Università Roma Tre

Course Schedule: Tuesday 5pm-7pm Aula 12; Thursday 5pm-7pm Aula 12.
Classes start on Tuesday, March 9 at 5pm



Course Syllabus: (days, topics and readings)


T 9 March - Course Intro: Historical Thinking and Cultural History

- M. C. Lemon, Philosophy of History: A Guide for Students, pp. 290-303 (“The What is History Debate”)
- Alessandro Arcangeli, Cultural History: A Concise Introduction, pp. 1-17 (“In search of a definition”); pp. 30-48 (“Interwoven paths”)


TH 11 March - No Class Today! We will make up for it on 6 May


T 16 March - Popular Culture?

- Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, pp. 3-22 (The Discovery of the People)

- Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, pp. 78-103
(Popular Culture in the Mirror of the Penitentials)


TH 18 March – Francis Petrarch and Humanism

- Kenneth Bartelett, The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance, pp. XIX-XX; 1-8 (Introduction; Quintilian); pp. 25-34 (Petrarch: Introduction; Letter to Posterity; The Ascent of Mount Ventoux; Letter to the Shade of Cicero)


T 23 March - The Humanist “Revolution” and the Renaissance

- Kenneth Bartelett, The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 66-86 (Coluccio Salutati, Letter to Peregrino Zambeccari; Vespasiano da Bisticci: Life of Poggio Bracciolini; Life of Niccolò Niccoli; Lorenzo Valla, The Glory
of the Latin Language)

- Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination (Ch."Humanism: A Program for Ruling Classes")


TH 25 March - Women of the Renaissance

- Bartelett, The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance pp. 111-133 (Marriage, the Family, and Women: Intro; Francesco Barbaro; Leon Battista Alberti)

- Carolyn James, “Politics and Domesticity in the Letters of Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga, 1490 –1519”, Renaissance Quarterly 65 (2012): 321–52


T 30 March - The “Universal Man” of The Renaissance

- Bartelett, The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 97-104 (Florentine Neoplatonism and Mysticism: Intro; Marsilio Ficino); pp. 104-108 (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola)

- Leonardo da Vinci, Selections from the Notebooks, in The Italian Renaissance Reader, ed. by Bondanella and Musa, pp. 185-195



TH 1 April - An Exercise of Critical Thinking: Lorenzo Valla’s Reading of The Donation of Constantine

- Bartelett, The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance, pp. 206-210 (Lorenzo Valla:
The Principal Arguments from the Forged Donation of Constantine)

- The Donation of Constantine: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/donatconst.asp


2-7 April: Spring Break


TH 8 April - Political Thought: Niccolò Machiavelli

- Starn, Seeing Culture in a Room for a Renaissance Prince, in Biersack, Aletta, The New Cultural History, pp. 205-232

- Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in Bondanella and Musa (eds.), The Italian Renaissance Reader, pp. 258-264; 273-274; 291-293


T 13 April - Pope Sixtus IV, Conspiracies, and the Making of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel

- Joseph H. Lynch and Phillip C. Adamo, The Medieval Church: A Brief History, pp. 318-327 (“Crisis and Calamity”); pp. 329-342 (“The Church in the Fifteenth Century”)

- Marcello Simonetta, The Montefeltro Conspiracy: A Renaissance Mystery Decoded, selected pp.


TH 15 April – The Age of Geographical Explorations

- Cristopher Columbus, Journal of the First Voyage, paragraphs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 50-54:
http://eada.lib.umd.edu/text-entries/journal/


T 20 April - Witchcraft: A Renaissance Contradiction?

- Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, Ch. 2 (The Intellectual Foundations)

- Charles Zika, Images of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, in Levack, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America


TH 22 April - Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum and Related Traditions

- Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 400-1700, pp. 176-228 (“The Hammer of Witches”)

- Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, “Strix”, in Witchcraft in Europe, ed. by Alan Charles Kors
and Edward Peters, selected pp.


T 27 April - Carlo Ginzburg’s Benandanti

- Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries, selected pp.


TH 29 April - Civic Rituals and Popular Cultures: The Case of the Carnival

- Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early-Modern Europe, pp. 178-204 (The World of Carnival)


T 4 May - Paper due today
Protestant and Catholic Reforms

- Lisa Jardine, Erasmus: Man of Letters, selected pp.

- Martin Luther, Address to the Christian Nobility: https://history.hanover.edu/texts/luthad.html

- Paolo Giustiniani and Pietro Querini, Booklet to Pope Leo X on the Reform of the Church, selected pp.


TH 6 May - Science, Theology, and Authority

- The Index of Forbidden Books: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/indexlibrorum.asp

- Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite, the Universe, and the Worlds, selected pp.

- Galileo Galilei's Indictment and Abjuration (1633): https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1630galileo.asp



T 11 May – Current Cultural Trends

- James Hankins, How Not to Defend the Humanities:
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/not-defend-humanities/

- Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, selected pp.


TH 13 May - Course Recap and Final Exam Preparation


Final Exams

 All readings will be made available by the professor on Moodle. The Prof.’s lectures as well as class discussion will be based on those readings.