Feuds, Vengeance, and War: Violence in Medieval Europe, 500-1550

Undergraduate / Graduate

Violence and conflict are dominant themes of medieval and early modern European history. This course will introduce students to the wide variety of perspectives with which one can approach violence in its western European context from 500 to 1550. Students will not only analyze and evaluate the historiographic and methodological contributions made by the existing scholarship on violence, but also have the opportunity to explore and evaluate various sources for the study of violence. The course itself will be organized around chronological, thematic, and regional lines of investigation ranging from Merovingian France to Early Modern Scotland. Guiding this class will be a broader methodological discussion on the relative merits and demerits of different approaches to studying violence's role in pre-modern societies and politics and how they continue to influence contemporary perceptions of violence, past and present.