Food, Pain, Sex, Death: Bodies and Souls in History (1300-1800)

Food, Pain, Sex, Death: Bodies and Souls in History (1300-1800) is a crosslisted Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies/Social Science class taught by Jutta Sperling.

Course Description
This course will investigate bodily practices and the gendered representation of bodies in Europe from the late Middle Ages to the age of the French Revolution. At the center of our inquiry will be the emergence of the "modern self" during the Renaissance as a result of a complex set of practices, such as: the confessional mode of talking about sexuality; dissection as a way to penetrate women's "hidden secrets;" colonization and the formation of desire; the repression of spectacular, body-centered forms of devotion involving pain and self-starvation; art and the anatomy of gender difference; emergent concepts of race; prisons and the birth of the modern soul; medical discourse and the rise of sexual "identity." This course satisfies the Division I distribution requirements.

Learning Goals

 * Project-based
 * Presenting
 * Reading
 * Writing