MODERN HISTORY|EASTERN EUROPE|EUROPEAN HISTORY|URBAN HISTORY|VIENNA|PRAGUE|BUDAPEST

This module examines the history of major cities in the Habsburg monarchy and its successor states during the period of classical modernity. It will focus on...

Urban culture and modernity: Vienna-Prague-Budapest, 1857-1938 (II) (HIST0742)

This module examines the history of major cities in the Habsburg monarchy and its successor states during the period of classical modernity. It will focus on the emergence of a particularly modern urban culture in Central Europe around the turn of the century, and study some of its proponents in detail. Taking turn-of-the-century Vienna as a starting point, the seminar will discuss the emergence of leading modernist movements and ideas in the ‘backward’ Habsburg empire. We will look at aspects of Vienna’s, Prague’s, and Budapest’s urban landscape and culture, and study these in a comparative way. Students will examine the development of capital cities as centres for the arts and popular culture, science and technology, industry and commerce; and analyse their architecture as well as features of every-day urban life. We will study some of the main ideas that constituted ‘modernity’, and look at intellectual circles and networks of avant-garde artists that promoted these ideas. The different forms of nationalism and antisemitism that emerged within Central European cities will be another focus of the seminar. The course will make students familiar both with urban history and cultural and intellectual history. To this end, a wide range of sources will be used, from specialised academic literature to diaries, memoirs, and novels; from maps and photographs to reproductions of modernist art and architecture.

This module will explore how ideas about the body, soul and cosmos shaped the medieval understanding of what it meant to be human. We will look at how...

Identity, Cosmology and the Supernatural in the late Middle Ages (HIST0103)

This module will explore how ideas about the body, soul and cosmos shaped the medieval understanding of what it meant to be human. We will look at how cosmological models from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries explained celestial bodies and supernatural beings and forces: their powers, their relationships and their intentions towards humans.‎ Cosmological ideas and discussions flourished in works of natural philosophy, theology, astronomy and medicine; more idiosyncratic cosmologies can be found in visionary literature, heresy trials, poetic works, popular science and magic texts. Our broad focus will capture some of the numerous cosmologies, both written and unwritten, that are likely to have been conceived during the Middle Ages – since most, perhaps all, people have views of some sort about their universe.

Our investigation of cosmological thinking will include looking at the boundaries of the supernatural and natural. Medieval theologians explored the differences between humans, animals and spirits: they emphasised the superiority of human rationality and the belief that animals would not have an afterlife. But there was also an intellectual and aesthetic fascination with the blurring of human and animal boundaries. We will also cover thirteenth-century studies of the nature and powers of angels and demons and fourteenth-century narratives of spiritual experience that expressed increasing anxiety about the ways humans and demons could be bound together through possession, invocation and pact. Our course concludes by looking at the culmination of these fears in the fifteenth-century mythologies of witchcraft and persecution of witches.