Learning outcomes:
With the successful completion of the course students will
- Familiarize themselves with early modern European history,
- Gain an in-depth understanding of social practices and values of early modern societies,
- Understand the relevant interpretive perspectives and historiography,
- Assess changes in historical perspective, reassess historical knowledge, critically recognize how the present conditions historical research,
- Assess the limitations and the possibilities primary material offers,
- Recognize the complexity that the production of historical knowledge involves,
- Conduct bibliographical research and develop writing skills.
General Competences:
Search for, analysis and synthesis of data and information
Working independently
Production of new research ideas
Criticism and self-criticism
Production of free, creative and inductive thinking
“Crisis”, “transition”, “change” have been deeply ingrained as concepts, analytical and descriptive categories in the historiography and conceptualization of European early modernity over the last decades. The “crisis of the Reformation”, the “transition from feudalism to capitalism”, or the “crisis of the Renaissance” are among well-known descriptions for the period between the 15th and 18th century in Western Europe. Early modernity as a historiographical category is inextricably associated with the search for the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. The course examines these perspectives and their assumptions in diverse schools of historical thought, including post-war Marxist historiography, the Annales school, historical anthropology and cultural history, gender history, and more recently global history and transcultural history. Subsequently the course delves into the values and social and cultural practices of early modern European societies through policies of toleration and persecution and processes of othering. We are interested in those societies’ self-perception, ideals, expectations and taxonomies in the light of wider changes that pre-modern European societies experienced and fueled the rhetoric and practices of exclusion / inclusion and criminalization of difference and dissent.
Thematic units:
1. “Crisis” as an analytical category in history and historiography. Is history in crisis? A recurring question.
2. “Crisis” and “transition” as categories of analysis in the historiography of early modern Europe.
3. Transitions and changes in premodern European societies: A Longue Durée Perspective.
4. Societies in conflict: Persecuting heterodoxy during the Protestant and Catholic Reformations.
5. Aliens within: The Jews in the Christian West.
6. Restructuring gender and sexual relations.
7. New judicial categories and targets: Sodomy and witchcraft.
8. The overseas expansion: Conquest, Christian universalism and cultural hierarchies.
9. The transition from religious to “racial” Otherness.
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Related academic journals:
- Sixteenth Century Journal
- Renaissance Quarterly
- Past & Present
- History Workshop Journal
- Gender & History
- Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
- Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies
- Comparative Studies in Society and History
- Journal of Global History
- Journal of World History
- Mediterranean Historical Review
