BASC63333 - Alumni Sequence: The Middle Ages Year I

Course Description

In the seminar we will read three texts whose project is to provide guidance to the perplexed.  Boethius wrote his Consolation while awaiting execution on trumped up charges of treason against Theodoric the Great.  In the form of a dialogue between the prisoner and Lady Philosophy, he dramatizes the struggle to reconcile belief in an ordered universe, and in true happiness as an inviolable inner possession, with experience of suffering and injustice.  Hildegard von Bingen’s Scivias explicates her personal visionary experience as a means to instruct a wayward clergy, and ultimately every Christian, in the ways of divine providence.  Finally, Maimonides wrote his Guide for those perplexed by the seeming incompatibility between philosophical rationalism and the divine revelation contained in the Hebrew Bible.

In keeping with the guides we are reading in the seminar, the tutorial is concerned with the second part of the Divine Comedy, which includes not only Virgil’s ongoing guidance of the pilgrim Dante but the additional guidance of the Roman poet Statius along the way, of the poet’s muse Beatrice toward the end, and of the landscape itself throughout the poem.  More systematically structured than the Inferno, Purgatorio seeks to make immediately perceptible the rational order of Christian penance and salvation. Course code: BASC63333

Course Outline

Reading List

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, tr. Green, Dover Books.
ISBN 978-0486421636

Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, tr. Hart & Bishop, Paulist Press.
ISBN 978-0809131303

Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, tr. Rabin, Hackett Press.
ISBN 978-0872203242

Dante, Purgatorio, tr. Hollander, Anchor Books.
ISBN 978-0385497008