Nuns, Saints, and Mystics in Mediveval and Early Modern Europe

Nuns, Saints, and Mystics in Mediveval and Early Modern Europe is a Social Science course taught by Jutta Sperling.

This course satisfies Division I requirements.

Course Description
Early Christianity had a tremendous appeal to women and slaves, because its forms of devotion were part of a broader cultural revolution aimed at subverting existing patriarchal family structures, slavery, and the political structures of the Roman Empire within which they were embedded. The high numbers of female converts, martyrs, and donors testify to the extent to which the church in its formative phase relied on women and their spiritual and material contributions. In medieval Catholicism, women mystics formulated a theology according to which Christ in his human nature could be thought of as entirely female. In the early modern period, female religious rallied to withstand the onslaught of the Counter-Reformation, which was aimed at purging the religious public sphere from its many female protagonists. Female imagery, and the orchestration of cults devoted to the Virgin Mary played a key role in converting native Americans. In Africa, female warrior queens presented themselves as Catholic saints. In this course, we will be reading original sources written by or about women in their roles as followers of the apostles, founders of convents, mystics, nuns, "real" as well as "fake" saints, but also secondary literature in this rapidly expanding field of historical studies.

Learning Goals

 * Multi-Cultural
 * Project-based
 * Presenting
 * Reading
 * Writing