The Dark Side of the Renaissance: The Tragic Origins of Modernity

3.0 credits · Graduate

This course examines the Renaissance and the early modern period not only as a celebrated age of creativity, artistic innovation, and intellectual rebirth, but also as an era deeply marked by violence, domination, and systemic inequality. By moving beyond triumphalist narratives of “progress” and “civilization,” the course invites students to consider the darker foundations of modernity: the emergence of practices of exclusion, exploitation, and repression that shaped both European societies and the wider world.