This course is structured around two key questions: what can the study of global history bring to our understanding of the Middle Ages, and what can the study of medieval history bring to the evolving field of global history? Those taking the paper will be able to enhance their understanding of medieval history by thinking more about the history and culture of regions beyond Europe during medieval centuries, about parallels and contrasts between the approaches and evidence bases used by scholars of extra-European and European history in the centuries between 500 and 1500, and about the most productive ways to conceptualise that thousand-year period in global terms.
Seminars:
- Does ‘the global Middle Ages’ make sense?
- Connectedness, comparison, scale, micro-global
- Conceptualising power: empires, states, zomia (not-governed spaces)
- Cultures of recording: documents, archives, historiography, monuments, landscape,
- Global thinking in medieval societies: religion and cosmology
- Embodiment in the globe: family, gender, sexuality, disease, climate, environment
