History of Art 262: Human Nature: Between Medieval and Modern

Instructor: Professors Beate Fricke and Elizabeth Honig

What is Mankind? How are we placed in the cosmos; what constitutes the fundamental nature of our being; and in what ways can we be elevated, inspired, socialized, and corrupted? Our ways of answering these questions are said to have undergone a fundamental shift with the advent of renaissance humanism. This course investigates the nature and extent of that shift, and asks which areas of thinking about mankind were more, and less, altered at the dawn of the modern period.

Italian Studies 215: Ariostan Histories: From Romance to Epic to Novel

Instructor: Professor Albert R. Ascoli

Our aim will be to situate Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, the most widely read literary text of the sixteenth century, at a pivotal place within an array of literary, cultural, and socio-political histories. Most prominently, from a literary-historical point of view, the Furioso may be situated within two genealogies that are often read in opposition to one another: the Renaissance recuperation of classical epic poetry in the Virgilian (and Homeric) mode through a filter of chivalric romance (culminating in Tasso and Milton), and the early modern passage from romance, novella, and other late medieval genres to what would become the literary genre par excellence in centuries to come, the novel (the first great exemplars being Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel and Cervantes’ Don Quixote).

Spanish 280, section 2: Colonial technologies

Instructor: Professor Ivonne del Valle

Recent work of environmental historians has demonstrated how Spanish America underwent drastic changes during the colonial period. From the desertification of 20% of what is now Mexico to the traces of pollution found in the ice caps of the Andes due to mining, it would appear that, since the 16th century, the relationship between technology and economic activity had a detrimental impact on the “New World” natural environment which is only now beginning to be studied.