Western Civilization

This course is a history of Western civilization from 3500 BC to AD 1600. Western Civilization may be characterized as one long debate on the holy. In no other civilization did this debate about the limits of the sacred and the profane, this constant effort at trying to grasp the divine through word and deed, last continuously for over five thousand years. To argue over the holy is to argue over the very nature of how to live a life, from the most mundane daily activity to the most sublime act of the imagination. It is to argue over how politics, economics, art, philosophy, literature, and religion are realized in a society. Apart from many types of polytheism, we study the three great world monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We study the ancient cultures of north Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, the empires of Alexander the Great and imperial Rome, the Christianization of the Roman empire and the rise of Islam, the early medieval world in the North Sea and the East (Byzantine) Empire in Constantinople, the formation of Latin Christendom and the papal monarchy, the crusades and the reaction of the Islamicate, concepts of individuality, the persecution of Jews and heretics, chivalry and peasant servitude, the Mongol Empire, the Black Death and the devastation of the fourteenth century, the renaissance in Italy and the Protestant reformation, the hunt for witches and the scientific revolution, the medieval origins of the African diaspora and the European conquest of the Americas. What defined being human, and so a man, a woman, or a child over five millennia? A fundamental question of this course is what is "Western Civilization" and when do the characteristics defined as "western" come together as coherent phenomenon? What, then, is historical truth? We will read, for example, Gilgamesh, the Iliad, Plato, Sophocles, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, the Bible, Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, the Qur'an, Beowulf, Peter Abelard, Wolfram von E
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; BU IS; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM

Western Civilization

HISTORY 101C

Section 01

Section A

Section B