Approaches to History (393-0-26)
Topic
Monsters and Marvels in Early Modern Europe
Instructors
Haley Elisabeth Bowen
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-343: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
Instructor: Haley Bowen
Max Weber described the early modern period (16th-18th centuries) as an era of "disenchantment," in which Europeans threw off the mantle of religious superstition and embraced secularism and "rational" scientific understanding. In this course we will interrogate and challenge Weber's thesis, exploring the ways in which the monstrous and the marvelous permeated the early modern imagination. Early modern Europeans collected and catalogued mythical beasts and natural wonders from around the globe in private collections, speculated on the divine significance of comets and earthquakes, and testified to the existence of ghosts and witches in judicial trials. Mystical visions and wondrous miracles saturated popular religious culture, gaining strength and urgency from the confessional divisions of the Reformation. Throughout this course we will be guided by a series of case studies drawn from the vast catalogue of European marvels (a woman who gave birth to a litter of rabbits in eighteenth-century London; a compendium of hybrid beasts compiled by Ambroise Paré; a mass possession among religious pilgrims in Paris; and many others). We will explore how the marvelous and the monstrous were continually reinvented to reflect broader cultural forces and political anxieties, from the rise of colonial European empires to the ascendancy of scientific attitudes among intellectual elites. In early modern Europe, wonders signaled the limits of human knowledge, blurred the boundaries between the natural and the divine, and testified to the continuing presence of the supernatural in an increasingly secularized world.
Learning Objectives
In this course, students will: read complex texts and images "slowly" by summarizing, analyzing, and synthesizing them in order to generate and support writing; learn to how to ask generative research questions about the past and produce complex, analytic, evidence-based historical arguments; and reflect on the history of secularization.
Evaluation Method
Class participation, reading response papers, and final project/essay
Class Notes
Concentration: European
Class Attributes
Historical Studies Distro Area