The Medieval World

This course will offer you an opportunity to travel vicariously to the medieval world and experience both its strangeness and its familiarity through encounters with people, events, ideas, beliefs, texts, images, and objects from the fourth century to the fifteenth, from Iceland to India, from Norway to North Africa. En route you will get a comparative overview of the cultures and civilizations of the medieval world as seen on their own terms as well as yours. Traces and transformations of that world are still with us — the university, banks, common law, romantic love, the printed book, cathedrals and mosques, religious conflict. There’s more to the Middle Ages than knights and ladies! The course assumes no previous knowledge of the medieval world, and requires only curiosity and an open mind.

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