The Proseminar: Centerpiece of the Graduate Certificate Program

MEMS Proseminar, a team-taught comparative and/or interdisciplinary course, brings together faculty and students from a wide array of our constituent areas. Visiting lectures, colloquiua, and conferences are often coordinated to bear upon the topic of a given term’s proseminar. The course is offered under two or more departments (appropriate to the topic and disciplinary approach) and welcomes both Certificate students and other interested students.

Here is a detailed description of the Winter 2010 proseminar:

"Albrecht Dürer in Contexts" (German 821 / History of Art 646) Helmut Puff (German/History) and Achim Timmermann (History of Art)

Ever since the sixteenth century, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) has figured as an iconic artist. In fact, the histiography of the history of art is intimately intertwined with the reception of Dürer. Whether his self-portaits were said to exemplify Renaissance subjectivity, his prints were taken as an expression of Germanness, or his religious art interpreted as emblematic of a particularly fervent religiosity on the eve of the Reformation, the artist's rich œuvre of paintings, prints, drawings, and writings has repeatedly served as a window onto religion, culture, and society on the brink of modernity. The artist's persistent iconicity can be traced to a deliberate self-presentation which Dürer, the artist-humanist, and his circle fashioned as well as disseminated in a variety of media.

This interdisciplinary seminar will respond to Dürer's enduring presence by engaging the artwork and its reception as well as the social and civic contexts in which this art was circulated. Our discussions will primarily revolve around the close analysis of Dürer's paintings (such as his self-portraits and altarpieces), prints (such as Melencolia I), and theoretical and autobiographical writings. A reading knowledge of German is desirable, but not essential, as much of the best literature on Dürer, Nuremberg and late medieval / Renaissance Germany is available in English. Pending funding, we will also undertake a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum and the Cloisters in New York (March 19-21).

For a taste of what the MEMS proseminars have offered in the past:

Winter 2009  "The Culture of Cities in Premodern Europe" (Italian 660 / History 638/707) Alison Cornish (Romance Languages) and Diane Owen Hughes (History)

By the sixteenth century Europeans regularly identified their culture as both urban and urbane.   This argues for a central role of cities in the formation of European identity.This course will examine the role of the city in shaping that identity from the rise of urban culture in the twelfth century through its full development in the period of European global expansion in the sixteenth century. Although European urbanism shaped a continental identity, the continent was not unaware of comparisons, from dream capitals of Troy and Jerusalem to more competitive contemporary images of Tenotichlan and Constantinople. It is the intersection between the growth of cities in Europe and the imagining of cities - in art, in literature, in religious thought - that will provide the focus of this course.

Although the course will proceed for the most part chronologically, it will also organize itself around specific cities, institutions, and disciplines. Such topics will include the role of the universities in the standardization of European culture, but also in connecting various cities in Europe, urban religion (mendicants, confraternities, Jews), self-representation and public display (art, music, procession), the physical city (architecture and urban planning) and the ideal city (Rome, Jerusalem), exiles, tradesmen and travelers. Because of the expertise of the instructors, particular attention will be given to Italian cities: Florence, Venice, Rome.

Winter 2008  "Arts, Patrons, Courts in Early Modern Culture" (Musicology 505.002/605.001 / Histart 689.003 / RomLang 500 ) taught by Louise K. Stein (Musicology) and guest lecturers. This course is a seminar devoted to exploring the role of private patrons, institutional patronage, and the commercial market-place in the production of works of music and art.  It is designed for graduate students interested in reading and writing about the patronage and production of music, the visual arts, architecture, and theater in the early modern period, as well as studying pieces of music and works of art. The course is open to scholars and performers.  We will explore the role of individual patrons and institutional patronage, public and private, in early modern societies, through careful case-studies of patrons, producers, artists, and performers, male and female, in selected times and places.  Our work seeks to better understand systems of production as well as the variability and complexity of relationships between patrons/producers and artists/composers/performers in Europe and Latin America in the period roughly 1500-1750. Our first set of readings will include groundbreaking patronage studies from our several disciplines, as well as readings concerned with methodology, theories of patronage and production, the economics of the arts, and the politics of the arts in early modern society.  Following this initial period of general readings, the course will be organized around particular times and places (along with relevant musical, theatrical, and artistic repertories), with readings from successful case studies. Students will be introduced to and have the chance to work with various kinds of primary sources---archival documents (inventories, notarial documents, household accounts, private letters, etc.), printed texts, theatrical manuscripts, musical scores, images, and so on.  Our understanding will be enriched by several guest presentations by MEMS faculty on their own case studies.  Our work will focus on Florence (and possibly other Northern Italian centers), Rome, Naples, Versailles and Paris, Madrid, Lima, and London, with possible study of other sites, depending on student interest and linguistic preparation.

Winter 2007: “Religion and Empire in the Early Modern Atlantic” (Eng 642.001/Hist 698.003)  taught by Linda Gregerson (English), Susan Juster (History)  Religious passions and conflicts drove much of the expansionist energy of post-Reformation Europe and provided both a rationale and a practical mode of organizing the dispersal and resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people from Europe to the Americas. During the formative period of European exploration, settlement, and conquest of the Americas, from roughly 1500 to 1700, Europe’s Christians, confronting the new and unfamiliar, were forced to explain and defend the old, often in novel and startling ways.  This course will look at the dynamic expansion, fragmentation, and dispersal of religious communities and ideas in the 16th and 17th centuries through four interrelated categories:  translation (the process of rendering familiar beliefs and texts in a new idiom); dissent (the challenge of defining and maintaining boundaries between the authorized and the unauthorized); diaspora (the experience of exile and estrangement); and transplantation (the rooting of the sacred in alien environments).  All of these themes highlight the tremendous instability that the wars of the Reformation and imperial expansion introduced into organized religious life in the 16th and 17th centuries, on both sides of the Atlantic, and the creative adaptations of belief, practice, and community life that followed in the wake of these seismic events.  Our texts will include major literary and historical documents of the period as well as important scholarly interventions. We are eager to convene this course as an intensive interdisciplinary conversation and we welcome students from American Culture, Comparative Literature, Anthropology, Sociology, Romance Languages, Art History, and other related disciplines, as well as those from our home departments of History and English.  This course is sponsored by the Atlantic Studies Initiative and fulfills the proseminar requirement for the certificate in Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Our semester’s work will also lay the groundwork for an international conference on the same subject, to take place at the University of Michigan on October 5-6, 2007; students will be encouraged play active roles in planning and administering that conference.

Fall 2006: "Histories of Etymology and Genealogy" (HA 754, Studies in 16th C Italian Art; History 698), taught by Profs Diane Owen Hughes (History) and Pat Simons (History of Art). This course will examine etymological and genealogical continuity but also rupture, investigating the processes in terms of their fictionality and representational strategies.  Stretching over both medieval and early modern materials, chiefly in Western Europe, the seminar queries standard notions of chronological division and instead invites a reconsideration of conventional ideas about origin, influence and filiation.  After an overview of theoretical frameworks (Bloch, Butler, Derrida, Foucault), our case studies will be drawn from such subjects as Isidore of Seville’s etymological project, linguistic and archaeological claims for the primacy of Etruscan roots (including Annius of Viterbo’s late fifteenth-century forgeries and those of Curzio Inghirami in the seventeenth century, which also invoke notions of authenticity), the representation of Adam and Eve as the “first parents” after they committed “original sin”, nationalistic myths of Troy (including stories about the origins of the Ottomans), and the productive tension between valorized imitation (visual, political, rhetorical) on the one hand and valued innovation on the other.

Winter 2006:  “The Presence of the Past in Medieval and Early Modern Culture ,” taught by Professors Karla Taylor (English, MEMS) and Tom Willette (History of Art). The proseminar explored several broad purposes of the past in medieval and early modern cultures.  The past could be used to construct identity in the present; the effort to assimilate an alien past could be a main engine for hermeneutics, allegory, and other forms of re-signifying; the past could support claims of political and cultural legitimacy; and conversely, it could become the site for the oppositional imagination. Through a series of case studies, we will investigate the varied ways in which myths of the past were created, exposed, and continually reinvented for these (and perhaps other) purposes.  We will focus our exploration through such cases as Beowulf and the past as treasure; invented genealogies and other forgeries; the legend of Arthur; the story of Lucretia; architectural spolia and the idea of Rome; the Donation of Constantine and the past as text; visual histories; hagiography and devotional images; and biblical hermeneuetics and the Franciscans.

Fall 2005: "Visual Valences: The Status of the Artist in Medieval and Early Modern Europe ," taught by Megan Holmes and Elizabeth Sears (both History of Art). The goal of this seminar is to develop more complex models for conceptualizing the ‘artist’ as practitioner and social agent in Europe from 1200 to 1600.  Drawing on an array of primary sources and recent secondary literature, we will examine narratives embedded within late Medieval and Early Modern art histories about the ‘rise of the independent artist’ and the ‘changing status of the artist’.  Historical terminology and grades of distinction among practitioners will be defined, as well as variation in usage according to region and time.  We will examine images of labor and note how specific practitioners are ‘named’ and their skills, status and fame represented in inscriptions, chronicles, encomia, and treatises. Attention will be given to the organizations (guilds, confraternities), the socio-economic networks and the conditions that structured artistic employment in major and minor artistic centers, in monastic, communal, and court environments, and in cases of interregional activity.  Clientele and patronage will be examined from the perspective of the practitioner negotiating contracts and forging careers.  We will consider how conceptions about ‘quality’ were defined and regulated through contract and guild control, tied to certain kinds of performativity evident in works of art, and verbalized in assessments and literary praise.  The figure of the entrepreneur operating with a ‘signature style’ will be explored. While the focus will be on the visual arts, many of the issues considered are equally applicable to the fields of architecture, literature, and music.  Our approach will be interdisciplinary and participants from other fields are welcome. 

Fall 2004: “Print Culture in Early Modern Europe,” taught by Professors Megan Holmes and Pat Simons (History of Art). The introduction of printing with moveable type and new techniques of pictorial reproduction had a major impact on European culture and society, comparable to that of the current computer and Internet technological revolution. This course offered an interdisciplinary study concentrating on the material and visual culture of prints in Italy and the north of Europe (Germany, the Netherlands, England) circa 1450 to 1650. Raises issues relevant to many projects beyond those specific to print technology, such as the regulatory role of censorship, the definition of “obscenity” and “copyright”, the nature of representational “authority”, the connection between print and a growing number of observational “sciences” such as medicine and cartography, the development of genres like urban guidebooks and New World travel literature, and the matter of different registers of circulation and reception (ranging from the “popular” to the “learned elite”). Also considers theoretical arguments about the cultural significance of reproductive technology and the rise in visual literacy within different social populations and cultural spheres. Utilizing the excellent collection of intaglio prints in the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the early illustrated printed books in the Harlan Hatcher and Clements Libraries, students will become familiar with a range of printing techniques (woodcut, engraving, etching, and dry-point) and the different categories and functions of prints, in both single-leaf issues and illustrated books.

Fall 2003: “Seeing (in) Early Modern Europe,” taught by Professors Celeste Brusati (History of Art) and Helmut Puff (History, Germanic Languages and Literatures). This class focused on a series of readings and case studies highlight ways that notions of seeing and visual technologies have figured in key (art) historical scholarship on early modern Europe. The course examined the historical implications of taking serious account of the visual, and the art historical implications of historicizing vision and visual culture. It investigated how the disciplines of history and art history and their methods have been brought to bear on one another. Readings covered different types of visual objects as well as a range of topics, such as imagery in the context of religious devotion, Reformation propaganda, nascent nation-building, and scientific exploration. Aimed towards understanding the changing status of image in an age of mechanical reproduction.

Fall 2002: “Geographers and Cartographers: Shaping the Premodern World,” taught by Professors Michael Bonner (Near Eastern Studies, History) and Diane Owen Hughes ( History), Gottfried Hagen (Near Eastern Studies, History). This course compared the ways in which the world was bounded, charted, and described in the premodern period, particularly within Christian and Islamic spheres. Since both religious cultures reached back for geographic knowledge into the ancient Greco-Roman past, part of the interest of the course will be to assess the ways in which the shared authority of the past was transmitted, transmuted, and challenged between the fall of Rome in the fifth century and the encounter with new lands and cultures in the fifteenth and sixteenth. Considered attempts to grasp the world in maps (e.g., the Ptolemaic grid; portolan sea charts; spiritual mappaemundi), in literary accounts (e.g., the geographies compsosed by travelers and pilgrims; descriptions of marvels and wonders), as well as in texts deriving from bureaucratic practice (e.g. administrative manuals) in order to learn both how they envisioned and represented the globe and how they measured themselves and their civilization as they experienced cultures beyond its bounds. The course offers an opportunity for students from a variety of disciplinary and regional specialites to experience a range of the sources of premodern geographical knowledge (read in translation) and to achieve some sense of the benefits of cross-cultural exploration of the premodern world.