Medieval & Early Modern Studies | The University of the South | Sewanee

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If you're interested in the past, Medieval and Early Modern Studies may be for you. On a historical journey from the fall of Rome through the eighteenth century, you will encounter vast wealth alongside extreme poverty, deep piety alongside brutal religious conflict, and intense creativity alongside the ravages of plague and warfare. You will engage with texts, architecture, and art that may seem distant from modern life but which continue to inform—for good and ill—the ways we engage with important issues ranging from religion to gender and power.

Why Medieval & early modern Studies at Sewanee?

The Medieval and Early Modern Studies program at Sewanee is designed to develop a cross-disciplinary overview of these historical periods, incorporating the study of art, literature, history, and philosophy, as well as to offer scope for mentored research projects in pursuit of the student's own distinctive scholarly interests.

We encourage our majors and minors to take advantage of a range of study-away opportunities, including a longstanding relationship with the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Oxford. Founded in 1975, the program provides academic training for overseas students who wish to complete part of their education at Oxford in these areas of study.

Sewanee also offers an opportunity unique among small liberal arts colleges as host of the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, an annual academic conference. The colloquium is held each spring and draws scholars from across the country (and beyond) to campus; student attendance at all events is welcomed, and participation by majors and minors is encouraged.

MEMS 400: Early Soundscapes in Music, Literature, and Art

This class will give you a new, interdisciplinary perspective on how sound, voice, and meaning
unfold in time. Medieval and Early Modern composers and musicians (as well as authors and
artists) often worked within fixed, recognizable forms to produce different ways of
understanding the relationship between what one heard or seen and what it meant. In this class,
we will take up this same interest, listening and looking at a wide range of music, texts, and
images to understand how the production and performance of art in this period joins what is
beautiful (the aesthetic) to what is good (the ethical).

Our readings will draw on medieval and modern theories of sound and attention, as well as
aesthetics and ethics. We will consider music of popular love and devotional practice. We will
read texts that experiment with how time shapes narratives and characters. We will work with
proleptic images of the Passion and with donor portraits within altarpieces. We will consider how
the use of sounds in historical, public spaces (bells, for example) structured communal and
political identity for the people who heard them. We will think about how architecture
(cathedrals, chapels, halls) shapes the experience of both space and sound. Students will also
have a chance to work directly with scholars who are also currently working on these same
questions – faculty and performers from across the country will be invited to share their work
with us, and we will have a chance to see how they engage with meaning-making about the past.

No experience with early music, literatures, or cultures is required, and the only pre-
requisite for the class is a completed G1 requirement. Assignments will consist of short,
informal papers, class discussion, and a longer (analytic or creative) project. No exams.

Taught by Prof. Stephanie Batkie

Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30-10:45 a.m.

Easter Semester 2025

A Sampling of Courses

Nature, Magic, and Machines in Early Modern Europe

History

This course explores watershed changes in the strategies used to produce and circulate new knowledge in the early modern world (c. 1500 to 1800), pursuing a global and interdisciplinary approach to understanding the diverse tools, embodied practices, sociopolitical configurations, social and economic networks that contributed to the rise of modern science. Topics to be addressed may include natural magic, secrets and recipes; natural history collecting, empire and observation; human anatomy, medicine and the Galenic body; drug trials and experimentation; mechanical philosophy, androids, and the transfer of knowledge.

HIST 337

Imagining the Medieval Italian City

Art History

This course explores the ways medieval Italian city-dwellers imagined and shaped their communities and civic identities in art, architecture, and literature, with a focus on vibrant thirteenth and fourteenth century urban centers like Siena, Florence, and Padua. Medieval Italian urbanites strategically imagined and represented their civic ideals and communities in the face of factional divisions and violence. Art, architecture, and urban planning had essential roles to play, as communities, institutions, and religious orders sought to define themselves in an accessible visual language, and as organizations.

ARTH 323

Early Women's Voices

English

A study of women’s literature before 1800, this course examines how feminine voices were presented and heard in their historical contexts. Readings for the class are drawn from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, and ask students to think through the conditions of feminine authorship and identity in the pre-modern period.

ENGL 354

Saints and Society in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

History

This course explores the place of Christian saints in the society and culture of the late Roman and medieval worlds. It analyzes changing ideals of sanctity and their relationship to broader social, religious, and cultural developments. It also focuses on the varied functions of saints' cults as perceived by both the promoters and the followers. Emphasis throughout is on the close relationship of religious ideals, ecclesiastical and secular politics, and social and cultural change.

HIST 368

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Medieval & Early Modern Studies

Programs of Study

Requirements for the Major & Minor in Medieval & Early Modern Studies

Meet some professors

Matthew Mitchell

mdmitche@sewanee.edu

Matthew David Mitchell teaches courses on all eras of the history of Britain and Ireland, with a particular focus on the early modern period (circa 1500 to 1850) and British commercial and colonial contacts with the Atlantic World. Mitchell is the author of The Prince of Slavers, part of Palgrave Macmillan's series of Studies in the History of Finance. This is the first book ever to focus on the life and career of Humphry Morice, the largest-volume British slave trader of the first half of the eighteenth century, who bears the guilt of forcibly transporting over 30,000 enslaved Africans between 1704 and 1732. Using Morice's papers in the Bank of England Archives, Mitchell shows how Morice's innovative methods propelled him to the first rank of slave traders, while bringing untold misery to the men, women, and children his captains imprisoned upon his ships.

Associate Professor of History

Matthew Irvin

mwirvin@sewanee.edu

Matthew Irvin specializes in medieval English and Latin literature and is the author of The Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae in the Confessio Amantis. He is currently collaborating on a translation of Gower’s Vox Clamantis. His next monograph concerns the use of pity by women in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Dr. Irvin also has an interest in late medieval English drama, and has directed two medieval plays at Sewanee.

Professor of English

Leslie Todd

letodd@sewanee.edu

Leslie E. Todd works on early modern art history with a specialization in art of colonial Latin America. She investigates how early modern visual practice enacted and upheld the dynamic relationship between metropole and colony that defined Spanish colonialism in the Americas. Her current research focuses on wooden polychrome sculpture dating to the second half of the eighteenth century from Quito, Ecuador, a major center for sculpture-making in colonial Spanish America.

Assistant Professor of Art and Art History

Susan Ridyard

sridyard@sewanee.edu

Susan J. Ridyard's research centers on the social and cultural history of medieval Christianity, and especially on the cult of the saints in medieval Europe. Dr. Ridyard's current research focuses on the canonization of the thirteenth-century English bishop, Thomas Cantilupe. Working mainly with manuscripts from the Vatican Library, she is preparing a critical edition and English translation of Cantilupe's canonization process, the longest and most detailed such record to survive from medieval England. Her goal is to make this text, which offers extraordinarily rich insights into medieval society and devotion, available not only to other scholars but also to undergraduates for whom it has the potential to "bring the past to life" in a remarkable way.

Professor of History

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Contact

James Ross Macdonald

Associate Professor of English

jrmacdon@sewanee.edu

Gailor Hall 129, ext. 1338

Medieval Colloquium

Medieval history, modern conversation

The Sewanee Medieval Colloquium is a conference for ideas. Medieval scholars across various disciplines converse with one another on a theme, hear lectures, share papers, and bring challenging new perspectives to the field. Surrounded by bluffs and forest coves, Sewanee’s neo-Gothic campus offers a beautiful and intimate setting for academic conversation about the past and the future.

Thither!

Humanities Program

An interdisciplinary way of looking at the world

Sewanee’s team-taught, interdisciplinary Humanities program introduces students to the cultural products and practices that have informed the development of Western cultures. Along with critical examination of “the West” and consideration of what it has meant — and means today — to be human, students refine their writing and speaking skills and participate actively in humanities seminars. Though students may enroll in individual courses within the program, those who complete the entire complement of Humanities courses will be able to conduct interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary critical inquiry, evaluate the implications of historical change over time, and approach the study of cultures — their own and others — in intellectually informed and responsible ways.

Onward!

Shakespeare Studies

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none

Shakespeare studies is a complementary minor for many programs. There’s a reason Shakespeare’s poems and plays have endured the test of time. His colorful characters give us a glimpse into specific and universal human experiences.

Pray tell more!