Intercollegiate Modules

Taught by Dr Thomas Balfe

This course examines the connections between the visual image and understandings of nature in early modernity. It concentrates on northern Europe (primarily the Netherlands, Britain, Germany and France) and its colonies in Asia and North and South America, exploring a series of case studies that focus on depictions of land, plants, animals and insects, and on the entanglement of these phenomena with human beings. The visual materials will include works in artistic genres such as landscape and still life painting, but also artefacts such as maps, travel books, automata, and anatomical and ethnographic depictions that challenge the modern distinction between artistic and scientific images. Rather than situating these materials within frameworks of art and collecting narrowly defined, the course asks how they were also connected to changes in social life, to widening patterns of trade and exploration, and to developments in dietetics, medicine, philosophy and other forms of knowledge.

The course begins by considering period understandings of nature, and their relationship to categories such as the human, the creatural, the supernatural and the preternatural. We will also think about how ecocritical and ecological approaches might deepen a historical investigation of our materials. The main run of classes will explore the interwoven empirical, political and symbolic meanings conveyed by early modern images of nature. Possible topics include: Dürer’s watercolour nature studies; Bruegel’s depictions of the months and seasons; early modern microscopy; visual cultures of human and animal anatomy; sottobosco painting; the early modern ménagerie; hunting scenes and gamepiece still life; Altdorfer’s depictions of the German forest; and European artists’ responses to the environments of the Atlantic world, Asia and the Arctic.

Taught by Dr Sara Miglietti

This module will explore a range of canonical and non-canonical political texts from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, contextualizing them historically and situating them in a longer tradition of moral and political philosophy that stretches back to Classical Antiquity and forward to modern times. We will also discuss methodological questions regarding their interpretation and engage critically with seminal scholarship in this area. Specific topics will include: what counts as a ""political"" text?; the reception and transformation of classical theories in new historical contexts (e.g. movements of religious reform; the rise of nation-states; the ""discovery"" of America and the beginnings of the colonial race); main trends (e.g. the rise of political ""realism"" vs. ""utopianism"") and debates (e.g., around the best form of government, resistance rights, religious toleration, just war, and the role of women in society).

Taught by Dr Alessandro Scafi

The aim of this module is to identify and explain the significance of religious culture in late medieval, Renaissance and early modern Italy, providing a basic understanding of the interactions between politics, social life, cultural expression and religion. From the late Middle Ages to the early modern period politics and religion were inextricably bound together, the Church was involved in temporal matters and religious beliefs and practices were powerful motivating factors in contemporary policy making; religion was expressed both in rituals and in texts and works of art and formed a significant dimension of Italian culture and scholarship. Students are encouraged to develop a sound knowledge and critical understanding of Italian cultural history through the discussion of specific themes: the relation between pagan philosophy and Christian faith, Church and Empire, Church and Papacy, faith and space, sex and sanctity, Islam and Christianity, Jews and Christians, Church Councils and spiritual renewal, secular and religious utopias. Religion and Society in Renaissance Italy aims to critically assess the development of religious thought and practice by looking at texts and works of art, reaching – beyond factual information – a critical and unbiased assessment of the past and its complexities.

Taught by Professor John Tresch

This course will study cosmograms: concrete objects which represent the universe as a whole. It will explore connections between art and science, including the intellectual function of images and the aesthetics of representing the cosmos and knowledge about it, in science, religion, and folk traditions. Students will be provided methods for studying such objects in action, as part of ritual practices, projects of knowledge, and political programs. One aim of the course will be to consider the changing form and content of cosmograms from the medieval through modern period, especially with regard to scientific images. The course will trace the gradual emergence of a cosmology said to be mechanical, materialist, and objective, and its interactions and oppositions with other views of the cosmos. By exploring these conflicts and controversies through a focus on cosmograms, we will ground these longstanding issues of intellectual history in concrete contexts and the making of objects and images. 

Taught by Professor Bill Sherman, Dr Matt Coneys and Dr Giles Mandelbrote

The aim of the module is to provide an understanding of the culture of the book in Renaissance Europe—a time and place that saw the invention of printing, the growth of both private and public libraries, the development of bibliographical protocols, the advent of the humanist printer and new techniques for active reading. It also saw the beginnings of colonialism and conquest, cultural revolutions, religious reformations, and profound social upheavals. What role did the book play in these changes—or did it? How can it help us to understand the changing world of the European Renaissance? Through seminars, collection visits, and practical training at a historically appropriate printing press, this module will offer an overview of the history and the historiography of the book, with a special focus on the material aspects of production, dissemination and use.

Taught by Thalia Allington-Wood

With a title that borrows from Rosalind Krauss’s seminal 1979 article ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, this module examines Renaissance sculpture according to broad parameters to think about how images and other media (such as drawing, print, architecture, paint) were fundamental to the creation and reception of sculptural objects. Together we will explore drawing and modelling in the artist workshop; the adaption and migration of sculpture into painting; the role of sculpture in the rituals of religious life – from mobile, polychromed crucifixes to immersive pilgrimage sites such as the Sacro Monte at Varallo; as well as sculpture within the framework of society and culture: large scale public work, portrait busts, installations within the villa garden and, finally, ephemeral sculptures made for festivities and banquets.

In doing so, we will encounter the famous, at times monumental, artworks by sculptors such as Donatello, Michelangelo and Giambologna, but we will also consider more unfamiliar objects and materials: life-size holy dolls, votive wax figures, sculptures made from food and the colossal monsters of the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo. We will examine how sculpture was discussed in a range of primary sources, from artistic treatise to the fictional Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, alongside recent scholarship that engages with materiality and Renaissance making practices. It will become apparent that sculpture was a varied, experimental artform, which played a key role in the embodied practices of Renaissance life.

Taught by Dr Lucy Nicholas

This module places the spotlight on a major and vital dimension of the Renaissance: the revival of the classical tradition. We will begin by considering the quest for and rediscovery of ancient texts, and their subsequent diffusion and assimilation into humanist curricula across Europe. Students will be encouraged to consider how classical literature, rather than superseding a largely scholastic and Christian framework, was integrated into it, and also the extent to which the Church Fathers and medieval writers had already laid some of the groundwork for a much more extensive phenomenon of absorption. Students will be invited to take into account developments such as standardization and canon formation, but also regional and chronological trends.

The process of reception will be assessed from a number of different perspectives, but always in way that prioritizes full contextualization and the complexities of textual transmission. Areas of reception that will feature in the course include: the concept of imitatio (itself an ancient practice and idea), generic organization, literary modes (such as metre), the use of prose vs poetry, and preferences for Latin or Greek texts. The reception of certain classical authors whose influence was particularly profound will also be charted through case-studies, and these authors will include Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and Plutarch. In parallel, students will be encouraged to explore the impact of ancient works that are in modern times less familiar but that were regularly consulted in the early modern period, such as the output of Late Antiquity. Another complicating factor will be the repackaging and mediation of classical literature in repositories which meant that early modern writers did not always need to return to the original source. A further key consideration in our discussions about reception will be Christian belief systems and also the Reformation, and a significant part of the course will be devoted to the question of the relationship between paganism and Christianity, and the degree of harmonization that was possible between the two. The course will further cover a range of areas in which reception occurred, from the world of art to the realms of diplomacy and nation-building.

The importance of the languages of Latin and Greek will constitute a further focus. As the primary vehicles for classical learning, we will assess the extent to which Greco-Roman sources enjoyed a hegemony even as the production of vernacular literature burgeoned. At the same time, students will be asked to reflect on the ways in which the growing vernaculars were able to harness classicizing approaches in ways that might be yet more inventive. A major theme of the module will be issues of bilingualism and multilingualism, and students will be introduced to macaronic texts and also tracts which expressly confront linguistic choice.