New modules running in 2012-13
Family and Society in the Graeco-Roman World
Science and Religion: From Galileo to Global Warming
Divided Unity: France since 1870
Markets and Morals in early modern England
Visions of the Mind in the Age of Extremes
Religion, Magic and Society in Late Antiquity
FAMILY AND SOCIETY IN THE GRAECO-ROMAN WORLD
Course Convenor: Dr April Pudsey
This module explores the culture of the family in its various social, economic, legal and demographic contexts across the ancient world, addressing key themes in the history of the pre-modern family: influences on family size and structure, obligations between family members, and relationships between the family and wider society. Topics we will cover include: marriage and divorce, childhood, polygyny, brother-sister marriage, birth control, wet-nursing, education and religion, grand-parenting, and adoption. We will look at material from Classical Athens, and Egypt and the Roman world up to the late antique and Byzantine periods, considering the impact of Christianity (and even early Islamic influences) on the nature of the family. We will examine these themes from the perspectives of a wide range of material (in translation) ranging from legal texts and law court speeches, inscriptions, art and funerary monuments, papyrological documents and letters, to literary and hagiographic texts.
KEY TEXTS FOR THE COURSE
Bagnall, R.S. and Frier, B.W. 1994. The Demography of Roman Egypt Cambridge
Cooper, K. 2007. The Fall of the Roman Household Cambridge
Cox, C.A. 1998. Household Interests: Property, Marriage Strategies, and Family Dynamics in Ancient Athens Princeton
George, M. 2005. The Roman Family of the Empire. Italy and Beyond Oxford
Huebner, S. and Ratzan, D. 2009. Growing Up Fatherless in Antiquity Cambridge
Dasen, V. & Späth, T. 2010.Children, Memory and Family Identity in Roman Culture Oxford
Laes, C. 2011. Children in the Roman Empire: Outsiders Within Cambridge
Nathan, G. 2002. The Family in Late Antiquity London
Patterson, C. 1998. The Family in Greek History Harvard
Papaconstantinou, A. and Talbot, A-M. 2009. Becoming Byzantine. Children and Childhood in Byzantium Dumbarton Oaks
Parkin, T.G. 2002. Old Age in the Roman World: A Cultural and Social History Baltimore
Pomeroy, S. 1997. Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece Oxford
Rawson, B. ed. 2012. Blackwell Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds
Rowlandson, J. 1998. Women in Graeco-Roman Egypt Cambridge
Science and Religion: From Galileo to Global Warming
Course Convenor: Adam Shapiro
This module is designed to survey the intellectual developments of “science” and “religion” from the seventeenth century to the present day. This survey proceeds from an understanding that both “science” and “religion” are concepts that have each evolved historically and that interact in different ways depending on their contexts (and across different cases of particular sciences and religions.) This module will examine the history of those interactions and the groups of people who are responsible for them. No prior background in either science or religion is expected or required for this module.
Some of the major questions that will be addressed in this module:
- Are there inherent tensions or incompatibilities between science and religion in general, or only in particular instances involving specific sciences and religions?
- Are the categories of “science” and “religion” essentially tied to their origins in Western cultures?
- How do the origins of these concepts allow us to speak of science and religion in world history?
- How do debates over science-religion relationships affect political discourse about human and civil rights?
- How do science and religion interactions depend of national contexts?
- In what ways do social movements use science-religion rhetoric to mediate other forms of cultural interaction?
- Are science and religion completely distinct enterprises, or do they share some common features?
Recommended Readings
Ronald L. Numbers, ed. Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009)
Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Cantor, and Stephen Pumfrey, eds. Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (2010)
John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991)
Martin Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (2008)
J. L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (1999)
Bertolt Brecht. Galileo
BODY POLITICS: HEALTH, ILLNESS AND DEATH IN MODERN BRITAIN
Course convenor: Dr. Carmen M Mangion
This course examines developments in the social and cultural understandings of health, illness and death in Britain from the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. We will examine cultural responses – such as behaviours, beliefs and emotions – to these phenomena and question what they can tell us much about changes to social structures, individual and community identities and family relationships. The course will also address religion, secularisation and the medicalisation of the body as influences to changing ideas of health, illness and death. Engaging with historical texts, literature and visual sources, students will develop their historical interpretation skills and understand how diverse responses to health, illness and death reflected wider social and cultural change.
KEY TEXTS FOR COURSE
ARIES, P., The Hour of Our Death (1981)
JALLAND, P., Death in the Victorian family (1996)
STRANGE, J.M., Death, grief and poverty, 1870-1914 (2005)
PORTER, ROY, Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 1550-1860 (1987)
SMITH, F. B., The People’s Health, 1830-1910 (1990).
WADDINGTON, KEIR, An Introduction to the Social History of Medicine: Europe since 1500 (2011)
WEAR, ANDREW (ed), Medicine in Society: Historical Essays (1992)
The course outline can be downloaded here.
MARKETS AND MORALS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Course Convenor: Dr. Brodie Waddell
Early modern England was a nation in the midst of rapid economic change, witnessing expanding markets in goods, land, labour and credit. This sparked fierce debates at the time about the ethical questions and moral concerns raised by such developments – in some cases leading to violence and rioting. Students will explore how early modern people asserted, challenged or defended a wide variety of commercial and financial behaviours ranging from predatory money-lending to privatizing common goods to protecting local producers from foreign competition. Even the sex trade and ‘the marriage market’ will be addressed.
As well as becoming familiar with scholarship from a diverse array of theoretical and disciplinary traditions, students will also engage with many types of primary sources. Students will have the chance to compare and contrast the ways in which controversial economic problems were presented in speculative fiction, religious polemics, folk ballads, and woodcut images. In addition, this module will include some discussion of the connections between early modern economic debates and those of today, thinking critically about the continued salience of past moral concerns in the twenty-first century.
Recommended Reading
Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (1978)
Natasha Glaisyer, The Culture of Commerce in England, 1660-1720 (2006)
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972)
Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500-1660 (1996)
Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (1998)
R.H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912)
R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)
Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (1978)
Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (2001)
Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities. Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain, 1470-1750 (2001)
Visions of the Mind in the Age of Extremes
Course Convenor: Daniel Pick
This option explores a number of key transformations in theories of human nature, psychic life and the unconscious in Anglo-American thought and culture. Developments in modern accounts of the mind are considered alongside contemporaneous ideas about war, fascism and Nazism. Students will be able to learn about the diverse ways in which ideas of the unconscious and theories of group dynamics emerged and to see how they were harnessed to interpretations of politics in general, and the Third Reich in particular. This module also traces applications of ‘the talking cure’ in projects for ‘denazification’ and the restoration of democracy. Lectures and seminars examine how representations of the mind shaped interpretations of political violence, xenophobia, racism and militarism in the direst decades of the ‘Age of Extremes’. The course draws on a rich literature in the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Students will be exposed to a range of views of and debates about the implications of psychoanalytic thought and the ‘psy’ professions at large for the writing of history. The module also draws upon some film and audio material and, throughout, makes use of a dedicated website of archives, ‘The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind’, housed in the student resources section of the HCA website.
Recommended Reading
Theodor Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, (1951), repr. in id., The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London 1991).
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem [1963], London, 2006
Julia Borossa and Ivan Ward (eds.), ‘Psychoanalysis, Fascism, Fundamentalism’, special issue of Psychoanalysis and History, 11: 2 (2009)
John Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914 (New Haven, 2000).
Jane Caplan, ‘The Historiography of National Socialism’, in Michael Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London, 1997), ch. 21.
Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, 2001).
Mark Edmundson, The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism (London, 2007)
Sigmund Freud, Mass Psychology and other Writings, London, 2004, with an introduction by Jacqueline Rose
Kirsten Fremaglich, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957–1965 (Walthan, Mass., 2007)
Stephen Frosh, Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic (London, 2010)
Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (New York, 1985)
Roger Griffin (ed.), Fascism (Oxford, 1995)
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, ‘Extreme Traumatization as Cumulative Trauma—Psychoanalytic Investigations of the Effects of Concentration Camp Experiences on Survivors and their Children’, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 36 (1981), 415–50
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, London, 1994
Louise Hoffman, ‘American Psychologists and Wartime Research on Germany, 1941–1945’, American Psychologist, 42 (1992), 264–73
Melanie Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children (London, 1932)
Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY, 1998)
Daniel Lerner, Psychological Warfare against Nazi Germany: The Sykewar Campaign, D-Day to VE-Day [1949] (Cambridge, Mass., 1971)
Meira Likierman, Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context (London, 2002)
George Makari, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (New York, 2008)
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London, 1998)
Daniel Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts (Oxford, 2012)
Riccardo Steiner, ‘It is a New Kind of Diaspora’: Explorations in the Sociopolitical and Cultural Context of Psychoanalysis (London, 2000).
Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York, 2004)
Religion, Magic and Society in Late Antiquity
Course Convenor: Caroline Humfress
Late antiquity (the 3rd to 7th centuries AD) was a period of rapid religious and social change. Traditional beliefs and practices were re-negotiated, alongside new ideas and institutional structures. In this course we will explore the histories (plural) of late antique religion and culture, using interdisciplinary approaches from history, anthropology, and archaeology. The study of late antiquity is itself an exciting and dynamic field and we will also be using our material to question key modern categories and assumptions along the way. As H.D Betz states: ‘The neat distinctions we make today between approved and disapproved forms of religion – calling the former ‘religion’ and ‘church’ and the latter ‘magic’ and ‘cult’ – did not exist in antiquity…’. We will read a diverse body of late antique source material in translation, including love spells, curse tablets, letters on papyri and pilgrimage accounts, as well as other literary, documentary and archaeological material. Students will also gain an understanding of key questions concerning magic, religion and society in broader historical context.
Recommended Reading
Aune, D.E., (1980) “Magic in Early Christianity”, Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt 2.23.2, pp. 1507-57.
Bohak, G., (2008) Ancient Jewish Magic: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, esp. chs 3. and 6.
Brown, P., (1995) Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gwynn, D.M. and Bangert, S., (2010) “Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity: An Introduction” in Gwynn, D.M. and Bangert S., Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity. Leiden: Brill.
Harris, W.V., ed. (2005) The Spread of Christianity in the First Four Centuries. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Meyer, M.W. and Smith, R. (1999 2nd ed.) Ancient Christian Magic. Coptic Texts of Ritual Power. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Mitchell, S. and Van Nuffelen, P., eds. (2010) Monotheism between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity. Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion 12. Leuven: Peeters.
Divided Unity: France since 1870
Course Convenor: Sarah Howard
The course examines France's history since the elaboration of a Republican settlement in the late-nineteenth century. For some historians, France has been in a virtual state of civil war ever since. Integrating social, cultural and economic perspectives with political analysis, the course considers France's divisions, together with the elements that mean the French Republic has largely endured its myriad disharmonies and challenges. Combining chronological and thematic approaches, we will explore the most troubled periods of modern French history, through two world wars, occupation and collaboration, decolonisation, street protest and political corruption. The course pays particular attention to debates around religion, race, gender, political ideology, discourses of national degeneracy, urban/ rural divisions, Americanisation and the politics of memory. We also consider the extent to which specific symbols remain important in bringing the French together and the ways that historical sites and monuments have healed divisions and memories of national trauma. The course engages with the controversies associated with the writing of French history and the new approaches and methodologies with which historians have approached France's past. Students will have the chance to compare and contrast the ways that France's recent past has been represented in various primary sources including political speeches, images, memoirs, novels and films. Recommended Reading
Roderick Kedward, La vie en bleu. France and the French since 1900 (2006). Charles Sowerwine, France since 1870 (2000). Richard Vinen, France 1934-1970 (1996). James McMillan, Modern France,1880-2002 (2003). Robert Tombs, France 1814-1914 (1996). Julian Jackson, France. The Dark Years, 1940-1944 (2001). J-M Mayeur and M. Reberioux, The Third Republic from its origins to the Great War (1987). P. Bernard and P.Dubief, The decline of the third Republic, 1914-1938 (1986). Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic, 1944-1959 (1987). Serge Berstein, The Fifth Republic, 1958-1969 (2006). Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory (1997).
