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Module

HCA1003 : Gold and Silk: Global Middle Ages

  • Offered for Year: 2020/21
  • Module Leader(s): Dr Christina Mobley
  • Lecturer: Dr Nicola Clarke, Dr Philip Garrett, Dr Willow Berridge, Dr Scott Ashley, Dr James Gerrard, Dr Sophie Moore
  • Owning School: History, Classics and Archaeology
  • Teaching Location: Newcastle City Campus
Semesters
Semester 2 Credit Value: 20
ECTS Credits: 10.0

Aims

This module seeks to provide a global framework for understanding the Middle Ages, defined broadly from 500CE-1500CE. By privileging networks of circulation of people, goods, and ideas, this module stresses the interconnection of the global past. This module will introduce students to interdisciplinary methodologies that will allow them to recover the past of people and places for whom we have few or no written documents. Drawing on expertise from across the school of HCA, methodologies will include object analysis, textual analysis, climatology and ecology. Instructors will model how to understand the local history of the global through a series of specialist case studies. These illustrate the benefit of the global as an analytical framework by tracing how communities in seemingly disparate parts of the world understood and consumed global ideas and goods. By encouraging them to examine the past from a variety of perspectives, this module invites students to see familiar places in a new light and unfamiliar places as more central than previously understood.

The module aims are
•       To introduce students to the emerging discipline of the Global Middle Ages.
•       To introduce students to interdisciplinary methodologies used to recover the past.

Outline Of Syllabus

This module may include the following large themes, with specific case studies dependent on research lead teaching.

Migration
Ethnogenesis
Religion
Networks of trade and exchange
Networks of knowledge
Empires and complex societies
Dark Ages
Slavery
Gender
Power

Teaching Methods

Module leaders are revising this content in light of the Covid 19 restrictions.
Revised and approved detail information will be available by 17 August.

Assessment Methods

Module leaders are revising this content in light of the Covid 19 restrictions.
Revised and approved detail information will be available by 17 August.

Reading Lists

Timetable