This module explores theories of human nature in the European Renaissance—an era when traditional teachings were revised and displaced by newly revived classical ideas, contested by philosophers, doctors and theologians amidst religious and political controversies, and, eventually, rejected in favour of radically scientific doctrines. Its main focus is on the rich corpus of philosophical, religious, and medical works composed between the late-fourteenth and the early seventeenth centuries—by famous authors such as Francesco Petrarch, Marsilio Ficino, Andreas Vesalius, Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon, as well as such less well known figures as Johann Weyer, Jacques Ferrand, and John Abernethy. Students are also encouraged to delve into the abundant literary and artistic sources that illustrated and contributed to views of what it was to be human in this period.

The main territories covered include the physiology of the body and soul in medicine and natural philosophy; the ethical and spiritual aspects of the soul and its passions in moral and religious works, before and after the Reformations; the incorporation and refinement of conceptions of human nature in works of social and moral thought; and the expansion of geographical and ethnological knowledge resulting from missionary enterprises and the colonisation of the ‘new world’. Within these areas, particular attention is given to debates about the dignity or misery of man and the immortality of the soul, theories of sexual difference, theories of melancholia and dreaming, the status of the occult sciences of astrology and demonology, discussions of the geographical relativity of customs and values, ideas about 'civility' and civilisation, and, most broadly, historiographical claims about the secularisation of knowledge and the growth of modern individualism. Emphasis throughout is on the close reading of primary texts, but always in relation to the contemporary political, religious and social contexts that informed them.