History 450 - JYW Seminar in History

This seminar trains students in historical research techniques and the writing of history, and fulfills the University's Junior Writing requirement. See the History Department course description guide for various sectional sub-titles and descriptions.

Monsters, Foreigners - Outsiders in Antiquity - The Middle Ages :

Idealized and despised, outsiders, both real and imagined, define a society through negative and positive examples. We will examine numerous primary sources including Babylonian epic, Greek tragedies, paintings, sculpture, histories, geographies, saints' lives, theology, Viking poems, manuscript illumination, Arthurian legends, and witch-hunting manuals. By placing our sources in their historical contexts, we will examine the ways that a society represents and uses its outsiders. The structure of the class will be roughly chronological beginning in the Ancient Near East and continuing through the Classical world, and medieval Europe, but will also proceed thematically to examine different kinds of outsiders. The subjects of our inquiry will be the fantastic--monsters, zombies, revenants, wild men--but we will also consider the related representations of real peripheral groups and individuals including Jews, Muslims, saints, heretics, and those accused of witchcraft.