History 280B: The Forms of European Intellectual Culture, 1450-1700

This course provides an intensive introduction to early modern European intellectual culture. It focuses both on the questions that animated intellectual inquiry and the frameworks inside of which this inquiry was pursued. Major topics will include: humanism and the humanities, politics and political thought, practices of theological inquiry, philology and the historical sciences, genre and the history of the book, the topography of intellectual life (universities, networks, academies), and the sciences of culture in an age of discovery. Many weeks will engage a substantial primary text. Authors may include: Valla, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Acosta, Luther, Calvin, Teresa of Avila, Bodin, Lipsius, Grotius, Bacon, Hobbes, and others.