Recent Courses: Fall Semester 2021
Medieval Manuscripts (HART 377 / HART 577 / MDEM 377), Rice University
In the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the advent of moveable type print in Western Europe, scribes, illuminators, and patrons expressed their ideas in vibrant illuminations in opulent books. This dual-level (i.e. graduate and undergraduate) seminar focuses on how makers and readers of manuscripts used their lushly illuminated books. By focusing on materials and techniques, the relationship between text and image, and the patronage of books, this course emphasizes the ideological motivations of making books in periods of social, religious, and political upheaval. We meet each week in Rice’s Fondren library to examine high-quality facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, enabling students to work firsthand with historical evidence.
Previous Courses:
Monsters and Miracles: Representing the Strange in Medieval Art (ARTH 23809, COSI Seminar), University of Chicago
Things that confuse, surprise, or frighten skeptical modern viewers — one-eyed monsters and miraculous cures — had rational explanations in the works of medieval theologians and philosophers. But the idea of something being strange was at the forefront of the medieval imagination. Questions, fears, and theories of strangeness — from the uncanny to the foreign — found expression in complex, beautiful, and grotesque images that bear witness to a medieval grappling with otherness and alterity. This advanced undergraduate seminar (part fo the Chicago Object Study Initiative), challenged students to think critically about image-making in the middle ages through the lens of the strange. How did images promulgate ideas about the strangeness of others? Can images explain what medieval viewers found strange in their worlds? And how can we as modern viewers confront the alterity of the past?
Intro to Medieval Art (ARTH 14200), University of Chicago
Hybrid creatures carved in stone, gem encrusted metalwork, and page upon page of gold leaf: artists and artisans in the Middle Ages crafted objects like these that evidence complex and diverse techniques, political and ideological motivations, and religious beliefs. In this course, we will study the art of medieval Europe c. 500-1500 CE, with special emphasis on the artistic, political, and ideological forces that created the visual and material culture of the medieval world. How did competing desires to assert power and prestige affect the art and architecture made in the Middle Ages? The production of manuscripts, wall paintings, metalwork, textiles, and architecture in the period covered in this course bear witness to centuries of artistic traditions, political turmoil, and religious change; we will survey this varied corpus of sacred and secular objects with an eye to materials, techniques, and historical context. We will focus on medieval western Europe, but also attend to the global connections of the medieval world. Multiple class session will involve digital encounters with medieval objects in online collections, and the course will ask students to think critically about what it means to see medieval art using digital methods.
The Art of Premodern Science (ARTH 17225), University of Chicago
What did “science” look like in the premodern world? This course surveys scientific images and objects from antiquity through the fifteenth century to investigate how they could represent theories, teach their readers, facilitate practice, and aid in the production of knowledge. We will look at a wide variety of objects and images related to geometry, astrology, cosmology, medicine, anatomy, botany, and other disciplines. Largely through the lens of drawings and diagrams made by medieval artists and scholars reinterpreting and building upon older ideas, this course will explore historical scientific concepts, consider how these concepts transformed over time, and focus on the role scientific images played in the transmission and translation of theories over the course of several centuries. This course also explores the connections between science, magic, and religion in the premodern world. How did these concepts overlap, and how do modern definitions fall short in helping us understand premodern ideas about the natural world? Students will develop the conceptual tools necessary to confront these questions using visual evidence.