ITL 304 BODY AND LOVE: THE MIDDLE AGES

This course explores Medieval and early Modern culture through the following questions: What did it mean to have a body in the Late Middle Ages? What were the perspectives on love from a literary, medical and religious point of view? How did the material presence of the human body help shape the perception of the beloved? How did mystical authors embody various forms of sacred love? Although the main focus will be on the works by Italian authors from the 13th and 14th centuries (for example, the Sicilian poets, Dante, Boccaccio, and Caterina da Siena), we will also include physicians from Classical antiquity (for example, Galen and Aristotle), Arabic philosophers (for example, Averroes and Avicenna), and French, English, and Spanish writers up to the 15th century (for example, Julian of Norwich, Marguerite d’Oingt, Teresa de Cartagena).