Prof. Robin Fleming

In this class, we will examine the tensions between peasants and landlords, laypeople and the clergy, the literate and the illiterate, the state and its subjects, Europeans and those they moved to colonize and enslave, colonists and their home societies, Catholics and Protestants, and supporters of absolutist monarchy and their critics. Readings include the autobiography of a disgraced twelfth-century university lecturer; the story of a late-medieval peasant pilgrimage gone wrong; consumerism run amok in the Italian Renaissance; the story of a New England girl kidnapped by Native Americans, but who found that she preferred her new life to her old; and the autobiography of an African who spent part of his life as a slave and part as the writer of anti-slavery tracts in eighteenth-century London.

Mondays and Wednesdays at 11:00