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Campus | Bryn Mawr |
Semester | Fall 2023 |
Registration ID | HISTB203001 |
Course Title | High Middle Ages |
Credit | 1.00 |
Department | Environmental Studies |
Instructor | Sargent,Abigail Marie |
Times and Days | TTh 12:55pm-02:15pm
|
Room Location | OL111 |
Additional Course Info | Class Number: 2826 Were becoming used to the idea of environmental crisis. Drought, floods, storms, and extinctions constantly remind us that humans can be terrifyingly effective at shaping the world in which we live. But the interplay between human agents and the rest of the world is as old as humanity. This course explores how people in the European Middle Ages mostly the peasants left out of the history books lived with and made decisions about limited natural resources, looming overexploitation, customary common rights, and shared responsibilities, all within the narrow margins which characterized their immediate and taxing relationship with their landscapes. The period is alien in many ways: it was an age of faith, oaths, and lordship. Horsepower was measured in literal horses (or in human muscle). But the decisions its people made, and the assumptions they held, have shaped our own world in ways we dont always see. How did people in another age work within the constraints set by their environments? How did they change those environments to suit their desires? And whose desires were being pursued? Who was left out? Through attention to cultivation, climates, plague, and human conceptions of the natural world, well consider these questions, and seek to gain glimpses of the human-to-human and human-to-non-human relationships that dominated the medieval experience. Approach: Inquiry into the Past (IP); Haverford: A: Meaning, Interpretation (Texts) (A), Humanities (HU) Enrollment Cap: 35. |
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