Lecturing with Chapter 1

This was a bit of a mish-mash week. I did not stick to the syllabus, and instead blended the two days of lecture into coverage of three topics:

1. Medieval Overview

• Chronology
• Social Structure

Here, I aimed to do two things. First, I wanted to give the students an overview of the 1000-year sweep of medieval history and the master narrative that drives its history. So, I discussed the Early, Central, and Later Middle Ages using the same set of criteria for each—context (e.g. climate, migrations); economy; politics; religion; intellectual life. The tale was familiar: early medieval difficulties; central medieval apogee; later medieval woes coupled with plucky responses. Second, I needed to set them thinking about “hierarchy, mutuality, and exclusion” for their first essays, so I threw up the picture of the Three Orders found on p. 135 of the textbook, and talked it through with them. This might have been jumping the gun too much chronologically, but they needed the concepts now.

2. Rome after Rome

• Anxieties about Rome’s “fall”
• Practical legacies
• Dreams of Renewed Empire
• Claims of Glorious Ancient Ancestors

I did all the usual stuff here: interrogated the “fall” of Rome; discussed the many interpretations of its causes; reviewed the many ways in which Rome survived in the medieval West; talked about its legacy in the Holy Roman Empire. Item d is particularly good for the USC Trojans—I talked about Aeneas and Brutus and the ways that Romans and medieval people and even we today like to link ourselves to the glory that was Greece (and Rome).

3. Early Christianity

• establishment (Jesus, c. 4 BCE-30 CE; Paul, c. 5 BCE-67 CE; “terribly terrific” third century; security & triumph in the fourth century)
• consolidation (theology; papacy; classically)

My objective here was to reemphasize the story in the textbook with an eye to the exchange between Pliny the Younger and Trajan in 112 CE that they are discussing in sections this week. So I hope they got a good sense of how Christianity developed in its first century. But we went way beyond, too—to cover expansion, toleration, theological developments (Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Council of Nicaea), the assertion of papal authority (Leo I, Gregory I), and the integration of classical ideas into Christianity (Boethius, Cassiodorus).

Basically, then, I've covered 2 of the 3 elements of the medieval synthesis. We'll get to barbarians next week. In the meantime, we continued to work on the diversity theme in discussion sections:

Discussion #2: Christians, as the Romans Saw Them

READING: Pliny's Letter about Christians to the Emperor Trajan, 112 C.E. and Trajan's Reply

Question for discussion paper: What did pagan Romans imagine about Christians in their midst?

So, not a bad week, and I think we are now settled into the semester. They are not laughing at my jokes, so it could be a looong semester . . . here's hoping they are chuckling inside.