HIST1928: The Bright Ages: Reimagining the Middle Ages

There is no such thing as the Dark Ages. Medieval European history is a thousand years long and contains all the complexity, the mess, and the human capacity for good and evil as any other place and time. And yet this period of history remains haunted by the ghosts of the Renaissance, the age of Imperialism, and even today?s TV shows like Vikings or Game of Thrones. How do historians craft new and more persuasive narratives about the past? How do we shape what people remember? In this class, students will work on how we tell stories about big periods in the past, focusing first on the battle against the so-called Dark Ages, but then looking at the ways ongoing battles about how to tell our stories from antiquity to now play out in the classroom, our political arenas, in our entertainments, and beyond.

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