Print and bring the Final Exam questions (under Assignments, not Readings and Handouts)

Ramey, Black Legacies Ch. 5 (13 pg)

Also, Final Exam Instructions are posted here under Readings and Handouts

To guide your reading:

Note: As before, Ramey does a lot of “name dropping” where she refers to medieval things without explaining what they are. Sorry. Do what you can, but remember the point is not to master all the details of what she describes. My goals for the discussion are mostly to simply unpack or understand the arguments the author is making.

Note: Remember, a great deal of this reading consists of Ramey (the modern author) describing what earlier writers (Pliny, Augustine, etc.) thought. She does not bother to say “he also thought…he also thought” every time. This does not mean that Ramey agrees with these ideas. It is important to keep track of these layers: this is cultural history, in which we try to figure out how their assumptions/framework were different than our assumptions/framework.

Again, I think Ramey really “drops the ball” in a number of places in this reading. This, too, is good fodder for conversation, but remember that the point of this is not simply to complain, but to pinpoint the reasons her argument isn’t persuasive. This means that we have to read her as carefully as possible, to be sure we’ve understood what she’s actually saying. What parts of the reading do you object to, find unpersuasive, etc.?

At the outset, Ramey quotes a modern historian, Lestringant, and then says that she disagrees with him; this sets up her main argument. So what did Lestringant say, and what does Ramey argue instead?

This is the main question for our discussion: Ramey traces medieval descriptions of “monstrous races” and the debates around whether they were human or not. How did the question of humanness and race intersect with:
cosmologies or worldviews
the “structure” of race (different from the 19^th c. idea we discussed before)
Christianity and/or salvation
geography and map-making
culture
How did these issues get “transplanted” after the discovery of the New World?

What did the following thinkers contribute to these debates:
Augustine (93)
Albertus Magnus (94)
T-O maps (96)
Hugh of St-Victor (96)
Odoric of Pordenone (98)
John Mandeville (102)
Juan de la Cosa (103)
Piri Reis (103)
Cartier (104-105)
Sepulveda (108)

Humanism primary sources (10 pg)

Also, Final Exam Instructions are posted here under Readings and Handouts

To guide your reading:

Note: These are extremely difficult texts. We will be focusing on the structure and approach as much as the content.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: Don’t worry about the content/ideas of this passage. Instead, what is the structure of Aquinas’ text? How does he build his argument? Where does he get his data?

Petrarch, letter on Scholarly Method: Petrarch is criticizing (and mocking) some other scholar in this letter. What specific intellectual habits, attitudes, etc. does Petrarch deride about his opponent?

Petrarch Letter to Cicero and Letter to Posterity: What attitudes does Petrarch have toward the past and the future? He certainly likes the past, but what exactly does he value about the past?

Valla, On the Donation of Constantine: Valla’s treatise is attempting to prove that a famous document “The Donation of Constantine” was a forgery. How did Valla go about proving it? What kinds of evidence or arguments does he use?

Erasmus, letters: What scholarly values does Erasmus describe? What does he criticize about his opponents? How does he defend his new edition of the New Testament? 

Vergerius, On the Morals Befitting a Free Man: What does Vergerius say are the goals and structure of a good education?

Medievals in their Milieux presentations (7 minutes)

Ruben Besa

Thomas Gaither

Brandon Hopp

Kylee Garcia

Medievals in their Milieux presentations (7 minutes)

Avier Saldivar

Anna Trevino

Cade Killingsworth

Jackson Hughes