This graduate reading course is designed to introduce new scholarship that has brought the study of religion on the Italian peninsula “out of the shadows” and into the mainstream. By examining topics ranging from institutional developments and civic practices to lived religion, students map the interaction of the new historiography with broader trends in the study of Gender, the State, the Papacy, the Emotions, Space/Place, Material Culture, Heresy & Crusading, Patronage, Intellectual History, and the Mediterranean World. Those interested will have opportunities to read primary sources in original languages and to work on paleography.
Readings may include:
Articles by e.g. Bynum, Jenson, Rusconi, Zarri
Thompson, Cities of God
Muir, Civic Ritual
Miller, Bishop’s Palace
Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399
Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society
Requirements. Group-oriented participation in discussion is basic to this course (30%). Students write eight weekly 2 page analytic summaries of the hypotheses, methodologies, and sources relevant to readings (40%). In addition, students take turns introducing and summarizing discussion (20%), and presenting author and review reports (10%).
