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

Week 1: Introduction
Textbook reading for week 1: Muir, Introduction and chapter 1, “Rites of Passage”
Tuesday: Approaching Popular Culture
Thursday: Reading Mother Goose
Read for discussion in class: Four Early Versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” (E-Reserves).
Study Questions

Week 2: Time
Textbook reading for week 2: Muir, chapter 2, “The Ritual Calendar”
Tuesday: The Rhythm of Seasons
Read for discussion in class: Ronald Hutton, “The Ritual Year in England, c. 1490-c. 1540” (E-Reserves)
Thursday: Work and the Structure of Time
Read for discussion in class: E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work, and Industrial Capitalism” (E-Reserves)
Study Questions

Week 3: Dangers
Tuesday: War, Famine, & Plague
Read for discussion in class: Arthur Imhof, “Dangers” (E-Reserves).
Thursday: Culture as Technology
Read for discussion in class: Keith Thomas, “The Magic of the Medieval Church” (E-Reserves).
Study Questions

Week 4: Festivity
Textbook reading for week 4: Muir, chapter 3, “Carnival and the Lower Body”
Tuesday: The World Turned Upside Down
Read for discussion in class: Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule”; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Roman Carnival” (1788) (E-Reserves).
Thursday: Carnival and Social Order
Read for discussion in class: Robert C. Davis, “Horatius on the Bridge” (E-Reserves).
Study Questions

Week 5: Cosmos
Tuesday: Sources of Belief
Read for discussion in class: Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (all).
Thursday: Mid-term examination
Study Questions

Week 6: Individuality
Tuesday: Film—The Return of Martin Guerre, directed by Paul Maigret (1982).
Thursday: Self-Fashioning Peasants?
Read for discussion in class: Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (all).
Paper Topic Suggestions

Week 7: Discipline
Textbook reading for week 6: Muir, chapter 4, “Manners and the Upper Body”
Tuesday: The Civilizing Process
Read for discussion in class: Desiderius Erasmus, “On Education for Children” (1529) (E-Reserves).
Thursday: A Revolution in Ritual
Read for discussionn in class: Andreas Karlstadt, “On the Removal of Images” (1522) (E-Reserves).
Study Questions

Week 8: Family
Textbook reading for week 7: Muir, chapter 5, “The Reformation as a Revolution in Ritual Theory”
Tuesday: Gendering Popular Culture
Read for discussion in class: Lyndal Roper, “Discipline and Marital Disharmony” (E-Reserves) .
Thursday: The Living and the Dead
Read for discussion in class: Craig Koslofsky, “Bodies: Placing the Dead in the German Reformation” (E-Reserves).
Study Questions

Week 9: Authority
Textbook reading for week 9: Muir, chapter 7, “Government as a Ritual Process”
Tuesday: Theaters of Horror
Read for discussion in class: Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law”; and Thomas W. Laqueur, “Crowds, Carnivals and the State in English Executions, 1648-1868” (E-Reserves).
Thursday: The State as Ritual Process
Read for discussion in class: Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, chapter 1 (E-Reserves).
Study Questions

Week 10: Enlightenment
Tuesday: Reason, Morality, and Popular Culture
Read for discussion in class: Anke te Heesen, The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia (all).
Thursday: Review