Introductory description

This 30 CATS second-year undergraduate module provides a thematic introduction to European history of the later medieval and Renaissance periods.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Term 1

1. Defining the Middle Ages
2. Freedom and Unfreedom: Serfdom and slavery
3. The Medieval Family
4. Transgressing Gender roles in Middle Ages: Cross-dressing and prostitution
5. Towns, Trade and Wealth: Debt, Credit and Profit
6. Revolt and Rebellion: Urban and Rural Uprisings
7. Death and the Plague
8. The Medieval Church
9. The 'supernatural': Revenants, Witches and Ghosts

Term 2
10. Religious Norms and Heresy: Cathars, Lollards and Hussites
11. The Avignon Papacy
12. Science and Learning: Universities and Learning Outside Universities
13. The Italian Renaissance
14. War and Chivalry: The Hundred Years War
15. 15th-century England and France: Late Medieval Monarchies
16. Female power and Queenship in 15th-century England and Renaissance Italy
17. Religious Warfare: The crusades
18. The Rise of the Ottomans

Term 3
19. Latin Christendom and Asia
20. Exploration and Expansion

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the Medieval World between c.800 and c.1500.
• Communicate ideas and findings, adapting to a range of situations, audiences and degrees of complexity.
• Generate ideas through the analysis of a broad range of primary source material, including electronic resources.
• Analyse and evaluate the contributions made by existing scholarship.
• Act with limited supervision and direction within defined guidelines, accepting responsibility for achieving deadlines.

Indicative reading list

• Barthélemy, Dominique, 'Revisiting the "Feudal Revolution" of the Year 1000' in The Serf, the Knight and the Historian (New York: Ithaca, 2009)
• Geary, Patrick J., The Myth of Nations : The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2002)
• Bailey, Mark, The English Manor, c.1200-c.1500 (Manchester, 2002)
• Bailey, Mark, The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England: From Bondage to Freedom (Suffolk : Boydell & Brewer, 2014)
• Day, John, The Medieval Market Economy (Oxford, 1987)
• Lambert, Malcolm, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1992)
• Cohn, Samuel Kline Jr., (ed. and trans.), Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe (Manchester, 2004)
• Cohn, Samuel Kline Jr., The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death : Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy, (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
• Dyer, Christopher, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, 1200-1520, rev. ed. (Cambridge, 1998)
• Herlihy, David, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, ed. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)
• Karras, Ruth Mazo, Unmarriages: Women, Men and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages (2012).
• Karras, Ruth Mazo, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto others (2005).
• Curry, Anne, The Hundred Years War (Basingstoke, 2003)

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.