History 615. Topics in the History of Early Modern Europe

Fall 2008, Tuesday 1-3:30 p.m.

An introduction to classic interpretations, recent scholarship, and sources in intellectual history, cultural history, and the history of science, c. 1450-1700. Topics will include humanism and scholarship, natural philosophy and science, witchcraft and the occult, the arts, the organization of literary and intellectual life, and circulation of knowledge between different disciplinary and national contexts. Assignments will include a review, an annotated bibliography and bibliographical essay, and a historiographical synthesis. Interested students may continue with a research seminar in the spring.

The syllabus details course assignments and readings.

Here's the presentation sign-up sheet if you forgot what you chose or would like to see what others are doing.

The material below is of historical interest; see the syllabus for current assignments.

Preliminary reading list

This reading list is a work in progress. The final course syllabus will vary: it will have additional works, and many of the titles mentioned below will have only excerpts assigned. But this is a good start if you're looking for some summer reading in the area.

Read for the first week

• Grafton, Anthony. “The history of ideas: Precept and practice, 1950-2000 and beyond.” Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 1-32. Available from Project Muse in HTML and PDF format.
• Sewell, William H., Jr. Logics of history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Read chapters 1 and 2.

Additional reading (weeks 2-14, order and selections to be determined)

Burke, Peter. Languages and communities in early modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Clark, Stuart. Thinking with demons: The idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The printing press as an agent of change: Communications and cultural transformations in early-modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Hazard, Paul. La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680-1715. Paris: Fayard, 1961 (originally published 1935). The English translation has the anodyne title The European mind, 1680-1715.

Newman, William R., and Anthony Grafton, eds. Secrets of nature: Astrology and alchemy in early modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Pomata, Gianna, and Nancy Siraisi, eds. Historia: Empiricism and erudition in early modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Rohou, Jean. Le XVIIe siècle, une révolution de la condition humaine. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002.

Taylor, Charles. A secular age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Waquet, Françoise. Le latin, ou l’empire d’un signe, XVIe-XXe siècle. Paris: Albin Michel, 1998. English translation: Latin, or the empire of a sign.

Reading on methods

Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The craft of research. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Mann, Thomas. The Oxford guide to library research.

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