HIST 113 | Europe and the Mediterranean World, 1050-1650: A History in 100 Objects

This course traces the history of Europe and the wider Mediterranean world in the later medieval and early modern periods, using the framework of material culture. Students explore a range of material sources such as domestic objects, clothing, coins, weaponry, and architecture in conjunction with contemporary texts to reconstruct major historical developments of the eleventh to seventeenth centuries, as well as changing values, intercultural exchange, and habits of consumption within Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic civilizations of the Near East. In the process students consider questions and possibilities raised by the recent material turn in the study of history and practice material history as a class through the in-depth analysis of objects in their original contexts.