HUHI 6313.

501 Thought, Culture, and Society in

Course
Europe: Renaissance and Reformation
Professor Peter K. J. Park
Term Fall 2008
Meetings Thurs. 7:00-9:45 p.m. Location: JO 4.312

Professor’s Contact Information

Office Phone (972) 883-2152
Cell Phone (323) 819-2861
Office Location JO 5.610
Email Address peter.park@utdallas.edu
Office Hours Tues. & Thurs. 12:00-1:30 p.m. & by appointment
A&H Office Phone (972) 883-6780

General Course Information

Pre-requisites, Co-
requisites, & other This course is open to graduate students and fast-track undergraduates.
restrictions
This course is a graduate-level survey of the historiography of the
Renaissance and Reformation in Western and Central Europe. Our focus
will be on intellectual history, but we will also consider the era in terms of
popular culture and popular movements for some critical contrast. The
topics of our historiographical survey broadly are humanism,
hermeticism, Protestant and Counter-Reformation theologies,
Renaissance political thought, the conquest of America and its impact on
European thought, and early modern popular culture. We will forego a
study of the primary documents of the Protestant Reformation and instead
Course Description devote a number of weeks to studying some important sources of the
Renaissance: the Corpus Hermeticum and writings of the humanists
Niccolò Machiavelli and Desiderius Erasmus. We will study a late
fifteenth-century manual of demonology and witch-hunting, the Malleus
Maleficarum, and then consider Carlo Ginzburg’s approach to the study
of this subject. We conclude our studies with the German sociologist Max
Weber’s thesis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, one
of the most influential interpretations of Protestantism and its role in the
rise of modern capitalist societies in the West.

Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious

History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe, 1250-1550 (Yale UP,
1980) ISBN 0300027605
Brian Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin
Asclepius in a new English translation, with notes and introduction
(Cambridge UP, 1992) ISBN 0521425433
Required Texts &
Frances Amelia Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (University
Materials
of Chicago Press, 1991) ISBN 978-0226950075
Anthony Pagden, The fall of natural man: The American Indian and the origins
of comparative ethnology (Cambridge UP, 1986 paperback) ISBN
0521337046
The Portable Machiavelli (Penguin, 1979) ISBN 978-0140150926
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and
 the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton UP, 1975) ISBN 0691100292
Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, transl. and edited
by Robert M. Adams (W. W. Norton & Co., 1989) ISBN 0393957497
Peter Blickle, The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War from a New
Perspective (Johns Hopkins UP, 1981) ISBN 978-0801831621
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other
Writings on the Rise of the West, transl. by Stephen Kalberg (Oxford UP, 4th
ed. July 2008) ISBN 978-0195332537
The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, transl. by
Montague Sumers (Dover, 1971) ISBN 978-0486228020
Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, transl. by John and Anne Tedeschi
(Johns Hopkins UP, 1992) ISBN 978-0801843860
general histories/introductions
Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 1994)
Euan Cameron, ed., Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History (Oxford UP,
1999)
Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Clarendon/Oxford UP, 1991)
Euan Cameron, The Sixteenth Century (Short Oxford History of Europe) (Oxford
UP, 2006)
Suggested Texts,
John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (Atheneum and
Readings, &
Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1994)
Materials
Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany: The Reformation (Princeton UP,
1959)
George Huppert, After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern
Europe, 2nd ed. (Indiana Univ. Press, 1998)
R. W. Scribner and C. Scott Dixon, The German Reformation, 2nd ed. (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003)

Assignments & Academic Calendar

8/21 Introduction to the Course
Topic: European intellectual and religious history before Martin Luther
Reading: Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An Intellectual and
Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe, 1250-1550 (Yale
8/28
UP, 1980), pp. xi-xii, 1-222
Suggested Reading: Alister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction,
3rd ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2001)
Topic: the Corpus Hermeticum
Reading: Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and
the Latin Asclepius in a new English translation, with notes and introduction
9/04 (Cambridge UP, 1992), pp. xiii-lxi, 1-92
Suggested Reading: Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources
(Columbia UP, 1979); Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, Renaissance
Philosophy (A History of Western Philosophy, Vol. 3) (Oxford UP, 1992)
Topic: Hermeticism
Reading: Frances Amelia Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
9/11 (University of Chicago Press, first published 1964), pp. ix-xii, 1-189
Suggested Reading: D. P. Walter, The Ancient Theology: studies in Christian
Platonism from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century (Cornell UP, 1972)
Topic: Hermeticism continued
9/18
Reading:Yates, pp. 190-455
Topic: the conquest of America in European intellectual history
9/25 Reading: Anthony Pagden, The fall of natural man: The American Indian and
the origins of comparative ethnology (Cambridge UP, 1986), pp. 1-209
 Suggested Reading: other titles by Pagden; Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of
America: The Question of the Other (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Walter D.
Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, &
Colonization, 2nd edition (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2003); Nicolás Wey Gómez,
The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (MIT Press,
2008)
Topic: Machiavelli’s Letters, The Prince, The Art of War
Reading: The Portable Machiavelli, pp. 53-77-166, 480-517
10/02 Suggested Reading: Francesco Guicciardini, Dialogue on the Government of
Florence, transl. by Alison Brown (Cambridge UP, 1994)
NO CLASS MEETING
Topic: The Discourses
Reading: The Portable Machiavelli, pp. 167-418
10/09
Suggested Reading: Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and
History in Sixteenth-Century Florence (Princeton UP, 1965)
Topic: John Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment
Reading: J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political
Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton UP, 1975), pp. vii-x,
10/16
3-271, 553-583
Suggested Reading: Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political
Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge UP, 1978)
Topic: Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly, Two Forewords to the Latin Translation
of the New Testament, The Colloquies
Reading: Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, trans.
and edited by Robert M. Adams (W. W. Norton & Co., 1989), pp. 3-87, 117-141,
10/23 174-227, 267-338
Suggested Reading: Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth
Century: The Religion of Rabelais, transl. by Beatrice Bottlieb (Harvard UP,
1982); Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, transl. by Hélène Iswolsky
(Indiana Univ. Press, 1984)
FIRST PAPER DUE
10/30 Topic: European intellectual and religious history after Martin Luther
Reading: Ozment, pp. 223-438
Topics: Reformation as popular movement and peasant rebellion
Reading: Peter Blickle, The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants' War
from a New Perspective (Johns Hopkins UP, 1985), pp. ix-xxvi, 3-205
Suggested Reading: George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation
11/06
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962); R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple
Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge UP, 1981);
R. W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation
Germany (The Hambledon Press, 1987)
Topics: popular culture, witchcraft, witch-craze
Reading: The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger,
11/13 transl. by Montague Sumers (Dover, 1971), pp. TBA
Suggested Reading: Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies
in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford UP, )
Topics: popular culture, witchcraft, witch-craze continued
Reading: Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in
the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, transl. by John and Anne Tedeschi
(Johns Hopkins UP, 1992)
11/20
Suggested Reading: H. R. Trevor-Roper, “The European Witch-Craze of the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-
Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays (Harper &
Row, 1967);
11/27-11/29 NO CLASS MEETING
 (Thanksgiving
Break)
Topic: Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis
Reading: Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with
Other Writings on the Rise of the West, transl. and introd. by Stephen Kalberg
12/04
(Oxford UP, 4th ed. July 2008), pp. vii-xviii, 59-159, 3-58, 431-448
Suggested Reading: see Weber/Kalberg, Appendix III: “Suggested Further
Reading” pp. 455-457
12/11-12/17 (Final
FINAL PAPER DUE ON DEC. 17
Exam Week)

Course Policies
Final grade breakdown: regular attendance and participation (25%), first 10-to-12-
page paper, (35%), and final 10-to-12-page paper (40%)
Grading (credit)
Criteria Your final grade will be based on the following scale (as percentages): 93-100 = A,
90-92 = A-, 87-89 = B+, 83-86 = B, 80-82 = B-, 77-79 = C+, 73-76 = C, 70-72 = C-,
60-69 = D, 0-59 = F
Late Work You may try to negotiate an extention.
Class Attendance Required.
Classroom
Please arrive on time.
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Field Trip
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