Courses

This course explores the encounter between Europe, broadly conceived, and the Islamic world in the period from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries. While the Latin Christian military expeditions that began in the late eleventh century known as the Crusades are part of this story, they are not the focus. The course stresses instead the range of diplomatic, commercial, intellectual, artistic, religious, and military interactions established well before the Crusades across a wide geographical expanse, with focal points in Iberia and Southern Italy. Substantial readings in primary sources in translation are supplemented with recent scholarship. [Students will be assigned on average 150-200 pages of reading per week, depending on the difficulty of the primary sources; we will read primary sources every week.]