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Art and Science in the Middle Ages
Professor Conrad Rudolph
HASS 092-40R
Call# 20155
Select Mondays (see below), 2:10-5:00pm, Arts 333

There will be four class meetings:
1: Monday, September 29, 2:10-3:00
2: Monday, October 13, 2:10-5:00
3: Monday, October 27, 2:10-5:00
4: Monday, November 10, 2:10-5:00

The twelfth century was one of the great periods of change in Western history. After many centuries of decline, it was the time of the re-establishment of nation-states, cities, international trade, an assertive urban class, universities, and large-scale public art. It was also a time of questioning of previous assumptions about Western culture's understanding of the world and of its relation to the ancient learning of Greece and Rome.

This seminar will investigate the controversies of the new scientific learning of the twelfth century as they pertain to a number of current issues, including creation theory, Classical science, the meaning of history, and the relation of all these to traditional learning.

In particular, it will do this in the context of the most complex painting of the entire Middle Ages: Hugh of Saint Victor's The Mystic Ark, a painting which was the basis of a series of brilliant seminars in Paris at the monastery of Saint-Victor, one of the predecessors of the University of Paris. Now lost--but able to be reconstructed from a very rare fifty-six page description from the twelfth century--this painting was fundamentally political and was in the forefront of the controversies between the old and new ways of looking at the world and human experience.

In essence, this course is designed to take the students through the general steps of writing a research paper without, however, the burden of fully researching the topic or actually writing the paper--something that would be impractical in a one-unit course. Instead, all students will be required to make a class presentation at the end of the quarter in which they are expected to use the knowledge gained through their reading to interpret all or part of a previously unseen reconstruction of The Mystic Ark.

Reading List:

1: Introduction: Monday, September 29, 2:10-3:00
General introduction

2: Background: Monday, October 13, 2:10-5:00
The subject:
Hugh of St Victor, The Mystic Ark, trans. Conrad Rudolph (in typescript).
The biblical basis:
Genesis 1-3, 6-8 [use the English translation of the Latin Vulgate, known as the Douay Rheims (Douai-Reims) version: The Holy Bible (Rockford 1971)].
The cultural background:
William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman, The Medieval World View: An Introduction (Oxford 1983), chapters 1, 2, and 9.
The intellectual background:
Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass. 1927), chapters 1 and 10.
R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven 1975), chapter 4:pt.1.
The political background:
Conrad Rudolph, The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor and the Multiplication and Systematization of Imagery in the Twelfth Century, Chapter 3 "The Political and Intellectual Environment of The Mystic Ark" (in typescript, p.1-20).

3: Science: Monday, October 27, 2:10-5:00
The elemental harmony, the Zodiac, and the Months:
John E. Murdoch, Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York 1984), chapters 24, 25, and 26.
The mappa mundi:
Evelyn Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London 1997), chapters 1, 6, and 7.
The history of salvation:
Marie-Dominique Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century (Chicago 1968) p.162-201.
Creation:
Conrad Rudolph, "In the Beginning: Theories and Images of Creation in Northern Europe in the Twelfth Century," Art History 22 (1999) 3-55.

4: Art: Monday, November 10, 2:10-5:00
Student presentations and general discussion

Brief Biographical Statement:

Conrad Rudolph is Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of California, Riverside. He has special interests in such topics as medieval social theories of art, the ideological use of art, monasticism and art, the origin of Gothic art, and art and social change. He has held Guggenheim, J. Paul Getty, and Mellon fellowships, and is the author of The "Things of Greater Importance": Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art (Philadelphia 1990), Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot Suger's Program and the Early Twelfth-Century Controversy over Art (Princeton 1990), Violence and Daily Life: Reading, Art, and Polemics in the CÓteaux Moralia in Job (Princeton 1997), Pilgrimage to the End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela (Chicago 2004), and "First, I Find the Center Point": Reading the Text of Hugh of Saint Victor's The Mystic Ark (Philadelphia 2005).