Time and Location

MTWRF 9:30-10:45 AM

Flint Hall 111

Description

To many, the words ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘medieval’ conjure up images of primary-colored, boisterous times of gallant knights, beautiful maidens, or wizards. Many historians of the modern age imagine the Middle Ages as a thousand years of intellectual backwardness and social injustice separating the classical world from the enlightened modern age, beginning either with the Italian Renaissance or the Protestant revolt. Lumped together with the early modern period into what is commonly referred to as “pre-modern,” the medieval period still appears to many, as it did to the first American historian of the Middle Ages, Henry Charles Lea (1825-1909): an era dominated by “superstition and force.” On the other hand, a world of peasant communities, with a small elite of aristocrats dominating and feeding itself from the labors of the peasantry, Europe after AD 1000 underwent exceptionally intense changes. Economic growth, territorial expansion, and dynamic cultural and social change, all marked the vitality of European society between 1000 and 1400. For four hundred years, before the slump and crisis of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, population grew, the cultivated area expanded, urbanization and commercialization restructured economic and social life. Through incorporated towns, universities, central representative bodies, and the international orders of the Roman Catholic Church, Europe of the High Middle Ages first began to define itself in expansionary terms. In this course we will examine the various aspects of that transformation. This course is designed as a chronological and topical introduction to the history of the “medieval millenium,”  between ca. 400 and 1400. Since this is a three semester hour survey, it is impossible to cover everything. Instead, the course will offer a selection of representative topics from a much larger possible list. We will examine the evolution of various forms of economic systems and  social structures, particularly the emergence of feudal society in Europe. Although the main focus will be on Western Europe, we will also take quick glimpses at some neighboring areas, such as Eastern Europe, the Middle, and the Far East.