We explore art's roles in politics and religion from ca. 600-1300 CE in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The course introduces the arts of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Judaism, and Islam; great courts and migratory societies; works made for private use and public display. Through narrative arc in lecture and precepts dedicated to artistic media, textual and material primary sources, and/or key intellectual themes, we consider how art participates in forming sacred and secular power. We explore how the work of 'art' in this period carries powers of its own, and how art shaped a multi-lingual, multi-confessional, multi-cultural medieval world.

This course explores the technology and function of books in historical perspective, asking how illuminated manuscripts were designed to meet (and shape) cultural and intellectual demands in the medieval period. Surveying the major genres of European book arts between the 7th-15th centuries, we study varying approaches to pictorial space, page design, and information organization; relationships between text and image; and technical aspects of book production. We work primarily from Princeton's collection of original manuscripts and manuscript facsimiles. Assignments include the option to create an original artist's book for the final project.

This course examines the nature of state and society in an age of turmoil, with a focus on patterns of allegiances, ways of waging war, codes of conduct, norms of etiquette, social and political structure based on primary and secondary sources. Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Kagemusha shall provide the thematic foundation for this course.

This course introduces students to the historiography of China during the Tang dynasty (618-907). The themes covered include politics, state institutions, elite culture, gender relations, civil examination, the development of cities, economic changes, the environment, and the place of the Tang in the medieval world. To consider these issues means that we will occasionally reach back and forward in time beyond the Tang dynasty itself. But the focus is squarely on the Tang. In this process, we will also reflect on the historiographical implications of truncating the history of China into the units of "dynasties."

Explores the "rise" of the warrior culture of Japan, as well as how warriors governed and fought in medieval Japan, before explaining how the samurai status was created and idealized in Japan.

How do you write about a world that seems to be failing, even when you still love it? Does literature get in the way of changing the world, or does it imagine a way forward? That's the question that drives the two great medieval English works The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, and Piers Plowman, by his contemporary William Langland. Both works are learned, beautiful, hilarious and urgent--but in very different ways.

This class focuses on poetry in Old Occitan and Old French, two transregional languages born in medieval Europe and spoken throughout the Mediterranean. We will explore the aural, visual, and tactile nature of medieval poems, whether sung, declaimed, or read silently. We will reflect on questions of death, politics, gender roles, sexuality, and religious sentiment raised by such texts, while also considering the at times off-putting aesthetic experiences they present to our modern sensibilities. Out-of-class activities will allow us to engage with manuscripts and address the performativity and relevance of medievalism in North America.

Introduction to Middle High German language and literature 1100-1400. Selections from Arthurian romance (Parzival, Tristan), epic (Nibelungenlied), lyric poetry (Minnesang), and mysticism (Meister Eckhart, Mechthild von Magdeburg). Class sessions focus on close-reading and translating original texts. Also planned are visits to Rare Book Room and a local museum.

This class examines the relationship between law and society in the Roman and post-Roman worlds. We begin with the origins of Roman law in the ancient world, and end with the rediscovery of Roman law in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries. Over the course of the intervening millennium, we will focus on pivotal moments and key texts in the development of the legal cultures of the Roman and post-Roman worlds of Western Eurasia. Our goal will be to think about how law and law-like norms both shape and are shaped by society and social practices.

The seminar explores the transformation of the Roman World from the late ancient to the medieval West with a particular focus on Gregory of Tours and his world in the second half of the sixth century. The rich evidence allowd us to study the reconfiguration of the social, religious and political resources of the Roman world in the Frankish kingdoms of the sixth century and their transmission and reception allow us to explore the ongoing social, religious and political experimentation in the most enduring successor-state of the Western Roman empire.

In this course we will read ten (mostly short) novels, originally written in Greek and translated into English, spanning nearly two millennia, with a view to exploring how fiction has served as a focal point for the exploration of Hellenism. The course is intended both for students seeking to fulfill the requirements for the Hellenic Studies Minor and those interested in cultural history and literature more broadly.

The course begins with the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476 and ends with the collapse of the Eastern (or Byzantine) Empire in 1453. Among the topics addressed are the following: the western successor states, the birth and expansion of Islam, the Carolingian Empire, the Vikings, and the political entities of the High and Late Middle Ages. Due attention will also be paid to religious beliefs and devotional practices, economic change, cultural development, gender relations and other aspects of social history.

The seminar covers the history of mensural notation from about 1250 to 1350. This includes motet notation up to the 1310s, and the notation of the moderni up to the 1350s. There are weekly transcription exercises. Composers include Philippe de Vitry, Guillaume de Machaut, as well as countless anonymous figures. There is a special focus on three theorists: Anonymous IV (c.1280), Franco (c.1280), and the enigmatic Jacobus (c.1320). Since music theory in this period was steeped in the philosophy of Aristotle, we engage with the latter's teachings on measurement, time, form, matter, classification, and other things.