Telephone: (714)278-7045                                               

Fax: (714)278-2101

David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, (Princeton UP, 1996), ISBN: 0-691-05889

Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, (Penguin, 1996), ISBN: 0-14-014438-2

Inca Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570, (Cambridge, 1987, 2003), ISBN: 052379814

Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring. Vendetta in Renaissance Italy, (Johns Hopkins UP, 1993, 1998) ISBN: 0-8018-5849-6

Recommended Reading (in fact, highly recommended reading): Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, available in any bookstore.

Course Description:

The purpose of the History 522T course is to allow students to apply the skills of reading, writing, and research with primary and secondary documents they have acquired during their graduate training. The course is topical, but I generally try to be flexible especially if students are working on a thesis and wish to produce a paper related to that project. In the course of this semester, students will begin by reading together in a seminar format a series of books designed to provide them with a common body of knowledge related to the topic of the course. The readings will also present various methodological approaches and geographical settings exposing students to the various ways in which historians have examined the topic. This exercise is intended to accomplish two things. First, students will have a sufficient common background to discuss each other's research in class. Second, students may find inspiration (or useful sources) from the reading to help them craft a paper topic, find sources, and select an appropriate methodological approach for their own research.

The paper which students will write during the course of this semester will be an analytical paper rather than merely a narrative. Students will choose a topic of interest, then find primary sources which they can use to answer a question they have devised. In doing so, they will learn about the creative tension central to the historian's discipline, the ever present struggle between the questions one can imagine, and the sources which determine how, and if, those questions can be answered. They will then form a theory about how their question should be answered, and structure an argument, using their primary and secondary sources as evidence, to support their conclusions.

I have chosen as a topic for this semester "Violence in Pre-Modern Europe." As the required readings demonstrate, this is a broad and flexible topic, because violence, and especially religious violence, took many different forms, both state sponsored and extrajudicial, both public and private. Many factors conditioned it, including gender, class, region, culture, and ethnicity. Thus from a practical sense, the possible paper topics in which students are likely to find suitable primary sources are manifold. By the same token, religious violence is a central theme of early modern European history, and of pre-modern Europe's contacts with the rest of the world. No problem in early modern historiography is more significant than understanding the nature and causes of religious violence.

In this class students will produce a significant paper based on primary sources. This paper should be viewed as a draft of an article or a thesis chapter. In the process of completing this assignment, they will: