Medieval History

Module code: 7AAH1001
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 60 credits
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 15,000 word dissertation

The 15,000 word dissertation is the core of the MA in Medieval History. It offers students the chance to research a topic of their choice, working with a supervisor from the department (see list of core teaching staff). It is designed as a substantial research project based on primary sources, the equivalent of a major article for a historical journal or a chapter in a PhD thesis.

Recent topics have included:

• Caritas Ordinata: Public interest companies in Medieval Paris and Oxford
• Motherhood in Christina of Martyate
• The establishment of the Becket cult to Easter 1171
• William FitzStephen’s Life of Thomas Becket: A Biographival Paradox?
• Women in Christ: Anglo-Saxon Double Monasteries
• Who were the Brigands of Charles the Bald’s 873 Capitulary of Quierzy

Teaching staff: Mr Daniel Hadas
Module code: 7AAH1003
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20 credits
Semester:  Full-year 
Teaching pattern: 20 x 2-hour weekly seminars
Assessment:  written examination/s 
1 x 3 hour examination

Latin for Graduates aims to provide students with the translation skills necessary to carry out research for an MA dissertation or PhD thesis in late antique, medieval, or early modern studies. The module consists of intensive instruction in Latin grammar, from the basics to complex sentence structures involving a range of clauses, indirect speech, participles, etc. Students will also read a variety of texts in order to achieve an understanding of the particular features of post-classical Latin. The module is divided into beginning and advanced sections: the beginning section presumes no previous knowledge of Latin, while those students who have studied Latin to GCSE level or above are welcome to enter the advanced section.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/chs/modules/level7/7AAH1003.aspx

Teaching staff: Various, team taught
Module code: 7AAH1002
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20 credits
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 
Teaching pattern: 10 x 2-hour weekly seminars
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

Examines the sources used for the study of medieval history and places them within their historiographical framework.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/chs/modules/level7/7AAH1002.aspx

Module code: 7AAYM109
Credit level: 7
Assessment:  written examination/s;  coursework; 
Assessment will be by one three-hour unseen written examination, and sample manuscript description.

The aim of this module is to train students to read, date and describe Latin manuscripts from AD 1 - 1500 and to understand manuscript culture. It consists of a survey of the history of Latin handwriting from Cicero to the Renaissance. Students will also be taught how to describe a manuscript book and will be introduced to codicology. Basic Latin is a requirement of this module.

Teaching staff: Emeritus Professor Dame Jinty Nelson
Module code: 7AAH1005
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20 credits
Teaching pattern: 10 x 2-hour weekly seminars
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

The module develops students’ knowledge and understanding of the various Anglo-Saxon and continental kingdoms, promotes advanced critical engagement with the recent historical scholarship on the ninth century and promotes a comparative approach to the study of different contemporary polities. The module develops students’ understanding of the common themes in the histories of Anglo-Saxon and continental kingdoms, such as papal contacts and Viking impacts.

Teaching staff: Professor Peter Heather
Module code: 7AAH1011
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20 credits
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: 10 x 2-hour weekly seminars
Assessment:  written examination/s;  coursework; 
1 x 2,000 word essay; 1 x 2-hour gobbet examination

This module introduces students both to the wide range of legal materials surviving from the early fourth century to the Carolingian Empire, and to the wide range of historical issues that they raise. Late Antiquity was a hugely formative period in the history of Roman law, and also dictated the nature of at least some of the formal legal texts (the so-called Barbarian Codes') produced in early medieval, post-Roman, Europe. Equally important, the period between c.300 and c.900 AD saw slow but steady progress towards the emergence of the Christian Church as an institutional entity. Part and parcel of this process was the generation of a body of rules and regulations - Canon Law – with the same individuals often implicated in the making of both secular and ecclesiastical law. The module investigates not only the formal codes produced between the fall of Rome and the Carolingians, but also takes full account of the mass and range of less formal legal materials produced in the period, such as charters, wills, and books of formulae. Between them, this range of texts provides a large percentage of all the source material to survive from the early medieval west.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/chs/modules/level7/7AAH1011.aspx

Students will read widely and extensively in the surviving legal sources, the vast majority of which are available in modern English translations. The focus of the module is as much social history as legal history. Why did kings and emperors publish law codes, and how were they used in practice? What degree of overlap existed between formal written law, and practical dispute settlement?

Teaching staff: Professor David Carpenter
Module code: 7AAH1007
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20 credits
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: 10 x 2-hour weekly seminars
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This module begins by examining the causes of Magna Carta. It then looks beyond 1215 to consider both the achievements of the Charter and its defects, defects that meant that by 1258/9 far more radical schemes of political reform were imposed on the king. Central to the module will be a detailed analysis of the Charter of 1215, the later versions of 1216, 1217 and 1225, and the reforms of 1258 and 1259. The module will thus provide students with a comprehensive grasp of the issues in dispute between the king and his subjects in the central Middle Ages, and an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the constitutional means by which attempts were made to bring those disputes to resolution.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/chs/modules/level7/7AAH1007.aspx

Teaching staff: Dr Alice Rio
Module code: 7AAH1012
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20 credits
Semester:  Semester 1 (autumn) 
Teaching pattern: 10 x 2-hour weekly seminars
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This module will consider the history of slavery and unfreedom from the late Roman empire down to the Renaissance. The middle ages saw the disappearance of European slavery in the Roman mould, in which a restricted number of persons were under the complete legal and material control of their master, and its replacement with serfdom, a lighter form of subjection, but one which involved the majority of the rural population. Alongside these local developments, the slave trade, both in Northern Europe and in the Mediterranean, remained buoyant, and apparently subjected to fundamentally different rhythms of evolution. This course will be unique in offering students the opportunity to study this important topic throughout the medieval period, from late antiquity and the fall of the Roman empire through to the late medieval slave trade, in Western Europe as well as in Byzantine and Islamic regions.

The module will consider a variety of themes, such as enslavement, captivity and conquest; ways in and ways out of slavery; the slave trade; gender and sexual exploitation; the ability or inability of slaves to form families; slaves as the ‘other’; the scope for social mobility as well as exclusion; and the concept of social crisis, often linked with the subjection of the free by both contemporary writers and modern historians. The course will also consider slavery in the context of wider social change, since it cannot be assumed that the free-unfree divide, much insisted on by Roman masters and medieval lords after them, would always have been the most crucial form of social differentiation (the free poor, among others, constitute an important point of comparison). The available sources vary widely according to time and place: they include the writings of philosophers and moralists, letters, inscriptions, agricultural handbooks, laws, Christian polemic, saints’ lives, poetry, penitentials, archive documents and estate-surveys.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/chs/modules/level7/7AAH1012.aspx

Teaching staff: Emeritus Professor Dame Jinty Nelson & Dr Serena Ferente
Module code: 7AAH1008
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 40 credits
Teaching pattern: 20 x 2-hour weekly seminars
Assessment:  coursework 
2 x 4,000 word essay

This module studies the evolution of the Church’s teaching and practice in the medieval period. A primary focus is on the changes of the 11th-12th century, and on the social and economic contexts of institutional reorganisation of the Church, and of movements of protest, dissent and heresy. The themes considered thereafter may take students into earlier and/or later medieval periods, through considering the official teaching and lay practice on saints’ cults and canonisation, marriage, penance, legitimate violence, ordeals, the care of the dead and the doctrine of purgatory, and the rise and fall of Catharism in the Languedoc and Northern Italy.

Teaching staff: Professor David Carpenter
Module code: 7AAH1013
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20 credits
Teaching pattern: 10 x 2-hour weekly seminars
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

During the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there was a gigantic expansion in the records produced by royal government in England, an expansion itself reflecting a revolution in the workings of that government. Many of these records survive in The National Archives at Kew. They provide a resource for historians unparalleled in the rest of Europe. The aim of this course is to understand these records, and through them understand the development and workings of government and its increasing impact on society. The course will also show how the records can open windows onto the politics, economy and wider culture of the period. The course will thus engage closely with the records of the chancery, and its fine, charter, patent, close, and liberate rolls. It will do likewise with the records of the exchequer (the pipe, memoranda and receipt and issue rolls) and the law courts (the plea rolls of the king’s justices in the localities and at Westminster). The course will provide a grasp of both the burdens of government (through its financial exactions) and its benefits (through the developing procedures of the early common law). There will also be a session on the development of parliament. Students taking this course will be well for using the records in their doctoral research.

Teaching staff: Dr Alice Rio & Dr Serena Ferente
Module code: 7AAH1009
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20 credits
Semester:  Semester 2 (spring) 
Teaching pattern: 10 x 2-hour weekly seminars
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

The module considers images of women, religious and secular, through such evidence as saints’ lives, literary texts, art, and handbooks of instruction for wives and daughters. It examines the varieties of women’s position in law, and of women’s economic activities in town and countryside and at different social levels. Special attention will be given to the role of gender in the work of women writers from Dhuoda to Christine de Pizan and, in social and political history at large, to the interplay of gender and class.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/chs/modules/level7/7AAH1009.aspx

Teaching staff: Dr Serena Ferente
Module code: 7AAH1010
Credit level: 7
Credit value: 20 credits
Teaching pattern: 10 x 2-hour weekly seminars
Assessment:  coursework 
1 x 4,000 word essay

This module offers a broad overview of texts and debates on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century politics and society, with a focus on Italian thinkers. An age of incessant political and institutional experiments, the centuries between Aquinas and Machiavelli shaped the political languages of modern Europe. We will analyse canonical and less canonical texts as voices in wider debates and contexts. The conflict between secular and religious power, the different ways in which the body politic was imagined, the subordination of women and the young in the family-state compact, the problem of legitimate and illegitimate political authority are some of the themes that will be explored. We will read the works of Dante, Marsilius of Padua, Bartolus of Saxoferrato, Christine de Pizan, Leon Battista Alberti, Lorenzo Valla, Savonarola and others, together with everyday texts such as letters and memoirs.