Medieval Mediterranean : Travel, Trade, and Exploration

    Provisional Syllabus 4/17/08

 

            Professor Sarah Davis-Secord                                          Course 5311-001
Office: 331 University Hall                                                TH 7-9:50pm
Email address: sdavis-secord@uta.edu  

During the Middle Ages, the Mediterranean Sea was the meeting point of the three major civilizations of the age: Latin Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and the Islamic civilization of North Africa and the Middle East .  In this arena, many of the fundamental aspects of the pre-modern world found their expression.  Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived in the Mediterranean along shifting frontiers, at times in both conflict and cooperation.  Merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, and warriors traveled across the sea, often bringing with them cultural or economic products that contributed to a larger framework of commerce and communication.  This course will examine the Mediterranean , both as a geographical concept and as a stage for such complex relationships, from the ancient to early modern periods.  Topics running throughout the course will include the following: creation, maintenance, and crossing of boundaries; balance between violence and cooperation in cross-cultural dialogue; and commercial and cultural exchanges between the three major civilizations of the Mediterranean world.  

As a graduate colloquium, this course will introduce students to the major trends in historical scholarship in this field. Students will be asked to come to each week’s class meeting prepared to discuss the readings assigned.  These weekly readings will take the form of a book or a collection of articles, and each student should turn in a written reading response to the week’s texts.  The final project for the course will consist of a colloquium paper (historiographical in nature) of approximately 25 pages, examining the scholarship and trends on a question of the student’s selection.  

Weekly reading of a book or several articles, attendance and active participation in class discussion, final colloquium paper on topic of your choice.  

Fernand Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean (Vintage, 2003)

Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain : The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula 900-1500 (Cambridge University Press, 1996)

Steven A. Epstein, Purity Lost: Transgressing Boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1000–1400 ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006)

S. D. Goitein, rev. and ed. Jacob Lassner, A Mediterranean Society: An Abridgment in One Volume ( University of California Press, 2003)

Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean, new ed. (Princeton University Press, 2002)

Hubert Houben, trans. Graham A. Loud, Roger II of Sicily : A Ruler between East and West ( Cambridge University Press, 2002)

John Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean , 649–1571 (Cambridge University Press, 1992)

Steven Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1992)

Other readings will be distributed in class or held on reserve at the UTA Central Library.  

 8/28     Introduction to the Problem of “the Mediterranean”

- Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, “The Mediterranean and ‘the New Thalassology’” American Historical Review (2006): 722-740.

- David Abulafia, “Mediterraneans” in Re-Thinking the Mediterranean, W.V. Harris, ed. ( Oxford , 2005): 64-93.

            NB: these articles will be distributed in advance of the start of semester  

9/4       Concepts of the Mediterranean in the Ancient World

- Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean  

9/11     The Roman Mediterranean, the post-Classical World, and Henri Pirenne

            - TBA  

9/18     Communication and Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Mediterranean

- Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World (exerpts)  

9/25     Seafaring and its Implications in the Mediterranean

- Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War  

10/2     Muslim and Greek Travelers

- TBA  

10/9     Monarchy in the Mediterranean

- Houbon, Roger II of Sicily  

10/17   Muslims in the Mediterranean Economy

- Constable, Trade and Traders  

10/23   Jews in the Mediterranean Economy 

- A Mediterranean Society by S. D. Goitein  

10/30   Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Mediterranean Mercantile Cities

- TBA  

11/6     No class: work on final papers  

11/13   13^th Century Upheavals 

            - Runciman, The Sicilian Vespers  

11/20   Social, Cultural, and Inter-religious Contact

- Epstein, Purity Lost  

12/4     Early Modern Mediterranean  

- Greene, A Shared World