter, tears, heat, taste, a sense of being intensely present—by means of marks on a blank page, even if they were made by someone who’s been dead for hundreds of years. How does it do that? With that question in mind, we’ll read four poems Geoffrey Chaucer wrote about his dreams together with some poems he had read and some short essays on art, dreams, sensory experience, and virtual reality. The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and The Legend of Good Women are surreal, sweet, funny, philosophical, emotionally intense, feminist, and visually overstimulated poems. Dreams seem to provide Chaucer with a way of thinking about “para-sensory,” virtual experience and its relation to grief, love, and the other passions (the word medieval writers used for “emotions”). We'll be interested in how specific forms of language (image, metaphor, verb tense, and so on) work to produce the cognitive, emotional, and sensory effects of virtual experience. We’ll go slowly, so you can learn to “close read” poetry, and so you’re OK if Middle English is new to you. There are no pre-requisites except a joy in thinking and a love of language.

ENGL 4902: The Bible (Parker)

MW 2:00pm - 3:15pm

The stories, rhythms, and rhetoric of the Bible have been imprinting readers and writers of English since the seventh century. Moving through much of the New Testament, from the Gospels to Revelation, this course focuses on deepening biblical literacy and sharpening awareness of biblical connections to whatever members of the class are reading in other contexts. Along the way we will discuss English translations of the New Testament; the process of canonization; textual history; and the long trail of interpretive approaches, ancient to contemporary. Our text will be the New Oxford Annotated Bible, 5th ed. All are welcome. No previous knowledge of the Bible is needed or assumed. It can be taken before or after the Bible Part 2: The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, taught by Professor Stephen Cushman

ENGL 5559 Introduction to Old Norse (Hopkins)

Tu/Thu 12:30-1:45p

This course provides an introduction to the language and literature of medieval Iceland (also called Old Norse or Old Icelandic, roughly 800-1400 CE), and the goal is to arrive at a sound reading knowledge of the Old Norse language. Drawing upon Byock’s textbook, the first half of the semester focuses on internalizing the basics of Old Norse grammar and vocabulary. While acquiring these rudimentary linguistic skills, we will practice translating short bits of prose and poetry as supplied in the textbook. The course will also include secondary readings to orient us towards Old Norse genres, contexts, and critical/theoretical approaches prevalent in the field, with an emphasis on the history of the conversion and the importation of writing technologies (i.e., basic paleography). 

GETR 3464 Medieval Stories of Love and Adventure (McDonald)

Tu/Th 3:30-4:45

Fulfills the second -writing requirement. Course readings center on King Arthur and his court, as exemplified by the quests of Erec, Yvain, and Parzival. Readings include Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History and Gottfried’s Tristan. All readings in English. 

HIEU 4511 Viking Worlds (Kershaw)

Mo 2:00-4:30

Drawing upon the latest archeological, anthropological and literary studies alongshide historical scholarship, this 4-credit seminar explores the ways in which "the silver seekder from the North" travelled, traded and transformed the world around them, and were in turn temselfs transformed.

HIME 2001 The Making of the Middle East (Richardson)

Tu/Th 11:00am-12:15pm

This course explores the history of the Middle East and North Africa from late antiquity to the rise to superpower status of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century. Topics include the formation of Islam and the first Arab-Islamic conquests; slave societies; the fragmentation of the empire of the caliphate; the historical development of Islamic social, legal, and political institutions; science and philosophy; and the impact of invaders (Turks, Crusaders, and Mongols).

HIST 4501 Using and Abusing the Medieval Past (Kershaw)

Weds 2:00-4:30

The Middle Ages will not die. Representations of the medieval past are a pervasive - and often problematic - presence in the 21st-century. This 4-credit class explores the ongoing history of that exploitation: the ways in which the Middle Ages have been used and abused from the nineteenth century to the present day in the service of a range of political agendas from Victorian nation-building to wars of conquest, alt-right extremism and the neo-medieval religious radicalism of today.

JPTR 3100 Myths and Legends of Japan (Heldt)

Tu/Th 5:00-6:15

A seminar exploring Japan's earliest myths describing the origins of its islands, their gods, and rulers through close readings in English of eighth-century chronicles and poems.

RELB 2450 Zen (Heller)

MW 11–11:50

This course traces the history of the Buddhist “meditation school” from its beginnings in medieval China through its transmission and development in Korean and Japan. Through primary sources, we will examine how this tradition emerged from Buddhist thought and practice, and how Zen authors proposed new interpretations of both.  Through an exploration of its expression in visual and literary arts and its institutional forms, we will develop an understanding of Zen ideals and everyday life. We will also consider modern forms of Zen and its reception in the West, and how this shapes our understanding of its history.

RELG 3006 Augustine’s City of God (Mathewes)

M/W 3:30-4:45

The City of God is a foundational book for the history of Christianity and the history of the West in general.  But while many talk about it, hardly anyone reads it.  As Stefon from SNL would say, this book has everything: from creation to eschaton, the character of non-Christian moral action, Christology and the nature of the church, just-war reasoning, Jewish-Christian relations, the reality of zombies, the phenomenology of sex, and fart jokes.

Graduate students are welcome to take the course as a tutorial or “directed reading”.  Please contact instructor for details. Latin not necessary but welcomed. Work for the class could be accomplished either by a paper, weekly small pieces, or something else to be determined in consultation with instructor.

RELI/RELJ 5559 Resurrection (Andruss)

Th, 2-4:30

This comparative seminar traces the history of resurrection in Jewish and Muslim cultural and intellectual history. Students read primary texts—from the Bible and Qurʾān to medieval treatises to modern essays—to explore the concept of resurrection and its role in arguments over reason and revelation, the interpretation of scripture, and the boundaries between rival religious groups.

SPAN 4210 History of the Spanish Language II (Velázquez-Mendoza)

M/W, 3:30-4:45

This course traces the historical development of the Spanish language from its origins as a spoken Latin variety to the present. Topics include: The relationship between language change and language variation; the Indo-European language family; Romanization of the Iberian Peninsula; Classical vs. 'Vulgar' Latin; Visigothic and Arab influence on the Spanish language; expected and unexpected outcomes of nasalization; Medieval Spanish word order; Golden Age and Judeo-Spanish; Colonial Spanish.

ARAH 9585 Art and religion of the Silk Road (Wong)

Wed 3:30-6 pm

Stretching some 8,000 kilometers from east to west, the Silk Road is a network of trade routes that provided a bridge between the east and the west. Although the eastern part of the routes had been in use for millennia, the opening of the Silk Road occurred during the first century BCE, when China secured control over the eastern section and began trading with the Roman Empire through intermediary states in Central Asia. From this time until the end of the Mongol Yuan period in the fourteenth century, with periods of disruptions, the Silk Road flourished as a commercial and at times military highway. But more than that, the Silk Road was a channel for the transmission of ideas, technologies, and artistic forms and styles, with far-reaching impact beyond China and the Mediterranean world, extending to Southwest Asia, Africa, the Atlantic shores of Europe, and Japan to the east. This seminar examines topics from the art forms, trade objects to religions that flourished along the Silk Road between the first and fourteenth centuries CE.

RELG 3006 Augustine’s City of God (Mathewes)

M/W 3:30-4:45

The City of God is a foundational book for the history of Christianity and the history of the West in general.  But while many talk about it, hardly anyone reads it.  As Stefon from SNL would say, this book has everything: from creation to eschaton, the character of non-Christian moral action, Christology and the nature of the church, just-war reasoning, Jewish-Christian relations, the reality of zombies, the phenomenology of sex, and fart jokes.

Graduate students are welcome to take the course as a tutorial or “directed reading”.  Please contact instructor for details. Latin not necessary but welcomed. Work for the class could be accomplished either by a paper, weekly small pieces, or something else to be determined in consultation with instructor.