The course explores how art worked in politics and religion from ca. 300-1200 CE in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Students encounter the arts of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam, great courts and migratory societies; dynamics of word and image, multilingualism, intercultural connection, and local identity. We examine how art can represent and shape notions of sacred and secular power. We consider how the work of 'art' in this period is itself powerful and, sometimes, dangerous. Course format combines lecture on various cultural contexts with workshop discussion focused on specific media and materials, or individual examples.

This seminar explores law in Japan, and the social, administrative, and judicial functions of law across different premodern societies. It uses centuries-old records of divorces, inheritance conflicts, and even murders as case studies mainly from precedent-based legal systems in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. The chief focus is medieval Japan, seen in comparison to medieval England, whose 1215 Magna Carta inspires analogies to Japan's classic 1232 code (The Joei Formulary), and to the Mongol Yuan legal system in China.

Many challenges we face today are expressed in Chaucer's works but in a form different enough to shake us out of our heads so we can think honestly about what beleaguers human societies. On the one hand, his poetry is unfamiliar--high art from the fourteenth century cast in a language not ours, Middle English. On the other hand, his poetry is familiar, putting before our minds serious subjects we encounter today like military (and police) violence, sexual assault, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, class conflict, political protest, and social autonomy. This Chaucer class is about the politics of art and the art of politics.

Feeling lost? This course links two key forms that shape the spaces we dwell in, cross through, and imagine: medieval maps and travel narratives. These strange artifacts also index familiar categories like difference, identity, and control. We'll query what these epistemes make happen, including cultural diffusion and definitionally transgressive tales of travel. Along with critical and cognate works, these texts will expose worlds in which space wavers and dislocates where we're mapped.

A young Arthurian knight loses honor because he enjoys having sex with his wife. The Grail King is wounded near fatally in the genitals while trying to win the "wrong" woman. Young kings dress up and act like women in order to woo their prospective brides. This course will explore what it meant to be men and women in love (with each other or with God) in some of the most spectacular literary works of the German Middle Ages. The larger context for our discussion will be a more nuanced understanding of the history of gender. Readings and discussion primarily in modern German, some readings and discussion in English.

Team-taught seminar focuses on history of the book in German speaking regions with a specific focus on the 15th century, an age of both increased manuscript production and the invention of print. Students explore book-making both in manuscript and early print form, examining how these forms converged and diverged with the advent of new technologies. In addition to the basics of manuscript and early print book archival research, the seminar explores the 15th-c. historical context (late medieval devotion, gender and the book, reformation). Final project on manuscript or early book in the Princeton collection, resulting in on-line exhibit.

This course will focus on the history of the later Roman Empire, a period which historians often refer to as "Late Antiquity." We will begin our class in pagan Rome at the start of the third century and end it in Baghdad in the ninth century: in between these two points, the Mediterranean world experienced a series of cultural and political revolutions whose reverberations can still be felt today. We will witness civil wars, barbarian invasions, the triumph of Christianity over paganism, the fall of the Western Empire, the rise of Islam, the Greco-Arabic translation movement and much more.

This seminar course examines how people during the early Middle Ages defined their existence through negotiated boundaries of gender, class, ethnicity, race, religion, and the human condition. Our work will curate the contributions of marginalized groups to decenter traditional narratives. Students will leave this course with a broad understanding of early medieval history, an appreciation of historical work done by people often omitted from our histories, and a mastery of historical and interdisciplinary tools for promoting awareness and understanding marginalized groups.

This course is an investigation of rural society in northern Europe during the High Middle Ages, covering issues like land clearance, agricultural technology, labor (including serfdom), crime, agricultural crises, etc.

This course covers the study of the entirety of Dante's "Commedia" in connection with Dante's other poetic and prose works in the vernacular. Highly interactive seminar, taught in Italian.

An examination of the Winchester organa, the most sophisticated examples of the dominant polyphonic tradition from 850 to 1100. This tradition was based on a fundamentally different conception of polyphony than the new (and lasting) tradition that emerged around 1100. Winchester-style polyphony vanished around the same time: it was an evolutionary dead end. The organa used to be regarded as undecipherable, since the voices are written in unheightened neumes. Yet in 1968 Andreas Holschneider published his brilliant discovery of their decipherment. We will transcribe and discuss selected organa along the principles he established.

It is due to wonder, Aristotle tells us, that man began to philosophize. In the premodern Islamic world, wonder was also an experience linked with the pursuit of knowledge and discovery. It defined a spiritual attitude, an aesthetic outlook, and the encounter with strange and unknown worlds. We will explore the manifestations of wonder in medieval Arabic culture through reading travel narratives, medieval Arabic texts on the marvels of the world, fables, fantastic tales, poetry, and the Quran. We will also study medieval Arabic theoretical discussions of wonder as a literary effect.

This class explores medieval Islamic history from the bottom up -- through everyday documents from Egypt produced and used by men and women at all levels of society: state decrees, personal and business letters, legal contracts, court records, and accounts. Even the smallest details of these everyday writings tell us big things about the world in which they were written. Each week will focus in depth on a particular document or cluster of documents that open different doors onto politics, religion, class, commerce, material history, and family relationships in Egypt from just before the Islamic conquests until just before the Ottoman era.