Western Europe: Texts, Contexts, and Legacies
In this course, we will review major texts that serve as a foundation for understanding core aspects of Western European societies. Covering the period from the Hebrew Bible to Dante’s Inferno, we will read works of religion, literature, philosophy, and politics such as Homer’s Odyssey, Plato’s Republic, Virgil’s Aeneid, the Christian Bible, Beowulf, the Arthurian legends, and Marco Polo’s Travels. We will focus on the context in which these texts were written and the legacies they produced for understanding Western Europe as a region. We will discuss themes such as friendship, loyalty, family, home, gender roles, slavery, power relations, and the definition of Western Europe itself.