History of Renaissance Culture at the Colorado College
Renaissance Culture faculty:
Block One: Edith Kirsch (Art History), Maria Daniels (Spanish)
Block Two: Michael Grace (Music), Jane Hilberry (English)
Block Three: Bob McJimsey (History), Mark Stavig (English)
Renaissance Culture earns three units of Humanities credit, and its three blocks provide an ideal introduction to the Liberal Arts and interdisciplinary studies at Colorado College. Focusing on the period from 1300 to 1600, the program examines the heritage of Western Culture from the vantage points of Art and Literature (Block One), Music and Literature (Block Two) and History and Literature (Block Three). In each block two instructors introduce students to the main themes in their disciplines and to the wide variety of teaching styles students will encounter at the college. During Block Two the class will study at the college’s Baca campus, a mountain retreat three hour’s drive from the main campus.
Renaissance Culture has been a part of the college curriculum since 1972. For more than twenty-five years this interdisciplinary program has developed a community of loyal faculty and alumni in many different departments. The program satisfies the all-college AP:A requirement and can serve as a springboard for the thematic minor in Renaissance Studies (this year completed by majors in History, Art History and Biology). It also offers a solid foundation for such overseas programs as The Arts of London and Florence.
Renaissance Culture is open only to First Year students. The program introduces major developments in European intellectual history, taught by six different professors from five different departments. We hope you will join us in exploring one of the most exciting and creative periods in human history.
Course Descriptions:
Block One: "Vision and Self: The Renaissance Eye"( Professors Daniels and Kirsch)
Block One of Renaissance Culture examines the re-ordering of European culture through the lens of classical art and literature in Italy from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. In literature, we study the works of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Castiglione and Machiavelli and the impact of their ideas on such fundamental issues as the authority of classical antiquity, the "chaos" of the Middle Ages, the imitation of nature, and the power and meaning of love (as grounded in the writing of Plato). We also examine the work of visual artists who, like their literary counterparts, expressed and at the same time gave shape to the principles of the Italian Renaissance. These artists include Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael.
Readings include:
- Dante, La vita nuova
- Selections from the Inferno
- Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier
- Boccaccio, Selections from the Decameron
- Machiavelli, The Prince
- Petrarch, "The Ascent of Mt. Ventoux," "Letter to Posterity"
- Pico della Mirandola, "Oration on the Dignity of Man"
- Plato, Symposium
- Vasari, The Lives of the Artists
Block Two: "The evolution of the Creative Artist" (Professors Grace and Hilberry)
In Block Two of Renaissance Culture, we will explore twin issues in the development and representation of the creative artist during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. First, we will look at the way that innovation in the arts, particularly music, was often perceived as threatening to disrupt the established (and God-given) order. We will consider such innovation in the musical compositions of Leonin, Guillaume de Machaut, Josquin des Pres and Claudio Monteverdi. Secondly, we will examine the way artist-figures within literary texts (characters such as Walter in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and the Duke in Measure for Measure) seek to order their "materials"–the people and events taking shape around them–and the way those materials resist shaping. In both cases, art is seen to arise from the fruitful tension between the forces of order and chaos (or tradition and innovation, control and resistance).
Readings and musical studies include:
- Boethius, Selections from De institutione musica
- Chaucer, The Clerk’s Tale
- Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
- Selected sonnets
- The Ars Nova (Machaut, Landini)
- Music and Humanism (From Dufay to Josquin)
- Mannerism and the madrigal (from Josquin to Gesualdo and Weelkes)
- Donne, selected poems
- Monteverdi, L’Orfeo
Block Three: "Vice and Virtue: The Crisis of Renaissance Humanism" (Professors McJimsey and Stavig)
Northern Renaissance Humanism was imbued with the cause of reform. The Church, government and society fell under sharp criticism and demands for renewal. The Reformation and the Wars of Religion intensified these appeals. This Block examines these struggles and in particular those writers who kept alive the traditions of Humanist thought and criticism.
Readings include:
- Erasmus, The Handbook of the Militant Christian
- The Praise of Folly
- Montaigne, selected Essays
- More, Utopia
- Donne: Love poetry, Sonnets and Satires
- Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- King Lear
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