勛圖惇蹋

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勛圖惇蹋 College
First-Year Experience

Scribner Seminar Program
Course Desription

Famine, Warfare, and Plague in 14th-century England

Instructor(s): Erica Bastress-Dukehart, History

England in the fourteenth century may be considered the embodiment of what we think of when we use the term medieval. It was a time of famine and disease, prolonged and bloody battles with France, of chivalry, art, new architecture, and the end of the Crusades. If someone living at the beginning of the century survived famine and warfare, it was likely that they succumbed to the plague that crept onto Englands shores three decades later, with deadly consequence. This was a dynamic time socially, politically, and culturally: Londons back alleys were alive with beggars, pickpockets, and gamers, its markets filled with hawkers, fishmongers, barbers, and wool merchants. Knights jousted at the Tower of London, and the Church dominated peoples spiritual lives. The City stank of rotting garbage and raw human sewage, and the Thames was fouled by toxic runoff from the local tanners. Yet, everyone wanted to be part of this exciting city. Pilgrims arrived daily at it gates ready to be swept up in its wonders. In the fourteenth century, London was the place to be.

This course offers us a new way to consider what History means. It allows us to think about the past as something that is still in the process of unfolding, rather than as something that has already occurred. As Ian Mortimer writes Understanding the past is a matter of experience as well as knowledge, a striving to make spiritual, emotional, poetic, dramatic and inspirational connections匈t is about our personal reactions to the challenges of living in previous centuries and earlier cultures, and our understanding of what makes one century different from another.1 Our task this semester, then, will be to peel back the layers of the intervening centuries to rediscover London and its surrounding towns as they may have been in the fourteenth century.

Course Offered