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 Middle Ages 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, Lynn Hunt, & Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (Norton, 1995). Individual Reading: 1. AHR Roundtable on “Historians 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), Chester Jordan, and Fontana. 4. Anthony Grafton, 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 (Stanford University 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. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch. Monarchy and Miracles in France and England (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 University of Chicago Press, 1981). 4. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Theology (Princeton University Press, 2016) 5. Caroline Walker Bynum, 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 (Cornell University Press ) 2013. Week Four: The Renaissance (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: Renaissance Humanism 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. Lisa Jardine, 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 (Harvard University Press, 1994). 4. Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno 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 (Yale University 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. Eamon Duffy, 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. Alexandra Walsham, “‘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 John Bossy, “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 Royal Historical Society 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 (University of Notre Dame 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. Jonathan Israel, 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. Linda Colley, 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