Spring 2025 Courses

MRST 5301: Methods in Medieval & Renaissance Studies
Instructor: John Beusterien
Time: Thursday, 5:30-8:30pm
Modality: Hybrid 

Description: Introduces the scholarship of medieval and renaissance studies. Examines how different academic disciplines analyze and interpret the post-classical, pre-modern past. Introduces resources available at Texas Tech University for the study of the middle ages and the renaissance. This course, offered each spring semester, is a requirement for the MRST graduate certificate. The course provides a multi-disciplinary introduction to the study of medieval and early modern Europe. It encourages students to reflect upon the common problems scholars of the pre-modern past encounter in their work, and the research methodologies they deploy to address these problems. Guest speakers representing core disciplines associated with the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Center at TTU, including History, Art History, English, Literatures & Languages, and Music will give students a chance to learn in more detail how study of the medieval and early modern centuries works in practice. Course assignments will be geared towards introducing students to resources available at TTU for the study of medieval and early modern Europe, and towards getting students to apply the methods they encounter in readings and discussions to their own work.

 

ARTH 5305: Topics in Art History: Spanish Borderlands Art in the Missions of New Spain
Instructor: Klinton Burgio-Ericson
Time: Monday & Wednesday, 6:00-7:00pm
Modality: In-person

Description: This course considers the Spanish missions of sixteenth-century Mexico, and their subsequent developments in the northern Borderlands as arenas of cultural negotiation among colonizers and Native participants; the expansive artistic output these interactions engendered; and the varied responses of historians to this period.

 

CLAS 5311: Classical Art and Archaeology: Rural Life in the Roman World
Instructor: Linda Gosner
Time: Wednesday, 2-4:50pm
Modality: In-person

Description: In the public imagination, ‘ancient Rome’ often evokes images of temples, amphitheaters, palaces, and other monuments of the capital and its cities across the Mediterranean. Scholarship on the Roman world has historically privileged these urban places and elite spaces. A vast majority of people across the Roman world, however, lived in rural landscapes and engaged in agriculture and other industries to make ends meet. In recent years, methodological advances and theoretical developments in archaeology and ancient history have allowed rural life in the Roman world to come into focus. Advances in survey archaeology; newly excavated farmsteads; and new scientific studies of the ancient environment, plants, and animals have all provided fresh data and catalyzed novel ways of understanding rural landscapes and everyday life in the Roman Mediterranean. Drawing from this recent work, this course will explore topics such as Roman perceptions of rural life; time and seasonality; houses, villas, and farmsteads; religion and funerary practices; production and extraction; and the legacy of the Roman rural past. Case studies will be drawn from across the Roman Mediterranean, especially (but not exclusively) Italy and Hispania, where much of the most cutting-edge research has taken place in recent years. By the end of this course, students will be familiar with diverse archaeological evidence from the rural Roman world, as well as methods and theoretical approaches to understanding rural landscapes, peasant/non-elite communities, and everyday life that are applicable to other times and places.

 

ENGL 5303: Studies in Medieval British Literature: Beowulf
Instructor: Brian McFadden
Time: Thursday, 6:00-8:50pm
Modality: Hybrid

Description: This course will be an in-depth translation and analysis of Beowulf, the first major epic poem in the English language. Topics to be discussed: early medieval English conceptions of monstrosity and Otherness; Germanic social structure as depicted in the poem versus the realities of early medieval English society; the role of women in the poem and women in early medieval English society; the tension and accommodation between Christian and Germanic elements in the poem; the paleography and codicology of the text and the application of digital technology, especially the online Electronic Beowulf project at the University of Kentucky, to the study of the poem and the Beowulf manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv).  Requirements: leading one online class discussion; one 20- to 25-page seminar paper; weekly translation and reading in Old English. Texts to be announced but will probably include Mitchell and Robinson’s edition of Beowulf, Klaeber’s Beowulf Fourth Edition by Fulk, Bjork, and Niles, The Beowulf Reader (ed. Bjork and Niles) and A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Orchard). Please note: ENGL 5301 (Old English Language) is a prerequisite for ENGL 5303. ENGL 5334 (History of the English Language is not a satisfactory substitute for ENGL 5301.

 

ENGL 5315: Studies in Fiction: The Lineage of Romance
Instructor: Julie Nelson Couch & Marta Kvande
Time: Wednesday, 6:00-8:50pm
Modality: Hyflex (Separate CRNS: 65311 (in-person), 65307D (online students))

Description: Romance may be among the most denigrated of genres these days (just think of Harlequins) . . . but it is also among the most venerable in its long history and tradition, with origins traceable to the Greeks. In this course, we will study romance as a genre that changes and adapts as it moves through history. What does it mean for a text to be a romance in the Middle Ages? In the eighteenth century? In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? And how do romances from these various historical periods both share generic characteristics and diverge from each other? As we read the capacious genre of romance and attend to its range of cultural contexts, we will investigate the particular aesthetic and ideological values sought by the readers of these texts. Assignments will include a presentation, annotation assignments, and a seminar paper. Pleasenote: In addition to fulfilling MRSC certificate distribution requirements, this course also fulfills separate requirements of English MA degree (British Lit., Early Period, Poetry). Meeting with ENGL 5307: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature.

 

HIST 5341: Studies in Medieval History: Slavery in the Premodern World
Instructor: Jacob Bell
Time: Monday, 3:00-5:50pm
Modality: In-person

Description: The American experience of racially-based chattel slavery dominates scholarly conversations (for good reason) of unfreedom, but it was itself a successor to nearly a millennium of practices of slavery, bondage, and trafficking across the medieval globe. This seminar interrogates systems of enslavement before the transatlantic slave trade through a global lens, drawing on secondary literature from across Eurasia and Africa, focusing roughly on a period of c. 300-1500 CE. At the same time we investigate unfreedom in its multifarious contexts, we will also analyze the ways of knowing and source bases that underpin studying such systems. How do we use, for instance, the archives of slave owners to understand the worlds of slaves?

 

HIST 5349: Studies in Early Modern European History: Knowledge-Making and Scientific Practices in Early Modern Europe
Instructor: Jacob M. Baum
Time: Wednesday, 3:00-5:50pm
Modality: Hybrid

Description: Popular narratives of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century have long informed our understanding of origins of modern science, but recent scholarship has considerably complicated the story, pushing the chronology back considerably into the later medieval period and highlighting the important role played by 'ordinary' sorts of people in the process. Additionally, historians of early modern science have drawn attention to important intersections with visual arts, material culture, the practical forms of knowledge plied by artisans and protected by craft guilds, and central role played by the human body in the making or scientific knowledge in the early modern period. This course will introduce students to recent studies by historians dealing with this topic and in doing so, challenge their understanding of the origins of modern science.

 

MUTH 5321: History of Music Theory I: Antiquity-1600
Instructor: Peter A. Martens
Time: Tuesday & Thursday, 3:30-4:50
Modality: In-person

Description: Students in this reading-intensive seminar will delve into the rich world of writings on the theory and practice of ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance music. These writings, frequently peppered with musical examples and close commentary thereon, also comprise a more general intellectual history of the western world. Working knowledge of musical notation is helpful but not required. Students will be encouraged to tailor class projects to their own interests and areas of study.

 

MUHL 5322: Historical Performance Research and Practice 
Instructor: Angela Mariani Smith
Time: Tuesday & Thursday, 9:30-10:50
Modality: In-person

Description: The Historical Performance “movement’ began in the mid-20th century, catalyzing a veritable avalanche of research, scholarship, performances, and recordings of music of the medieval and early modern period, particularly from, but not necessarily limited to, Europe and the surrounding regions. While "early music" has been its primary focus, Historical Performance is better defined not by a specific repertoire, but by its methodology: 1) the study of instruments and instrumental techniques used in the period of a music's origin; 2) the study of a given piece of music within its original historical, social, and cultural performance context; 3) the examination of original scores, practical or theoretical treatises, or other primary source evidence;  and 4) the practice of synthesizing 1-3 above to create engaging performances for 21st-century audiences. Also critical to the field of Historical Performance are questions of philosophical approaches to the music of the past, and the extent to which we can or cannot re-create music as it might have been heard at the time of its creation. Please note:While MUHL5322 focuses on topics directly relevant to performance, it is not limited to performers or TCVPA students, and will also speak to scholars of medievalism, performance studies, arts practice research, and cultural history. Participants are encouraged to tailor their papers and projects to their specific interests and strengths to the degree that they remain related to the field of historical performance. 

 

 

Fall 2024 Courses

ARTH 4320: Topics in Medieval Art: Medieval Monsters

Instructor: Theresa Flanigan
Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 3:30-4:50pm
Modality: In-person.

Description: Why do humans create monsters? In this course, we examine the monsters that populate medieval images, from the margins of manuscripts to the sculptures and paintings in churches, from the edges of maps to illustrated romances, travel literature, and more. Focusing primarily on late medieval Europe (ca. 1000-1500), we will study the visual representation of monsters as historical evidence, providing deeper insight into both the past societies that created them as well as our own. This undergraduate course may be taken for graduate credit with approval of course instructor and MRSC faculty advisors.

ARTH 5320: Arts of Medieval Europe: The Medieval Book

Instructor: Theresa Flanigan
Time: Mondays & Wednesdays, 3:30-4:50pm
Modality: In-person.

Description: This course examines the history of the illustrated book, from Early Medieval illuminated manuscripts to the printed book of the Renaissance (ca. 500- ca. 1600). We will learn about the making of these early books, and the interplay between image, text, and margins. We will also consider what types of books were produced, for whom they were made, and how these books both reflected and influenced the social, cultural, and intellectual contexts in which they were made, collected, and exchanged. This class will include classroom sessions, a visit to the School of Art’s printmaking studios, and on-site research using the Manuscript Facsimile Collection housed in the Special Collections Library at Texas Tech.

CLAS 5315: Topics in Classics: Magic in the Ancient Mediterranean World

Instructor: Michael A. Freeman 
Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 3:30-4:50pm. 
Modality: In-person

Description: Magic was an important part of humans’ attempts, whether rich or poor, women or men, free or enslaved, to understand and try to exert some control over their place in a complex world. It is a window into the daily desires, challenges, and best and worst impulses of ordinary people. Our class will explore a time and place where it was common, everyday practice to brew love spells and write curses, craft amulets and decipher spell books, divine the future and turn lead into gold. Together we will build an understanding of the human behaviors and artifacts that have come to be called “magic,” giving special attention to the social and cultural situations that created a demand for such “arcane” solutions.

By the completion of the course, you will:
-Understand the many ways people in the ancient Mediterranean incorporated magic into their daily lives
-Evaluate the distinction that society has made between “magic” and “religion”
-Examine what magical texts and artifacts reveal about the human experiences of those who used them
-Develop and investigate original ideas using primary source material 

CMLL 5309: Studies in Literature and Culture: The Archaeology of Greece

Instructor: Christopher Witmore 
Time: Wednesdays, 2:00-4:50pm. 
Modality: hybrid

Description: This course will lead students through archaeological studies of the Greek-speaking world, covering several distinctive premodern periods, from prehistorical, through the Byzantine, Venetian, and Ottoman periods.

ENGL 5306: Studies in Seventeenth Century British Literature: Japanese Haiku and English Sonnets: Bashō and Shakespeare 

Instructor: Ryan Hackenbracht
Time: Wednesdays, 6-8:50pm.
Modality: Hybrid

Description: This course is a comparative study of the haiku and sonnet traditions in Japan and England, respectively, as perfected by Matsuo Bashō (1644-94) and William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Innovative and even iconoclastic for their day, Bashō and Shakespeare wrote poetry as no one had done before, and the fruit of their labors is evident in the ubiquity of haiku and sonnets today—without question, the most recognizable poetic forms in the world. But what made the craft of these two poets so unique and compelling? How did Bashō and Shakespeare reinvent—and in some cases subvert—the literary materials they inherited? How did they navigate the complex relationship between religious thought and aesthetics—a relationship that, whether in Protestant England or Buddhist Japan, was fraught with nuance and even danger?

While our focus will be the haiku of Bashō and the sonnets of Shakespeare, we will also become acquainted with the literary and religious contexts of their work. Thus, readings will include writings by Zen master Dogen and on Shintoism, as well as the haiku of Yosa Buson and Kobayashi Issa; additionally, we will read sonnets by Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, psalm translations by Mary Sidney, and select sermons by Martin Luther and John Donne.

Final research papers will be on a subject of your choice and within your own discipline (Linguistics, Creative Writing, etc.). Additional assignments will include an annotated bibliography and a brief conference-style presentation of your work.

Spring 2024 Courses

MRST 5301: Methods in Medieval & Renaissance Studies
Instructor: John Howe
Time: Tuesdays, 7-9:50pm
Modality: Hybrid 

Description: Introduction to the scholarship of medieval and Renaissance studies. Focuses on interdisciplinary perspectives and Texas Tech resources for medieval and Renaissance studies. Required core course for MRST graduate certificate.

CLAS 5311: Archaeology, Society, and Technology
Instructor: Christopher Witmore
Time: Tuesdays, 2-5:50pm
Modality: Face-to-face

Description: From Olduvai Gorge to banks of the Nile; from the Mediterranean Sea to the Manhattan Project; this course explores relationships between humans, society, and technology over the long term. How do we understand relationships between humans and technology? In what ways do technologies shape society? Each week explores a different juncture in the long story of humans and technologies. Moving between hand axes, fire, and Homo erectus, boats, sails, and Mediterranean societies, electrification, the automobile, and modern nation states it will introduce students to archaeological theories of things, philosophies of technology, and anthropological ideas of externalization, where tools or media were seen as outward and amplified forms of human organs. Ultimately, students will learn how humans, both as composite beings and components of societies, have continued to change saltationally through mergers with technologies, which has been ultimately generative of myriad humanities in the plural. 

ENGL 5303: Studies in Medieval British Literature: Holidays, Holy-Days, and Holy Smoke!: Pilgrimage and Travel in the Global Middle Ages
Instructor: Julie Nelson Couch
Time: Wednesdays, 6-8:50pm
Modality: Hybrid
Assignments: research project, oral presentation, conference-length paper, annotated bibliography. Prerequisite: English 5302, Translating Middle English, Fall 2023 (or accepted evidence, evaluated by the professor, of Middle English fluency)

ENGL 5334: History of the English Language
Instructor: Brian McFadden
Time: Thursdays, 6-8:50pm
Modality: Hybrid

HIST 5341: Studies in Medieval History: Writing Regimes: Interrogating Texts and Contexts
Instructor: Jacob Bell
Time: Mondays, 6-8:50pm
Modality: Hybrid

Description: Written records are a main source of historical evidence and, at the same time, every text has its own contextual history. What forces have shaped those texts, from their material supports to their specific contents? How have documentary regimes worked to control what is preserved, why, and how? How has the categorization of texts into seemingly distinct genres and archives worked to create divisions among forms of documentation?  How can we better account for the multiple media through which texts are transmitted and accessed – even by non-literate individuals and groups? This seminar will interrogate the making of texts in order to enrich, complicate, and challenge our reliance on them, engaging documentary habits and practices of literacy from many cultures, ranging from the earliest forms of writing to the internet. Students will be encouraged to apply what they learn to a particular text or archive relevant to their own research.

MUHL 5320: Music, Climate, Environment, Empire: A Sustainable Music History, 1500-2000.
Instructor: Christopher Smith
Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 12:30-1:50pm
Modality: Face-to-Face

Description: Understanding 500 years of climate crisis c.1500-2000 (the “Age of the Anthropocene”) through the lens of exploration, enclosure, extraction, environment, and empire. This seminar is a one-semester course exploring empires, particularly in Europe and the New World, and the ways their cultural and environmental impact can be understood through the history of sound. In the Age of the Anthropocene (approximately 1500-present), human choices permanently changed the planet’s climate and led to a long-growing, ever-accelerating global environmental crisis. We will place particular emphasis upon the interaction of people, systems, music, and ecology. Includes consideration of the works and contexts in cultivated (“classical”) and vernacular (“folk”) traditions, and what they reveal about power, energy, labor, data, and cultural meaning in the Anthropocene.

SPAN 5356: Seminar in Hispanic Culture: Colonial Blackness: Race and Identity in the Spanish Colonial World
Instructor: Sara Guengerich
Time: Tuesdays 3:30-6:20pm
Modality: Face-to-face.

Description: This graduate course will examine the voices, agency, identity and racial constructions of the Afrocolonial populations that emerge from archival documents, legal treatises, chronicles, religious literatures, poetry and visual documents of Spanish America. We will explore the racial politics of Church and State and the evolution of racial constraints at key moments of the colonial period. Class discussion will be in English; however, written assignments can be written in Spanish or English.

Fall 2023 Courses 

ARTH 5305: Spanish Borderlands: Art in the Missions of New Spain
Instructor: Klinton Burgio-Ericson (Art History, School of Art)
Time: Wednesdays, 6-8:50pm
Modality: In-person

Description: The most extensive artistic project of the Renaissance was the creation of missions and churches among thousands of indigenous towns throughout the Americas. Spanish colonization from Texas, California, Florida, and New Mexico to South America yielded an artistic heritage made largely by Native artists, who transformed European cultural ideas. This course considers the Spanish missions of Mexico and its borderlands as arenas of cultural negotiations among colonizers and Indigenous participants; their expansive artistic output; and the varied responses to this period. In Fall 2023, students will work firsthand with mission artifacts and visit regional sites in Texas and New Mexico.

CMLL 5309: Survey in Mediterranean Archaeology
Instructor: Christopher Witmore (Classics, Archaeology)
Time: Thursdays, 2-4:50pm
Modality: Hybrid

Description: From the economies of Bronze Age palaces, through the classical age of Greek art and architecture to the rise of Rome, Empire and its aftermath, this course sets the latest issues and debates in GrecoRoman archaeology against the general background one would expect of a survey in Classical History. It aims to not only engage key ancient historical texts (From Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Xenophon to Polybius, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Pausanias) but works through the questions archaeologists and historians ask of the ancient world. 

ENGL 5302: Many Tongues: Translating Middle English Literature
Instructor: Julie Nelson Couch (English)
Time: Wednesdays, 6-8:50pm
Modality: Hybrid

Description: This course introduces students to the grammar, syntax, vocabulary, phonology, and prosody of Middle English. This course also introduces students to Middle English manuscript studies. The term Middle English encompasses an array of regional dialects that coexisted in England roughly between the Norman Conquest in 1066 and the standardization of English in 1430. Class time will be spent translating and pronouncing Middle English, transcribing from manuscript facsimiles, and discussing related issues in translation, manuscript context, and literary interpretation. By the end of the course, students will be able to comprehend and read aloud Middle English poetry that ranges widely in dialect, form, and genre. This course will appeal to students interested in form, prosody, book history, the theory and praxis of translation, and getting to read some outlandish poetry! This course also serves as the prerequisite for the spring ENGL 5303 Medieval British Literature course; 5302 will prepare students to study a Middle English corpus (such as the Canterbury Tales, the Gawain poems, Arthurian romances, or another set of poems) in the spring.

FREN 5310: Medieval & Early Modern French Literature
Instructor: Lucas Wood (French)
Time: Thursdays, 5-7:50pm
Modality: hybrid.

Description: A seminar discussion of French literature in the medieval and early modern eras. Themes and topics vary by semester.

HIST 5342: Readings in Renaissance & Reformation History (Health & Healing in the Early Modern World).
Instructor: Jacob M. Baum (History)
Time: Wednesdays, 3-5:50pm
Modality: Hybrid

Description: Introduces students to historical debates on topics in cultural history covering the period from ca. 1400-1700 CE. The fall 2023 iteration of this course will introduce students to how people thought about and cultivated bodily health through a curated selection of recent monographs (book-length studies) by historians. Sub-themes emphasized will include the impacts of the Renaissance, Reformation, and early European colonialism on medical thought and practice.

ENGL 5305: Shakespeare
Instructor: Matthew Hunter (English)
Time: Mondays, 2-4:50pm
Modality: Hybrid

Description: Emphasis on Shakespeare's comedies, tragedies, histories, poetry, or a combination of these.