History 442/542 Popular Culture  in Early Modern Europe: Ritual, Religion, Power (1400-1750)

When: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:00-11:20
Where: McKenzie 214

Instructor: David M. Luebke
Office: 315 McKenzie Hall
Office Hours: Wednesdays, 9:00-11:00
Phone: 346-2394
Email: dluebke@uoregon.edu

What exactly is “popular” about “popular culture”? The term evokes implicit comparisons to “elite” or “high” culture, but on what grounds is the distinction drawn? Nowadays, “popular” also implies commercial success and with it the confident assumption that sales receipts measure “popularity” precisely, even as our use of the term effaces the connection between culture and the exercise of power. Even assuming this assumption is true, how are we to think about the ways in which culture operated historically, before the age of industrialization and commercialization? How are we to imagine relationships between culture and power in past time? This course introduces students to the ritual, magical, and reproductive practices of ordinary people in Europe before the industrial revolution, during the centuries between 1400 and 1750, a period in which the vast majority lived out their lives in the rural communities of their birth and upbringing. It was also an epoch of shifting boundaries between cultures of elites and the “populace”; a period when few people would have understood, let alone accepted, a sharp distinction between religion and the secular sphere; a time when power operated as much through ritual as through the written word. Far from studying “popular” culture in isolation from that of élites, the focus of this course will instead be on the complex interactions of ritual, religion, and power, as they played out in the various domains of everyday life. In mapping these interactions, course readings will expose conflicting ideas about the changing balance of forces between stasis and transformation through plague, Reformation, war, centralization, and Enlightenment.

Syllabus
Readings
Requirements
Evaluation
Study Questions

Choosing a Paper Topic

Logo image:  Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569), Peasant Wedding (c. 1568/69); Wood, 114 cm x 164 cm; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, GG Inv. No. 1027. KHM Caption: More than any other, this painting contributed to Bruegel's fame as a portrayer of Flemish peasant life and earned him the sobriquet of "Peasant Brueghel." The artist leads us straight into the middle of a peasant wedding. The table with the wedding feast leads diagonally through the threshing barn, the largest room in the farmhouse. Piled up high in the background is the harvest, safely gathered in. The bride sits in the middle of the table under a paper crown; near her in a high-backed chair sits the lawyer responsible for drawing up the marriage contract. At the end of the table we see the landowner, dressed in Spanish fashion. The bridegroom is not present; he was not led to the bride until the evening of the wedding day. Two bagpipers, the men carrying the food, and the boy pouring the drink lend a true-to-life quality to the scene without descending to the mere comic or caricatural. Image source: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, http://www.khm.at/system2E.html?/staticE/page431.html.