When this paper begins,  ancient empires (Roman, Persian, Chinese) had brought strong government and a generally ‘civilized’ standard of life. 

By the end of the period, most recognisable features of the world created by these empires had ceased to exist.  Nearly all the most prosperous and articulate arenas of ancient civilisation had collapsed. Of course, there were some basic continuities. The average age of death (twenty-five) did not change: childbirth, war, and disease were as fatal as ever. 

The changes in this period were arguably more total and more startling than any before the nineteenth-century advent of European industry and empire. Not coincidentally, Europeans of this era saw in this era a distant reflection of themselves.

The period also witnessed the triumph of monotheism, specifically, worship of the God of Abraham, and in China, the spread of Buddhism. Already in the fourth century, the Roman Emperors had left their old gods behind, and adopted Christianity. In the seventh century, Muslims bore witness to a new and, they claimed, definitive set of revelations from the Angel Gabriel, set down in the Qur’an. In Christian and Muslim societies, religious communities worked their way free of political structures, and looked to reset the terms for family life, marriage, gender and sexuality. 

The world of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages is an electric field of current research and debate. This paper aims to show why.

This paper is a wide-ranging introduction to the centuries between 1000 and 1300, a three-hundred-year period of remarkable change across the medieval world. 

Wherever we look, this was a time of substantial environmental change and population growth, increased urbanisation and commercialisation, evolving gender relations, diversifying forms of spirituality, and complex forms of social, religious and political organisation. New communities emerged which replaced or radically reorientated longstanding empires. Connections within and between different world regions intensified. 

But this was also a period of confrontation. Longstanding beliefs were questioned or given new meanings. Intellectual life was stimulated by deepening cross-cultural connections and the new needs of changing societies. 

This paper enables you to study the immense fluidity and variety of social, religious, political and economic forms in this period in many different ways. Women are regarded as integral to all topics in the paper and can also be studied comparatively across cultures. The paper also allows you to explore the masculinities associated with medieval religious, military and political structures, and to explore intersectionalities between gender, class and race in different medieval societies. You can approach this paper from either a World or a European perspective or a combination of the two.

The period from 1400 to 1650 can be considered a defining moment in the creation of modern Europe and its relations with the rest of the world.

Beginning when population and agricultural production had been sharply reduced by plague, it saw these rise to new levels, while the development of cross-European trade began the process of economic specialisation. Explorers, adventurers and merchants were opening up the New World of America, Africa and the Far East, laying the basis of a future world economy. 

Expansion of the material world was matched by enlargement of intellectual and cultural horizons. A new type of lay scholar, the humanist, rediscovered the texts of Latin and Greek antiquity, and developed intellectual interests, in language, morals and history, which differed markedly from those of medieval scholasticism. Artists and architects likewise took fresh inspiration from classical models, creating the glories of the High Renaissance and Baroque. The possibilities of new technology were most dramatically realised in the invention of the printing press.

Yet just as Renaissance drew Europeans closer in learning and culture, Reformation created unprecedented divisions in religion. Luther and Calvin succeeded where fifteenth-century heretics had failed, creating new churches, and forcing the long process of reform within the Roman Catholic Church to harden into Counter-Reformation. 

Economic and religious pressures put new strains on political structures. Expanding resources after 1500 enabled monarchs to support increasingly spectacular courts, larger administrations and more permanent armies, while forging new alliances with their nobilities. By contrast city-state republics flourished in the fifteenth century and declined in the sixteenth, only to set a new example in the successful revolt of the Dutch against the Spanish Monarchy.

This course approaches the nineteenth century in the widest possible way, ranging from population trends and social structure to cultural history and from revolutions to imperialism. 

The nineteenth century is often hailed as the century of nationalism. The paper will cover the state and to the spread of state structures and national institutions and the construction of national identities and the pursuit of the nation-state are studied, as are the scientific ideas - such as Social Darwinism - underpinning them. 

A number of areas are also studied including the population explosion of the nineteenth century, the agricultural and industrial revolutions which helped to sustain it, the dramatic growth of towns, the various waves of emigration to the New World, the European élites, (noble and non-noble, conservative and liberal) and a study of peasants, industrial workers, and some of the social and political movements which played such a prominent role in the shaping of the nineteenth century (including the revolutions of 1830, 1848, 1871 and 1905). 

Finally, the changing gender roles and ideologies, and the question of whether the century was one of secularisation or religious revival are also covered.