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Home , Anthony Grafton, Frances Yates, Georges Duby, Joyce Appleby, Linda Colley, Peter Brown (historian)

Hist 80020 Literature of European History I 5 credits

Fall 2020 Mondays 2-4 pm Helena Rosenblatt Office hours on Zoom/Skype by appointment

This course is an introduction to the literature of European history from the Late through the eighteenth century. It introduces students to the main debates and themes of the scholarship on that period and prepares them for the end-of-semester comprehensive examination as well as further study of European history.

Requirements:

Attendance and Participation (20%). Students are expected to contribute substantially to the weekly discussions; attendance is therefore essential. Each week there will be one or several common readings (a book or a number of articles) that everyone must read. Additionally, each student will select an individual reading (a book or several articles) and report on it to the class.

Weekly Response Papers and Presentations (40%). Every week students must submit a one to two-page (double-spaced, 12 point font) critical essay on one reading of their choice (not the common reading). They should briefly summarize the book or articles, describing how they compare with the assigned reading, and what they add to the theme of the week. They will email this essay to the rest of the class by 9 am on the day of the class, present it to the class orally (5 min), and answer questions about it.

Two Historiographical Papers (40 %). Students must also write two 8-10 page (double-spaced 12 point font) historiographical papers on major themes of the course.

Schedule of Meetings and Readings:

Week One: Introduction to the Course (8/31)

How to read books and articles at the PhD level.

Week Two: What is “Early Modern European History”? (9/14)

Common Reading:

Joyce Appleby, , & Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (Norton, 1995).

Individual Reading:

1. AHR Roundtable on “ and the Question of ‘Modernity,’” American Historical Review, Vol. 116, no. 3 (June 2011) Essays by Symes, Chakrabarty, and Wolin.

2. David Armitage, “In Defense of Presentism,” in History and Human Flourishing, ed. Darrin M. McMahon (Oxford University Press) and Joseph Conrad, “Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Approach,” The American Historical Review, vol 117, no 4 (October, 2012).

3. The Idea of Europe, Anthony Pagden and Lee H. Hamilton, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Essays by Pagden (intro and chapter 1), Jordan, and Fontana.

4. , What Was History? (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

5. Daniel Lord Smail and Andrew Shryock, “History and the ‘Pre,’” American Historical Review, Vol. 118, no. 3 (June 2013) and Randolph Starn, “The Early Modern Muddle,” Journal of Early Modern History, vol 6, no. 3 (Jan 2002)

6. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment ( Press, 1994)

Week Three: The “Middle Ages” (9/21)

Common Reading:

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.

R.I. Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250 (Wiley Blackwell, 2007). Read the introduction and chapter 5; you may skim the rest.

Individual Reading:

1. , The Royal Touch. Monarchy and Miracles in France and (Dorset Press, 1990)

2. E.M. Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe (Oxford University Press, 2015)

3. Peter Brown Cult of the Saints. Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (The Press, 1981).

4. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Theology ( Press, 2016)

5. , Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987)

6. Michael D. Bailey, Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe ( Press ) 2013.

Week Four: The (10/3)

Common Reading:

Keith Moxey, “Do We Still Need a Renaissance?”, in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence: The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress of the History of Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (The Miegunyah Press, 2009).

Paula Findlen, “Possessing the Past: The Material World of the Italian Renaissance” and Kenneth Gouwens, “Perceiving the Past: after the “Cognitive Turn,” in AHR Forum: “The Persistence of the Renaissance,” American Historical Review Vol. 103, No. 1 (February 1998), pp. 55-114.

Margaret King, Introduction, Renaissance Humanism: An Anthology of Sources (Hackett, 2014), pp. ix-xx

Margaret King, Introduction, A Short History of the Renaissance in Europe (University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. xvii-xxvii

Individual Reading:

1. Peter Burke, Hybrid Renaissance: Culture, Language, Architecture (Central European University Press, 2016).

2. , Erasmus Man of Letters. The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton University Press, 1993).

3. Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text. The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science ( Press, 1994).

4. , and the Hermetic Tradition (Routledge, 1964).

5. Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford University Press, 2002).

6. Margaret King, Women of the Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 1991)

Week Five: The Protestant Reformation I --NOTE DIFFERENT DATE (10/14)

Common Reading:

Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250-1550. An Intellectual and Religious History of the late Medieval and Reformation Europe ( Press, 1981).

Individual Reading:

1. Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of the Reformation (Yale University Press, 2002).

2. Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation (Penguin Books, 2015).

3. Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford University Press, 1991).

4. , The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (Yale University Press, 1992).

Week Six: Reformation II (10/19)

Common Reading:

James Simpson Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 2019.)

Individual Reading:

1. R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (Yale University Press, 1988.)

2. Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (Yale University Press, 2009.)

3. Nicholas Terpstra in Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World, An Alternative History of the Reformation (Cambridge University Press, 2015.)

4. Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (The Belknap Press, 2012.)

5. , “‘Domme Preachers’? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print,” Past & Present 168 (August 2000): 72–123; Alexandra Walsham, “Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation,” Historical Research 78, no. 201 (August 2005): 288–310 , “The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe,” Past & Present, no. 47 (May 1970): 51–70; John Bossy, “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation,” Transactions of the 25 (1975), pp. 21–38.

6. Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1470-1700 (The Catholic University of America Press, 1999.)

7. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (Penguin Press, 1984.)

8. Sarah Covington, The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth- Century England ( Press, 2003). Unavailable digitally, but paperback is inexpensive.

Week Seven: War and the Construction of the State (10/26)

Common Reading:

Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (Yale University Press, 2011.)

Individual Reading:

1. , The Dutch Republic:Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477-1806 (Clarendon Press, 1998.)

2. Mack Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629 (Cambridge University Press, 2005.)

3. C.V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (New York Review Books Classics, 2005.)

4. , Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (Yale University Press, 2009.)

5. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688-1783 (Harvard University Press, 1990.)

6. Steven Gunn, David Grummitt and Hans Cools, “War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Widening the Debate” Jstor.org) Guy Lazure, “Possessing the Sacred: Monarchy and Identity in Philip II’s Relic Collection at the Escorial,” Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 58–93. Simon Ditchfield, “Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 3 (Spring 2009), pp. 552–84.

Week Eight: Economy and Society (11/2)

Common Reading:

Jan De Vries, “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic History, 54 (1994), pp. 249-70 and essays by Jonathan Dewald, Geoffrey Parker and J.B. Shank in AHR Forum: The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Revisited,” American Historical Review 113, 4 (October, 2008), pp. 1029-99.

Individual Reading:

1. Bruno Blondé and Ilja Van Damme “Early Modern Europe: 1500-1800” in The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History, ed. Peter Clark and Jeffry A. Frieden, “A Mercantilist World Economy” and “The End of Mercantilism” in his “The Modern Capitalist World Economy: A Historical Overview,” in The Oxford Handbook of Capitalism, ed. Dennis C. Mueller.

2. James Murray, “Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship in Medieval Europe,” John Munro, “Tawney’s century, 1540-1640: The Roots of Modern Entrepreneurship” and Oscar Gelderblom, “The Golden Age of the Dutch Republic”, in The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times, David S Landes, and William J. Baumol eds. (Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 88-182.

3. Pieter Kriedte, Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capitalists: Europe and the World Economy, 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1983.)

4. Geoffrey Parker, “The Emergence of Modern Finance in Europe, 1500-1750” in Fontana Economic History of Europe, vol 2, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, ed Carlo Cipolla (Fontana, 1972), pp. 527-94. Anthony Wrigley, “The Divergence of England: The Growth of the English Economy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 10 (2000), pp. 117-41.

5. Patrick O’Brien, “Deconstructing the British Industrial Revolution as a Conjuncture and for Global Economic History,” Maxine Berg, “The British Product Revolution of the Eighteenth Century,” and Joel Mokyr, “The European Enlightenment and the Origins of Modern Economic Growth,” in Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution, eds. Jeff Horn, Leonard N. Rosenband and Merritt Roe Smith (MIT, 2010.)

6. Jennifer Jones, “Grisettes and Coquettes: Women Buying and Selling in the Old Regime,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia (University of California Press, 1996), pp. 25-53 and “Repackaging Rousseau: Feminity and Fashion in France,” French Historical Studies vol 18, no 4 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 939-967.

Week Nine: Europe and the World (11/9)

Common Reading:

Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of : An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton University Press, 2011.)

Individual Reading:

1. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution. Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

2. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Cosimo Classics, 2009).

3. J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2006)

4. Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From the Renaissance to (Yale University Press, 1994).

5. Joyce Chaplin, “Race,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, David Armitage, ed. (Palgrave, 2002) pp. 154-174.

Week Ten: Science (11/16)

Common Reading:

Raab Theodore K. July 1965 “Religion and the Rise of Modern Science.” Past and Present 31- pp. 111-26; 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), pp. 84-12.

Individual Readings:

1. Allison Kavey Book of Secrets: Natural Philosophy in England, 1550-1600 (University of Illinois Press, 2007.)

2. Barbara Naddeo, Vico and Naples: The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory (Cornell University Press, 2011.)

3. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton University Press, 2017.)

4. Robert Iliffe, Priest of Nature: The Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.)

5. Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006.)

6. Margaret C. Jacob and Larry Stewart, Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and (Harvard University Press, 2009.)

7. Jessica Riskin. Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental empiricists of the French Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2002.)

8. Londa Schiebinger, “The Philosopher’s Beard: Women and Gender in Science,” in The Cambridge History of Science, ed. , pp. 184-210 and “Women of Natural Knowledge,” The Cambridge History of Science, eds. Katherine Park and , pp. 192-205; and Anne Vila, “Medicine and the Body in the French Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment, chapter 14 and Erin Kathleen Rowe, “After Death, Her Face Turned White: Blackness, Whiteness, and Sanctity in the Early Modern Hispanic World,” The American Historical Review 121, no. 3 (June 2016), pp. 727–54.

Week Eleven: Women, Sex and the Family (11/23)

Common Reading:

AHR forum Revisiting Gender 113 (2008)

Patrick Hutton, Philippe Ariès and the Politics of French Cultural History (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), chapter 6: “Decades of Debate about Centuries of Childhood.”

Individual Reading:

1. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1998.)

2. David G. Troyansky, Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth- Century France (Cornell University Press, 1989.)

3. Mita Choudhury, Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture (Cornell University Press, 2004.)

4. Nicholas Terpstra, Cultures of Charity: Women, Politics and the Reform of Poor Relief in Renaissance Italy (Harvard University Press, 2015.)

5. The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe Jutta Isela Sperling, “The Economics and Politics of Marriage”; Lyndan Warner “Before the Law”; Janine M. Lanza “Women and Work”; Carole Levin and Alicia Meyer, “Women and Political Power in Early Modern Europe”; Alisha Rankin “Women in Science and Medicine, 1400-1800”; Allyson M. Poska “Upending Patriarchy: Rethinking Marriage and Family in Early Modern Europe.”

6. Stanley Chojnacki, Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.)

7. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Plague and Family Life” in M. Jones (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 124-154.

8. A History of Private Life, vol III, Philippe Ariès and (Belknap Press, 1989.)

Week Twelve: Popular Culture, Mentalities and Microhistory (11/30)

Common Reading:

Robert Darnton, “Intellectual and Cultural History” in Michael Kammen ed. The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the US (Cornell University Press,1980.)

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books, 1984.)

Individual Reading:

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.)

Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Clarendon Press, 1997.)

Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard University Press, 1984.)

The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800. Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, Lynn Hunt, ed. (Zone Books, 1996.)

Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil. Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 1994.)

Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process. Sociogenic and Psychogenetic Investigations, transl Edmund Jephcott, revised edition (Blackwell, 2000.)

Week Thirteen: The Enlightenment I (12/7)

Common Reading:

Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2010.) and Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2013), chapter one.

Individual Reading:

Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment. The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2002.)

Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters (Random House, 2013.)

David Harvey, The French Enlightenment and its Others (Palgrave, 2012.)

Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008.)

Antoine Lilti, The World of the Salons (Oxford University Press, 2015.)

Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth Century (Yale University Press, 1987.)

Week Fourteen: Debating the Enlightenment (12/14) Common Reading:

Daniel Gordon, “On the Supposed Obsolescence of the French Enlightenment,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 25, 2 (Summer 1999), pp. 365-385.

Karen O’Brien, “The Return of the Enlightenment,” American Historical Review 115, 5 (December, 2010), pp. 1426-1435.

Robert Wokler, “The Enlightenment Project and its Critics,” in Sven-Eric Liedman, The Postmodernist Critique of the Project of Enlightenment (Rodopi, 1997), pp. 13-30.

James Schmidt, “What Enlightenment Project?” Political Theory 28, 6 (2000), pp. 737-738

Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment, Introduction and Conclusion.

David A. Hollinger, “The Enlightenment and the Genealogy of Cultural Conflict in the United States,” in K.M. Baker and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., What’s Left of Enlightenment: A Postmodern Question (Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 7-18.

David Brooks, “The Enlightenment Project,” , Feb 28, 2017 and David Brooks, “The Virtue of Radical Honesty,” The New York Times, Feb 22, 2018.

David Harvey, The French Enlightenment and its Others, Introduction and Conclusion. Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters, Conclusion.