The Global Middle Ages

This course focuses on the historical interconnectedness of pre-modern cultures, necessarily decentering Europe to explore cultural exchange across the world, including the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, in the period 600-1600 CE. Providing students with a historical foundation to more modern courses in COLLEGE, The Global Middle Ages introduces a wide variety of sources, and equips students with the tools of critical inquiry necessary to evaluate and contextualize historical witnesses. In decentering Europe as the geographical focus of study, the course also aims to decenter teleological narratives that have tended to claim modernity for so-called 'developed' (western) nations, while denigrating other regions as 'medieval' (understood as chaotic, violent, and irrational). Chronology, long presented as neutral fact is acknowledged in this course as both constructed and political. Drawing on work by historians, art historians, and literary historians, we work in this course to reconsider the pre-modern world in a global context, informed by new trends in global history as well as the emerging field of pre-modern critical race studies.