During the academic year of 2009-2010, the Institute will present a thirty-week course, "Nature and Culture," taught by William H. Fredlund, Ph.D., and Bruce Thompson, Ph.D., on Thursday nights. For five thousand years, the poets and philosophers of Western Civilization have asked profound questions about our human existence and its relation to the natural world that surrounds us. Are we human beings separate from nature? Can we change the natural world or does nature control us? Is there such a thing as "natural law?" Who made nature? How old is the natural world? Is nature "beautiful" or are we imposing human values upon a world that does not know "beauty"? These are just some of the many issues we will examine this year on Thursday nights.
Week 11: "Beowulf and the Dark Forest" Thursday Jan 7, 2010
When the empire governed from Rome collapsed in the fifth century, it left northern Europe without any central authority. The result was a chaotic period of invasions, wars, destruction of cities, roads, bridges and universal suffering. During these five centuries from 500-1000 AD the vision of writers changed from one in which the creative act of man in the garden was celebrated to one in which man lost in the forest became one of the most frightening images. In this our first week of the winter quarter, we will look at the rich Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf to see one version of this medieval fear.
REQUIRED READING:
Week 12: "Chretien de Troyes: Yvain" Thursday Jan 14, 2010
Yvain, the Knight of the Lion (French: Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion) is a romance by Chrétien de Troyes. It was probably written in the 1170s simultaneously with Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, and includes several references to the action in that poem. The main character, Yvain, is derived from the historical Owain mab Urien. Many critics believe that Yvain is Chretien's most complex and most brilliant story. It is about the quest for the self within a series of adventures. The lion becomes a central image of something new, something promising. For our study of Nature and Culture, we are interested in this journey, this quest into nature, into the forest, into the world around us in which we find both promise and danger. You will enjoy reading it. It is presented in a beautiful Penguin Classics edition of Chretien's stories. The introduction (pp 1-25) is especially well done and worth reading.
REQUIRED READING:
RECOMMENDED READING:
If you want to read more about Courtly Love there is no better place to begin than in C. S. Lewis's brilliant Allegory of Love especially the first chapter. Lewis and the whole circle of Medievalists of whom he was a part (Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers), blazed a trail of research in this field and we are still in their debt.
But the one book that has had a greater influence on our ideas of love in the West than any other book is the brilliant Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont. De Rougemont (1906-1985) was one of the most influential European intellectuals of his generation. His book came out first in 1939 and then was revised several times with the 1972 edition being the definitive final edition. This book simply changed the way people thought about Western cultural history. It was of extraordinary importance and is still the beginning point for any study of the unique phenomenon of love in the Western world.
Week 13: "Dante" Thursday Jan 21, 2010
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) creates the definitive Medieval vision in his three-part poem that we now call The Divine Comedy. This week we will examine the first part of his poem with an emphasis on questions about man and nature and man in nature. What is Dante's vision of nature? Is it good or is it bad? How do we human beings live in nature and how do we treat it? Remember the opening of the poem:
Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
che la diritta via era smarritaIn the middle of the road of our lives, I found myself in a dark forest where the direct road was lost.
In other words, in all our lives, we find ourselves at some moment, lost, without a clear path, without a clear direction, and when that happens we must re examine everything we have done to that moment. Notice that the image for this terrible condition in life is a dark forest.
MATERIAL ON THE WEB:
- Chronology: 13th Century
- A List of Cantos in the Inferno
- Summary of the Inferno
- University of Vermont website
SLIDES:
Dante in Florence (Via dei Cerchi, Via del Corso, Via del Proconsolo).
REQUIRED READING:
Make sure you bring your copy of the Divine Comedy, Inferno, to class each week as we now discuss and read passages together. We will begin with the first canto (song) and move on. The Mandelbaum translation is the one we have chosen.
RECOMMENDED READING:
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: There is a new biography of Dante written by the late R. W. B. Lewis, Dante (ISBN 0670899097) and it is excellent and exactly what many of you will want: a short (200 pages), well-written, inexpensive ($19.95) biography of Dante. It is perfect for our course and although I don't want to make it a required book, I am sure that anyone who buys it will be happy they did.
Week 14: "Francesco Petrarca" Thursday Jan 28, 2010
We will read "The Ascent of Mount Ventoux" the first work we have by a European author since Classical times to describe climbing a mountain just for the view.
MATERIAL ON THE WEB:
- Chronology: 14th Century
- Petrarch page
- Petrarch photos
- Petarch's poem "Solo e Pensoso."
- Petrarch biography
REQUIRED READING:
Week 15: "Siena: A Moment of Perfect Balance" Thursday Feb 4, 2010
In the 1340's the small but extremely powerful city-state of Siena achieved a kind of perfect balance of industry and religion and politics that led to an extraordinary prosperity and a time of well-being. This moment produced spectacular architecture and beautiful sculpture on the cathedral and some of the most beautiful painting of the whole of the Middle Ages by the Lorenzetti brothers. We want to talk about this special moment in Siena this week in order to understand what Medieval society valued and how it saw the world of man-made culture and its natural surroundings.
SLIDES IN CLASS
We will see the extraordinary frescoes of "Good and Bad Government" by the Lorenzetti brothers in the Palazzo Communale of Siena.
Week 16: "The Black Death" Thursday Feb 11, 2010
From Wikipedia: "The Black Death was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, peaking in Europe between 1348 and 1350. It is widely thought to have been an outbreak of bubonic plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Usually thought to have started in Central Asia, it had reached the Crimea by 1346 and from there, probably from black rats on merchant ships, it spread throughout the Mediterranean and Europe. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population, reducing the world's population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in 1400. This has been seen as creating a series of religious, social and economic upheavals which had profound effects on the course of European history. It took 150 years for Europe's population to recover. The plague returned at various times, resulting in a larger number of deaths, until it left Europe in the 19th century."
The Black Death was the most catastrophic event to hit Europe between the Fall of Rome in the 400's and the discovery of the New World. It changed the way European citizens thought about themselves and their societies. And of course it changed the way people viewed the natural world around them. Since they did not understand the process whereby people became infected and died, they were free to imagine any possible explanation. From this confusion resulted a period of terrible doubt and pessimism.
RECOMMENDED READING
The best new book on the Black Death is:
Amazon review:
"A book chronicling one of the worst human disasters in recorded history really has no business being entertaining. But John Kelly's The Great Mortality is a page-turner despite its grim subject matter and graphic detail. Credit Kelly's animated prose and uncanny ability to drop his reader smack in the middle of the 14th century, as a heretofore unknown menace stalks Eurasia from "from the China Sea to the sleepy fishing villages of coastal Portugal producing suffering and death on a scale that, even after two world wars and twenty-seven million AIDS deaths worldwide, remains astonishing." Take Kelly's vivid description of London in the fall of 1348: "A nighttime walk across Medieval London would probably take only twenty minutes or so, but traversing the daytime city was a different matter.... Imagine a shopping mall where everyone shouts, no one washes, front teeth are uncommon and the shopping music is provided by the slaughterhouse up the road." And that's before just about everything with a pulse starts dying and piling up in the streets, reducing the population of Europe by anywhere from a third to 60 percent in a few short years. In addition to taking readers on a walking tour through plague-ravaged Europe, Kelly heaps on the ancillary information and every last bit of it is captivating. We get a thorough breakdown of the three types of plagues that prey on humans; a detailed account of how the plague traveled from nation to nation (initially by boat via flea-infested rats); how floods (and the appalling hygiene of medieval people) made Europe so susceptible to the disease; how the plague triggered a new social hierarchy favoring women and the proletariat but also sparked vicious anti-Semitism; and especially, how the plague forever changed the way people viewed the church. Engrossing, accessible, and brimming with first-hand accounts drawn from the Middle Ages, The Great Mortality illuminates and inspires. History just doesn't get better than that. --Kim Hughes."
Week 17: "Renaissance Florence: Brunelleschi" Thursday Feb 18, 2010
In Florence in 1401, the Florentines began a complete reappraisal of nature and the human role within nature. The most concrete evidence of this new appraisal is found in the theories of Filippo Brunelleschi on Perspective. These theories suggested that man's ability to know and control nature was much more complete than even the Greeks had envisioned. This is our subject in our seventeenth week.
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446)
Art, Science, the Renaissance.
Brunelleschi and Donatello in Rome.
The Cathedral of Florence.MATERIAL ON WEBSITE:
SLIDES:
The work of Brunelleschi.
REQUIRED READING:
No required reading this week.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Week 18: "Columbus, Vespucci and Visions of the New World" Thurs Feb 25, 2010
The Old World and the New.
The story of Europe and its knowledge of the rest of the world.
The voyages of exploration in the 15th Century.
The voyages of discovery in the 16th Century.
Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Martin Waldseemuller and the map.
What did the discoveries of the new world do to European thought?
The Amerindians gave tobacco to Europe; in return the Europeans introduced them to the delights of alcohol. Columbus and his successors brought horses, cattle, chickens, sheep, goats, and pigs to the New World, where those animals multiplied with astonishing rapidity; and from the New World potatoes, corn, tomatoes, and squash migrated to Europe, Asia, and Africa, fueling a vast human population explosion from the eighteenth century onward. On the microbiological level, European brought swine flu, small pox, measles, and a number of other diseases that proved to be lethal in populations that lacked previous exposure, while syphilis appeared in Europe shortly after 1492 and spread rapidly. Briefly, Columbus initiated not only the economic but also the biological unification of the planet, with consequences that were on the whole positive for the Old World and devastating for the New.REQUIRED READING
Vespucci, "Letter from a New World" (Xerox, we will provide)
From: Letters from the New World, ed. Luciano Formisano, NY, 1992.
Week 19: "Shakespeare: The Tempest" Thursday March 4, 2010
"The Tempest" is a play by William Shakespeare, estimated to have been written in 1610–11. The play's protagonist is the banished sorcerer Prospero, rightful Duke of Milan, who initially uses his magical powers to punish his enemies when he raises a tempest that drives them ashore. The entire play takes place on an island under his control whose native inhabitants, Ariel and Caliban, respectively aid or hinder his work. While listed as a comedy when it was initially published in the First Folio of 1623, many modern editors have since re-labeled the play as one of Shakespeare's late romances.
REQUIRED READING:
This Arden Shakespeare edition of The Tempest is, in my opinion, the best, the highest quality paper and print, the best editing, all the things you want in an edition of Shakespeare. It is available and in print from Amazon.
Week 20: "Milton: Paradise Lost" Thursday March 11, 2010
Wikipedia: Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books. A second edition followed in 1674, re divided into twelve books (in the manner of the division of Virgil's Aeneid) with minor revisions throughout and a note on the versification. The poem concerns the Christian story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton's purpose, stated in Book I, is to "justify the ways of God to men" and elucidate the conflict between God's eternal foresight and free will. Milton incorporates Paganism, classical Greek references, and Christianity within the poem. It deals with diverse topics from marriage, politics (Milton was politically active during the time of the English Civil War), and monarchy, and grapples with many difficult theological issues, including fate, predestination, the Trinity, and the introduction of sin and death into the world, as well as angels, fallen angels, Satan, and the war in heaven. Milton draws on his knowledge of languages, and diverse sources — primarily Genesis, much of the New Testament, the deuterocanonical Book of Enoch, and other parts of the Old Testament.
REQUIRED READING
We will provide you with passages from Paradise Lost in order to discuss Milton's vision of nature.
RECOMMENDED READING:
