Literature of European History I

Fall 2017

Wednesday, 2:00-4:00 p.m.

David G. Troyansky

Office Hours (GC 5104): Wednesday, 1:00-2:00, and by appointment [email protected]

This course provides an introduction to the literature of European history from the Late Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. It explores different conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches to the period and examines an assortment of classic and recent works on a variety of topics: religion and the state; science, technology, and medicine; economy and society; gender and sexuality; and ideas and mentalities. The course prepares students for the end-of-semester comprehensive examination and for further study of early modern Europe.

Requirements:

Class participation: 25%

Five (2-page) response papers (one title each—not the common reading): 25%

Two (8-10-page) historiographical papers on major themes of the course (4-6 titles for each): 50%

Written work will be shared with the class.

Recommended Reading:

Textbooks and Reference Works:

Eugene Rice and Anthony Grafton, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460-1559, 2nd edition (New York, 1994).

Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1975).

William Doyle, The Old European Order, 1660-1800, 2nd edition (Oxford, 1993).

George Huppert, After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe, 2nd edition (Bloomington, IN, 1998).

T.A. Brady, H.O. Oberman and J.D. Tracy, eds., Handbook of European History 1400-1600, 2 volumes (Leiden, 1995).

Jonathan Dewald, ed., Europe 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, 6 volumes (Farmington Hills, 2004). Bibliographies: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/ See especially Renaissance and Reformation. http://home.uchicago.edu/~icon/teach/guideorals.pdf “Guide to the Study of Early Modern European History for Students Preparing their Oral Examinations,” by Constantin Fasolt. Excellent through the 17th century. Doesn’t do much with the 18th.

Schedule of Meetings and Readings

8/30 Introduction to the Course.

9/6 Modernity, Medievalism, and History that Stands Still

Read AHR Roundtable: “Historians and the Question of ‘Modernity,’” American Historical Review, Vol. 116, no. 3 (June 2011): 631-751; Paul Freedman and Gabrielle Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” American Historical Review, Vol. 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 677-704; Daniel Lord Smail and Andrew Shryock, “History and the ‘Pre,’” American Historical Review, Vol. 118, no. 3 (June 2013): 703- 737. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “History That Stands Still,” in The Mind and Method of the Historian, trans. Siân Reynolds and Ben Reynolds (Chicago, 1981), 1–27. Recommended: “History and the Telescoping of Time: A Disciplinary Forum,” French Historical Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Winter 2011): 1-55.

9/13 Medieval Background

Read Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987) and one of the following: John Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 2005); Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (Chicago, 1961); Bloch, The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France (London, 1973); Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1982); Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia, 2007); Steven A. Epstein, An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000-1500 (Cambridge, 2009); Christopher Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The Writing of History in Medieval England (London, 2007); Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movement and the English Rising of 1381, 2nd edition (2003); Johan Huizinga, Waning [or Autumn] of the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1996); Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Thought (Princeton, 1957); Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, 1984); R.I. Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society, rev. (New York, 2007); David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence (Princeton, 1996); Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Chicago, 2014).

9/27 Renaissance Read AHR Forum: “The Persistence of the Renaissance,” American Historical Review Vol. 103, No. 1 (February 1998): 50-124 and one of the following: Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London, 1969); Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1994); Margaret King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago, 1991); Christine Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1995); Robert J. Knecht, The Rise and Fall of Renaissance France, 1483-1610, 2nd edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002); John J. Martin, ed., The Renaissance World (New York, 2007); Lauro Martines, Fire in the City: Savanarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 2007); Martines, Power and Imagination: City- States in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore, 1988); Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Boston, 1955); John M. Najemy, ed., Italy in the Age of the Renaissance, 1300-1550 (Oxford, 2005); Charles Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, 1995); Charles Trinkaus and Heiko Oberman, eds., The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (Leiden, 1974).

10/4 Reformations

Read John Bossy, “The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe,” Past and Present, 47 (May 1970): 51-70; Heinz Schilling, “Confessional Europe,” Handbook of European History 1400-1600, eds. T.A. Brady, H.O. Oberman, and J.D. Tracy, vol. 2 (Leiden, 1995), 641-70; Robert W. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World,’” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23 (1993): 475-94; and Gerald Strauss, “Success and Failure in the German Reformation,” Past and Present, 67 (1975): 30-63. Consult one of the following: John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400- 1700 (Oxford, 1985); Thomas Brady, German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400-1650 (Cambridge, 2009); Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford, 1991); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1999); Sarah Covington, The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth-Century England (Notre Dame, 2003); Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580, 2nd edition (New Haven, 2005); Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (Cambridge, 1985); Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London, 1972); Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550-1750 (London, 1989); Hsia, ed., A Companion to the Reformation World (Malden, MA and Oxford, 2006); Hsia, ed., The German People and the Reformation (Ithaca, 1988); Craig Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450-1700 (New York, 2000); Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York, 2004); John O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA, 2000); Steven Ozment, ed., The Reformation in Medieval Perspective (Chicago, 1971); Andrew Pettegree, ed., The Early Reformation in Europe (Cambridge, 1992); Robert W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movement in Reformation Germany (London, 1987); Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation, 2nd edition (Oxford, 1994); Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London, 1987) Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, 1978); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Oxford, 1997); Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, “Religion, the Reformation and Social Change,” in The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays (New York, 1969), pp. 1-45; Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge, 1995).

10/11 The State

Read Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500-1800, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 1996) and one of the following: Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, 1974); Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 1550-1700 (Cambridge, 2000); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Paul B. Cheney, Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy (Cambridge, MA, 2010); James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge, 1995); Jonathan Dewald, The European Nobility, 1400-1800 (Cambridge, 1996); William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1997); Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2000); Mack Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 2005); J. Russell Major, From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles, and Estates (Baltimore, 1994); Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Boston, 1955); Roland Mousnier, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, 1589-1789: Society and the State, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1979-84); J.H. Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire (Berkeley, 1990); David Potter, A History of France, 1460-1560: The Emergence of a Nation State (New York, 1995); Marc Raeff, The Well- Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600- 1800 (New Haven, 1983); Orest Ranum, The Fronde: A French Revolution, 1648-1652 (New York, 1993); Jay Smith, The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600-1789 (Ann Arbor, 1996).

10/18 Demography and Economy

Read Jan De Vries, “Population,” in Handbook of European History, 1400-1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, I: Structures and Assertions, ed., Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, 1:1-50 (Leiden, 1994); De Vries, “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic History, 54 (1994): 249-70; and Jonathan Dewald, Geoffrey Parker, Michael Marmé, and J.B. Shank, AHR Forum: The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Revisited,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 1029-99. Consult one of the following: Jean-Pierre Bardet and Jacques Dupâquier, eds., Histoire des populations de l’Europe [selectively in volumes 1 and 2] (Paris, 1998); Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000-1700, 3rd edition (London, 1993); Jan De Vries and A.M. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge, 1997); Michael W. Flinn, The European Demographic System, 1500-1820 (Baltimore, 1981); David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, ed. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Martha Howell, Commerce Before Capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600 (Cambridge, 2010); Massimo Livi-Bacci, The Population of Europe: A History (Oxford, 2000); Sheilagh Ogilvie, “’What Is, Is Right’? Economic Institutions in Pre- Industrial Europe,” Economic History Review 60 (2007): 649-84; Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith, eds., The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 2nd edition (London, 1997); Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (2000); E.A. Wrigley, Population and History (New York, 1969); E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981).

10/25 Economy and Society [First historiographical paper is due]

Read either Robert Duplessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997) or Pieter Kriedte, Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capitalists: Europe and the World Economy, 1500- 1800 (Cambridge, 1983). Consult one of the following: Philip Benedict, ed., Cities and Social Change in Early Modern France (London, 1989); Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics (Berkeley, 1966); Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (Princeton, 1978); Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (New York, 1967); Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, 3 volumes (New York, 1982-84); Jan De Vries, European Urbanization, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1984); Pierre Goubert, The Ancien Régime: French Society, 1600-1750 (New York, 1973); Jeff Horn, Economic Development in Early-Modern France, 1650-1800: The Privilege of Liberty (Cambridge, 2015); Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750-1789 (Oxford, 1974); Pieter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization (Cambridge, 1982); Michel Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Cambridge, MA, 2014); Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost Further Explored: England before the Industrial Age, 3rd edition (New York, 1984); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (Urbana, 1974); Katherine A. Lynch, Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, 1200-1800: The Urban Foundations of Western Society (Cambridge, 2003); Thomas Robisheaux, Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1989); David Sabean, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870 (Cambridge, 1990); Rebecca Spang, Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2015); Govind Sreenivasan, The Peasants of Ottobeuren, 1487- 1726: A Rural Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2004).

11/1 Science, Technology, and Medicine

Read Pamela Smith, “Science on the Move: Recent Trends in the History of Early Modern Science,” Renaissance Quarterly 72 (2009): 345-75 and Anthony Grafton, Adrian Johns, and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, “AHR Forum: How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 84- 128. Consult one of the following: Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton, 1997); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (New York, 1998); Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 1500-1700 (Princeton, 2001); Thomas Hankins, Science in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1985); Allison Kavey, Books of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550-1600 (Champaign, 2007); Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edition (Chicago, 1996); David Lindberg and Robert Westman, eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1990); Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1999); Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich, eds., The Scientific Revolution in National Context (Cambridge, 1992); Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA, 1989); Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996); Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1989); Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, 1990); Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2004).

11/8 Family, Gender, and Sexuality

Read two of the following: Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York, 1962); Natalie Z. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, 1983); Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, 1995); Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983); Goody, The European Family: An Historico- Anthropological Essay (Oxford, 2000); David Herlihy and Christine Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their Families (New Haven, 1985); Martha Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in the Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550 (Chicago, 1998); Isabel Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815 (Ithaca, 1996); Christine Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1995); Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (London, 1977); Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720 (Oxford, 2000); Michael Mitterauer and Reinhard Sieder, The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present (Chicago, 1982); Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1983); Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton, 1990); Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 1998); Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989); Ulinka Rublack, ed., Gender in Early Modern German History (Cambridge, 2002); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York, 1977); Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987 (Oxford, 1990); Stone, Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England, 1660-1753 (Oxford, 1992); David G. Troyansky, Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 1989); Merry Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edition (Cambridge, 2008).

11/15 Empire

Read J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (New Haven, 2006) and Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton, 2011).

11/29 Popular Culture, Mentalities, and Microhistory

Read in the following: Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edition (Farnham, 2009); Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (NY, 1984); Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975); Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, 1980); Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (New York, 1991); Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Harmondsworth, 1985); Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (Oxford, 1984); Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Carnival in Romans (New York, 1979); Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist (Chicago, 1988); Jacques Revel, ed., Jeux d’échelles: La micro-analyse à l’expérience (Paris, 1996); David Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1985); Michel Vovelle, Ideologies and Mentalities (Chicago, 1990).

12/6 Intellectual History, from Renaissance to Enlightenment [Second historiographical paper is due]

Read in the following: Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 1979); Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA, 1982); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994); Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680-1715 (London, 1953); Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, 2010); Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York, 1970); Alan Kors, Atheism in France, 1650-1729 (Princeton, 1990); James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001); Barbara Naddeo, Vico and Naples: The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory (Ithaca, 2012); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 volumes (Cambridge, 1978).

12/13 Looking Back and Looking Ahead

12/19 First Written Examination