CMPL 121 Romancing the World

TR 9:30-10:45 (Collins)

This course focuses on the enduring, global tradition of romance from classical antiquity to 1800, starting with the Homer’s Odyssey and ending with Voltaire’s Candide and including works by Heliodorus, Chretien de Troyes, Murasaki, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, among others.

CMPL 390 Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the Birth of the Imagination

TR 2-3:15 (Collins)

This course focuses on close reading of Cervantes’ Don Quixote in its social and intellectual context, considering the complex society of Imperial Spain and the great themes of debates identified with Renaissance Humanism.  The Renaissance polemic over the imagination and imaginative literature is a central issue in the course.  The class will also study some of Cervantes’ Exemplary Stories and examine the relationship between Erasmian thought and Don Quixote, the first modern novel.

ENGL 719 Old English Grammar and Readings

MW 12-1:15 (O’Neill)
The goal of this course is to acquire a reading knowledge of Old English while also
enjoying some of the variety of its literature.

ENGL 331 Restoration and 18th-Century British Literature

TR 12:30-1:45 (Reinert).

ENGL 227 Literature of the Earlier Renaissance

TR 12:30-01:45 (Wolfe)

ENGL 326 Renaissance Genres

TR 03:30-04:45 (Wolfe)

This course is a comparative survey of Renaissance epic (Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Milton, and lesser-known writers such as Folengo, Du Bartas, and Fletcher).

FREN 371 Survey French Lit II
MWF 1-1:50 (Heitsch)
A study of important works in French literature from the so-called classical age of the
“Sun King” Louis XIV and the Enlightenment, with an emphasis on literary genres, the
socio-historical context, writing practices, and certain key concepts.

FREN 398 “Imposteur!” Imposture and impersonation in French-language theater and prose fiction

MW 2-3:15 (Welch)

About 2/3 of the texts studied are from the 17th century, read in comparison
with 20th century works.

FREN 734: “Imposture, Imitation, et Identite au XVIIe siecle”

M 4-6:30 (Welch)
Imposture, impersonation, and mistaken identities in 17th-century French fiction and
theater, studied through the lenses of both baroque aesthetics and postmodern theories of
identity.

GERM 089 German heroes? Knights, tricksters and magicians.

TR 3:30-4:45 (von Bernuth)

The course aims to engage the students in discussions about medieval and early modern German literature, culture, and history and to encourage them to think and re-think the significance of literary production beyond the confines of the written word.

GERM 820 001 Topics in Medieval Literature: Medieval Song.

TH 9:30 AM – 12:20 PM. (Starkey, Rasmussen)

Drawing on material from the French, Latin, Italian, and German traditions, this course surveys the medieval lyric tradition from a variety of poetological, historical, and theoretical perspectives. The course will expose students to a broad range of material, from the songs of the troubadours and Minnesinger and to religious lyric. It will investigate the genres, influence, and cultural specificity of medieval lyric poetry, including medieval theories of music. Theories regarding the medieval reception and production of song and songbooks will be discussed in the context of modern philology and editorial practice. We will also discuss theories of translation and practice translating medieval texts. Students from a wide variety of departments and disciplines interested in exploring medieval lyric through diverse perspectives—philology, feminism, post-modernism, music—are welcome. Core course materials will be available in English.

HIST 721 Readings in European Expansion and Global Interaction, 1400-1800

F 1-3:50 (Lindsay)

This graduate seminar focuses on European encounters with each other, Africans, and Native Americans in the early modern Atlantic world, paying particular attention to themes of colonization, slavery, trade, and political power.  Students will read and discuss roughly a book a week, write book reviews, and compose a final essay.

HIST 107 Introduction to Medieval History

MWF 10-10:50 (Whalen)
This course provides an introduction to the history of Europe and the Mediterranean world
during the Middle Ages (ca. 300-1500), beginning with the transformations of the Roman
world in late antiquity and concluding with the origins of the early modern era. As a
survey course, the class will broadly explore events and developments for over a thousand
years of political, social, and economic history. Special attention will be devoted to
religious and cultural topics, including the Roman papacy, monastic life, the crusades,
the problem of heresy, and trends in late medieval spirituality. In addition to covering
the basic narrative and structures of medieval European history, this course will
introduce students to the basic skills employed by historians (e.g. how to analyze
primary sources; to identify and critique scholarly arguments; and to develop written
arguments).

HIST 431 The Medieval Church

TR 12:30-1:45 (Whalen)
The Medieval Church will examine major trends in the historical development of the Latin,
Western Christian Church in Europe during the Middle Ages. In addition to covering the
development of ecclesiastical institutions and basic forms of religious life, the course
will explore various special topics, including the ideology of papal primacy, the
dynamics of power between secular and sacred authorities, and tensions between clerical
and lay forms of spirituality.

HIST 910 The Arts of Roman Government

R 3:30-6:20 (Talbert)

The seminar offers its participants the opportunity to explore – both individually and jointly – one of the key features of Roman imperial rule during the first two and a half centuries AD: maintenance of a vast, but peaceful and thriving, empire with the minimum of policing or Roman administrative engagement. What were the different means by which the paradox of such surprising stability amid so much potentially unruly diversity was achieved ? Patronage, fear, tolerance, law, language, culture, religion, inclusiveness, infrastructure all merit investigation from this perspective, and they merely illustrate the themes that may prove relevant. Attention to a rich mix of testimony will be encouraged – among them, public and private documents, literature, inscriptions, papyri, material culture, coinage, archaeological findings. Accordingly, the hope is to bring together, and inspire, a group of participants motivated to fathom Roman imperialism, to penetrate the arcana imperii, in a revealing variety of ways.

ITAL 731 Dante’s Vita nuova and Inferno

M 3:30-6:00 (Cervigni)
A critical reading of Dante’s Vita nuova and Inferno within the context of their
ancient and medieval traditions and with particular emphasis on recent American
criticism. Original text with facing English translation. The course is taught in
Italian. http://www.unc.edu/%7Ecervgn/courses.htm#631

ITAL 240 Dante in English Translation

TR3:30-4:45 (Cervigni)

Ital 240 intends to analyze Dante’s New Life and some fundamental cantos of the Divine Comedy (Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise) within the context of their ancient sources and contemporary criticism and Dante’s complete oeuvre. http://www.unc.edu/%7Ecervgn/courses.htm#240

LATN 514 Latin Literature of Later Antiquity

TR 5-6:15 (Babcock)
A survey of Latin writers of the third through fifth centuries. We will read selections
from the Christian writers Tertullian, Lactantius, Ambrose, Augustine (De doctrina christiana, Confessiones, and De civitate Dei), and Jerome; as well as from Macrobius,
Symmachus, Amminaus, and the poet Claudian. This course is a reading/translation course,
designed to introduce students to major writers of the period by extensive reading of
their works. It focuses on the texts from Later Antiquity that are on the Classics Department’s reading lists.

MUSC 850 Music and Poetry in the Middle Ages

W 2-4:50 (Vlhová-Wörner)

MUSC 850 Renaissance Mantua

R 2-4:50 (MacNeil)
Graduate proseminar. Renaissance Mantua is an introductory, interdisciplinary seminar on the material culture of the Gonzaga court from the marriage of Gian Francesco II and Isabella d’Este (1490) through the reign of Vincenzo I and Eleonora de’ Medici (1612). This was an extraordinarily rich era in the history of Mantua and of northern Italy. It encompasses the first patronage of Italian music and musicians at court; the construction of the Palazzo Tè; the organization of performing forces for the newly-built basilica of Santa Barbara and the Teatro all’antico; the composition of Monteverdi’s first opera Orfeo and his Vespers of 1610; and the first performance of Battista Guarini’s tragicomedy Il pastor fido.

In studying the Gonzaga court, we will focus on working with primary sources—learning to transcribe, translate, and analyze letters, payment records, music, and festival descriptions from photographs of original documents; and learning how to read music from original notation. Writ large, we will seek to understand how the manifestation of durable goods informs our understanding of Renaissance Mantuan music and culture. Topics of discussion will include current scholarship on the Mantuan court; the organization of the court and its workforce; interactions among music, spectacle, literature, architecture, and engineering; the production of wedding festivities and carnival celebrations; the role of women in the creation of culture; Mantuan printers and paper manufacturing; and the representation of Mantuan culture to the outside world.

RELI 180 Introduction to Islamic Civilization

TR 11-11:50 (Ernst)
This course is the first of a two-part survey of Islamic civilization and culture from the sixth century to the present (the second part is RELI 181). This part focuses on the first eight centuries of the Islamic era (up to roughly 1500 C.E.), and includes the complex sources of Islamic civilization; the formation of a major world empire; and the relation between religion, politics, and culture in different regions.

RELI 890 “Islamic Thought.”

(Ernst)
This course is a graduate seminar devoted to study of major Islamic thinkers and topics, based on original language texts and modern scholarly interpretations. This year the topic will be major texts and genres in Persian Sufism: `Attar (hagiography), Suhrawardi (philosophical allegory), Gisu Daraz (visionary narrative), and selected poets.

SPAN 382

TR 9:30-10:45 (Hsu)

A survey of Spanish fictional prose in the Golden Age, excluding the Quijote by
Cervantes, in their social-historical and literary contexts from the end of the 15th
century till the end of the 17th century. Based on close reading of representative works,
with constant reference to the overall historical framework, key literary terms, and
concepts, we will explore the meaningful interplay of literary texts and society.

Span 617

TR 12:30-1:45 (Hsu)

A close reading of Cervantes’s masterwork «El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de
la Mancha», with consideration of the background of Renaissance prose (the romance of
chivalry, pastoral, picaresque novel), in relation to the sixteenth-century historiography as well as the literary theory and the conflictive social-historical contexts of the time.