ENL 4220 Fall 2020 Maurette

This course explores the period between roughly 1350 and 1650 as the beginning of modernity. The Renaissance, or early modernity, is a period marked by five major cultural revolutions: the rediscovery of Classical culture, the invention of the printing press, the discovery of the New World, the reformation, and the birth of modern science. All of these revolutions take place as human beings start thinking of themselves and their relationship to nature and to the divine in radical new ways. The way we think of humanity and its role in the universe, the ways in which we conceive science and religion were in many ways modeled in this period. The course will be looking at some of the most interesting transnational examples of poetry and prose of the time. We will work with fictional and non-fictional works written originally in Latin and English, French and Spanish, Italian and German. In authors as diverse and influential as Thomas More, Christine de Pizan, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Margaret Cavendish, Pico della Mirandola and others, we will find new notions of mankind and its role and place in the world, of science as a secular and anti-dogmatic endeavor, and of religion as an moral and spiritual enterprise.