Semester:
Offered:
Jan Ziolkowski (Department of the Classics)
First-Year Seminar 65H 4 credits (fall term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
Ever yearn to travel back in time? Heloise and Peter Abelard, woman and man, student and teacher, nun and monk, embody much that is fascinating about the twelfth century and what subsequent ones, including ours, have made of it. The seminar adventures into letters written by the two, together with adaptations of their lives, from the Middle Ages to the present, into poems, novels, plays, films, and artworks. Along the way, we delve into similarities and differences between handwritten manuscripts on parchment and books printed on paper as well as between spoken and written words.
As the title announces, the seminar emphasizes the loves of two extraordinary individuals. The theme encompasses the immense and mystifying spectrum of this feeling, including intense affections within a romantic couple, deep but differing bonds between individual believers and their God, passions that folks feel for vocations and avocations, and other types of pleasure also. It probes central issues of individuality and the power of institutions. We will explore who Abelard and Heloise were as persons and as a couple (before and after his castration), what they reveal about their now-distant days, and what they can help us to perceive about our own selves and moment in history. They taught each other much and can teach us nowadays too. Does human nature change? Are human beings today unique? Should we be as open to the inspiration of people from the past as from other cultures today?