History: Early Europe

Survey of European history, 500-1648.

Open to Degree and PACE students

This course traces the emergence of a distinctive European civilization from the last days of the disintegrating Roman Empire to the cusp of the Scientific Revolution. Beginning with a look at the late Roman Empire and its Byzantine, Islamic and “Latin” heirs, we will then more closely examine the early Carolingian period of proto-European unity, the development of nascent nation states and the rise of papal power in the high Middle Ages, the challenges of the disastrous fourteenth century, and the renewals and reformations of the early modern era. Major themes of the class will include developments in the ways Europeans ruled and rebelled; thought and fought; believed and dissented; worked and played, wrote and painted; and imagined themselves in relation to the rest of the world. Concentration: Europe (HI02)