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.

Spring 2023

MRST 5301: Methods in Medieval & Renaissance Studies
Instructor: John Beusterien (CMLL, Department of Spanish)
Time: Thursdays, 6-8:50pm
Modality: Hybrid

Description: 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, 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. Students in course will participate in the Centers and Peripheries conference hosted at Texas Tech University. Meeting in-Person Room 255 Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures and Online, Synchronous. Note: This course is required for completion of the MRSC certificate.

 

ENGL 5304: Studies in Renaissance British Literature - How to Read an Early Modern Play
Instructor: Matthew Hunter (Department of English)
Time: Wednesdays, 6-8:50PM.
Modality: Online.

 

ENGL 5303: Studies in Medieval British Literature - Beowulf
Instructor: Brian McFadden (Department of English)
Time: Tuesdays, 2-4:50PM.
Modality: Face-to-face.

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, Otherness, and race; 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 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). Note: ENGL 5301 (Old English Language) is a prerequisite for ENGL 5303. History of the English Language is not a satisfactory substitute for ENGL 5301. Requirements fulfilled: Philology foreign language option; Early British literature; Poetry genre requirement; Book History and Medieval and Renaissance Studies certificates.

ARTH 5320: Arts of Medieval Europe: Medieval Monsters
Instructor: Theresa Flanigan (Department of Art History)
Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 3:00-4:20.
Modality: Face-to-face

Description: In this course we will 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. While focusing primarily on late medieval Europe (ca. 1000-1500), we will compare medieval European monsters with monsters from other cultures, such as Africa, China, Japan, and the Americas, as well as our own modern-day monsters. We will study the visual representation of monsters as historical evidence, providing deeper insight into both the societies that created them as well as our own. Questions we will ask include: Why does a society create monsters? What do monsters symbolize? How do monsters evoke emotions, such as fear and wonder? What values do monsters communicate? What social, cultural, or political functions do monsters serve? What are you afraid of? The course will be arranged around a series of thematic units, each with a discussion based on a series of assigned primary and secondary source readings. For a grade, students will perform independent research, write a thesis-driven research paper, and do oral presentations related to the course's themes. Prerequisite: consent of the instructor. Note: Multiple critical, theoretical, and historical approaches to the art and architecture of Medieval Europe. May be repeated with change of topic up to 9 hours.