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Graduate Fall Courses 2005 |
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The following graduate courses are being offered in Fall 2005. Email addresses are included for contacting instructors for further information. For a list of courses being offered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, see the attached listing. For those who are not aware of the opportunity, Duke and UNC have a reciprocal registration arrangement that allows graduate students at one university to take courses at the other. Inter-Institutional Registration Agreement Under the inter-institutional registration agreement, any graduate, professional, or undergraduate student enrolled as a degree-seeking student at any of the following participating universities may participate in registration via the inter-institutional registration process: Duke University For further information on rules and registration procedures, go to the Inter-Institutional Registration Agreement website.
Duke/UNC direct bus: A new Duke/UNC direct bus, funded by the Robertson Scholars Program, departs frequently and makes traveling between the two campuses easier than ever before. See the Robertson Scholars website for the departure and arrival schedule for this bus. MEDREN 202B.001.
Early and Medieval Christianity (Also offered as Divinity School
CHURHST 13) Synopsis: A survey of the history of Christianity from its beginnings through the fifteenth century.
Synopsis: Representing, narrating, alluding to and addressing Christ were pervasive in late medieval England. As the title of this course indicates, it welcomes a diversity of approaches to its materials: medieval forms of writing, like the forms of life which produced them, do not fit conveniently the divisions of study shaping our own institutions. In trying to understand the implications of different ways of representing Christ, in different contexts, we will necessarily be moving between literary, theological, and political discourses. At the center of the course are two long and astonishingly complex works of the later fourteenth century, Julian of Norwich's Showings and William Langland's Piers Plowman. To these we will give sustained and close attention. Alongside these we will study an immensely popular and anti-Wycliffite translation of the already immensely popular thirteenth-century Franciscan Meditationes Vitae Christi, together with the extraordinary work of Margery Kempe. I hope that some students may decide to do research outside these core texts: for example: on Eucharistic representations of Christ; on Wycliffite (heretical) representations of Christ; or the representing of Christ in contemporary political conflict, whether around the peasants' uprising or around Richard II; on the relations between representations of Christ and theories of poverty and riches. Before the first seminar students should have read the following: the C-version of Piers Plowman; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, chapters 1-10; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi. You should also find the following especially relevant: Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God; Sarah Beckwith Christ's Body; David Aers and Lynn Staley, Power of the Holy. Required texts: William Langland, Piers Plowman: an edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Northwestern UP); there is a modern English translation of this by George Economou (Pennsylvania UP); Julian of Norwich, The Showings, ed. Denise N. Baker (A Norton Critical Edition, 2005); John of Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ (Pegasus); Margery Kempe, either Lynn Staley's edition of The Book of Margery Kempe (TEAMS, Kalamazoo, 1996) or her Norton edition (which includes essays). Other essential materials will be on reserve.
Synopsis: This course will engage the vitality of classical medical thought in the Renaissance (i.e. Galen and Hippocrates) and consider 16th-century developments. These developments will include classical translations and summaries like Thomas Elyot's The Castel of Helthe; the first vernacular account of an epidemic in John Caius's Boke or Counseil Concerning the Sweate; the incorporation of anatomy practices developed in Italy and the rise of anatomy "theaters"; Michel de Montaigne's essays on health and the inhabitation of the body; John Donne's brilliant meditation on his own grave illness in Devotions on Emergent Occasions; treatises on midwifery; Shakespeare's portrait of aging in King Lear; Thomas Dekker's The Wonderful Yeare, Wherein is shewed the picture of London, lying sicke of the Plague; London city comedies by Ben Jonson based on the four "humours"; William Harvey's first account of the circulation of the blood in De Motu Cordis; and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. The course will thus range between technical material and literary representations of health issues. Our focus will be on historical understandings of the body's norms and mishaps, the historical relations between body and mind and between bodies and society, and on the conceptions of what might remedy a given body's dis-ease. (No previous experience in Renaissance literature is required.)
Synopsis: Phonology, morphology, and syntax of German from the beginnings to the present.
Synopsis: Selected writings of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine, as well as lesser known African Fathers, on topics such as the African rite of baptism, African creeds, and African church councils. Focus on major theological, liturgical, and pastoral problems in the African church in order to gain perspective on the crucial role of the African church in the development of the church in the West.
Synopsis: The arts and intellectual culture flourished under Charlemagne and his Course Homepage URL Textbooks Assignments Exams Term Papers Grade to be based on
Synopsis: Late medieval English culture was sacramental. As "visible signs of an invisible grace," the seven sacraments involved questions that were at once semiotic, epistemological, theological, ecclesiological, social, and political. The sacraments in the middle ages involved not only an axiomatic distinction between clergy and laity (except in the interesting cases of baptism and marriage) but went to the core of self-definition and fashioning and communal relations. This class will concentrate especially on the sacrament of penance within a wider consideration about the hermeneutics of sacramentality. This was the sacrament that caused the most trouble to reformers but which brought together in the most fascinating and troubling ways issues of self-examination and authority, questions of control, compulsion and apparently free yet depraved human will in the internal forum of the conscience and confessional, and the external forum of the court of law. Axiomatic to the distinction between clergy and laity in the middle ages, this sacrament, conventionally seen in its tri-partite form of contrition, confession, and restitution, organized ways of conceiving both self and community and spawned a vast and brilliant taxonomy of sin. With the diminishment of the sacraments from seven to two (eucharist and baptism), penance was abolished as a sacrament, and annual auricular confession was no longer compulsory, yet the entire structure of the church courts remained liturgically central in the Book of Common Prayer. An examination of these materials and contexts will allow us to see the extent to which the relations of individual to community might have been misdiagnosed and misdescribed in some of the narratives of the transition from medieval to early modernity. We'll explore the complexities and unforeseen consequence of these changes in a range of literature. We'll look at Langland's great poem, at Julian of Norwich's Revelations, some Corpus Christi cycles, Gower's Confessio Amantis and some "penitential romances" and some of the heresy trials of the early sixteenth century. In the post-reformaiton setting we'll test out the survival and appropriation of some of these stories and remedies for sin by looking principally at some of Shakespeare's plays-particularly the turn to medieval forebears in the late romances. |