Welcome to the Medieval World

This online course guide is intended to assist the Carleton University (Ottawa) students taking HIST 2000 (Medieval Europe) in the 2020/21 academic year taught by Marc Saurette and Sarah Keeshan.

The Medieval World is a weird and wonderful place, very different from ours in some ways but not so different in others. We want to explore –as much as we can in an introductory survey– the rich diversity of life in the Middle Ages (i.e. 300-1500 CE) and tease out what it can teach us. We will explore subjects that movies, books and video games popularly have made familiar to us – knights, castles, damsels in distress, sinister monks and beer-swilling friars – and we will also look at the less familiar – the stone-cut churches of Ethiopia, a saintly greyhound, and the travels to Asia of a pair of proselytizing friars.

We hope to use this online guide as a way to offer course materials, provide links to online resources and a place to write up some how-to guides. We're leaving it publicly accessible, just in case there are other people might want to make use of this course but who are not at Carleton University.

One thing you are going to notice about this course, is that we will talk about the "medieval world" much more than we will talk about "Medieval Europe" which is the actual course title. I want to highlight the importance of this seemingly small change in naming because it speaks to a vast change in scholarship of the Middle Ages in the past few years. And we can alter our subject matter quicker than it takes to change official course titles...

It was once typical to talk about the Middle Ages as something that almost exclusively happened in England or France or Germany – places that are made to seem as if they were cut off from the rest of the world. Thanks to amazing work done in the past two decades, historians now recognize the Middle Ages as a larger phenomenon. What we think of as "Europe" was in reality bound by religious, intellectual and economic ties to Africa, Asia and the Middle East. To ignore these ties is to willfully ignore key cultural forces that defined the Middle Ages as a period.

If you want to quickly get a sense of what the course will cover this year, jump to the schedule, which outlines lecture topics.