First-Year Writing Seminar (101-8-26)

Topic

Here Be Dragons: Medieval Travel

Instructors

Alexandra Montero Peters

Meeting Info

Shepard Hall Classroom B05: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Medieval men and women journeyed astonishing distances by foot, pack animals, and boat for trade, religion, diplomacy, and the love of exploration. In the tenth century, a Muslim traveler from Baghdad journeyed up the Volga and brought news of the Vikings back home. Centuries later, the Venetian Marco Polo wrote about, and also likely lied about, traveling Asia and his time at the court of Kublai Khan. Ethiopian merchants traveled to the courts of Italy searching for Christian relics to bring back to Africa, and Eurocentric maps and travelogues imagined distant spaces as peopled with so-called monstrous races, like the cynocephali (dog-headed people). For many medieval peoples, marvelous beasts, terrifying sea monsters, and fantastic mines of gems dotted the edges of their maps, and similar ideas about what was familiar and what was exotic deeply informed premodern notions of race and empire. This class investigates a wealth of travel writings and artifacts like these by enigmatic authors from all Abrahamic faiths—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—in order to consider what happens when people from distinct cultures meet for the first time. By following in the footsteps of such intrepid explorers, we witness how medieval people crafted narratives that strategically shaped understandings of the unknown, and the way their writings informed broader histories of race-making, religion, empire, and borders.

Learning Objectives

1) to guide students through interdisciplinary sources so that they can hone the skill of historical analysis; 2) to challenge students to explore modern questions about culture, identity, and religion through the lens of history; 3) to improve how students develop and defend their scholarly opinion both in writing and in discussion without generative AI; 4) to produce a piece of college-level writing based on the sources.

Evaluation Method

Participation in discussion (20%), attendance (10%), drafting assignments (40%), final paper (30%)

Class Notes

History Major Concentration(s): Europe, Global
History Minor Concentration(s): Europe

Class Attributes

WCAS Writing Seminar

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Weinberg First Year Seminars are only available to first-year students.
Add Consent: Department Consent Required