History

Documents of 7th-century Irish history

This course will offer a survey of the principal text-types composed in Ireland during the 7th century (e.g. annals, genealogies, saints' Lives, homilies, letters, etc.), both in Latin and in Old Irish, in poetry and in prose. Texts will be read, where possible, from facsimiles of the original manuscripts.

Seminar Leader: Daibhí Ó'Cróinín

Early Irish Law

This course offers a survey of the lage corpus of materials relating to Early Irish 'brehon' law, with detailed examination of selected individual law-tracts or groups of related tracts. Texts will be read in the original Old Irish, with the aid of English or German translations.

Lecturer: Daibhí Ó'Cróinín

Colum Cille and Iona: Irish Cultural and Political Expansion, 563-729

The island monastery of Iona (founded by St Colm Cille in ad 563 off the western coast of Scotland) was of central importance in the history of early Christianity in Ireland, Scotland, and the north of England. This was acknowledged in 1997 by centenary celebrations in all three countries marking the death of Columba in ad 597. In the last few years a steady stream of publications has appeared, which allows the study (in unique detail) of the monastery's early history from its foundation down to the period c. 800, when it produced the high-point of Irish manuscript and artistic culture, the Book of Kells. However, Kells was only the pinnacle of Iona achievement; the monastery and its community produced a wide variety of compositions, in prose and in verse, in Latin and in Old Irish, that together form a unique monument to Irish culture in the Early Middle Ages.

Introductory Reading: Thomas Owen Clancy & Gilbert Márkus, Iona: the earliest poetry of a Celtic monastery (Edinburgh 1995), and Richard Sharpe, Adamnán of Iona, Life of Columba (Harmondsworth 1995): Máire Herbert, Iona, Kells and Derry: The History and Hagiography of the Monastic Familia of Columba (Oxford, 1988; reprint Dublin, 1996), pp. 1-67

Seminar Leader: Daibhí Ó'Cróinín

Women in Medieval Society -NOT ON OFFER 2009/10-

This course examines the experience and contributions of women in medieval society, politics, and the religious life, c. 500-1500. Emphasis is placed on the complex and changing figurings of gender, as well as on the diversity of women's activities within their multiple social roles, in spite of the prevailing misogyny of the period.

Seminar Leader: Kim LoPrete

The First Crusade

Without two military victories won against seemingly impossible odds, the c. 90,000 armed and unarmed Latin-Christian pilgrims who set out from western Europe for the Holy Land in 1096 might merit a minor footnote in history books. Yet because those near-miraculous victories led to the remaining c. 15,000 capturing Jerusalem in 1099, the movement that came to be known as
crusading was born. This seminar examines the so-called ‘first crusade' in its eleventh-and early twelfth-century context.
Students will first attempt to understand the participants' motivations, aspirations and experiences as construed in the 1090s. Tracing the short-term effects on western Europeans (to c.1148) of the crusaders' establishment of a ‘Latin Kingdom' in Syria-Palestine follows. A twopronged approach is used:

Discussion of causative factors, such as population growth, the peace movement, penitential pilgrimage, and papal reform within Europe, and realignments among competing Muslim polities and the Orthodox-Christian population of the Byzantine empire in the ‘middle east' after Sunni-Muslim Seljuk Turks ‘purified' Baghdad in 1059 C.E.

Close analysis of contemporary documents and narrative accounts of events (in translation), including several written by crusaders and some by Muslim commentators.

Introductory Reading: J. Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London & Philadelphia, 1986); or J. Riley-Smith, What were the Crusades?, 2nd ed. (1992). More detailed overviews are in J. Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 (Cambridge, 1997), and in the relevant chapters of P.M. Holt, The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh
Century to 1517 (London & New York, 1986).

Seminar Leader: Jason Roche

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