Each student attends one of the seminars offered each semester.  The seminars complement the one-to-one work of the tutorial by fostering students’ presentational skills, by encouraging students to learn from each other as well as from the tutor, and by requiring an extended essay to be written in the final week of the course.

Globes, books, a telescope, and a bust on display

The seminar course consists of ten meetings that run during the Oxford term. Each seminar meeting lasts roughly two hours and assessment is based on the essay (50% of grade) and seminar participation over the course of the semester (50% of grade).

The seminars vary in format and style according to the requirements of the subject and the needs of the participants.  They range from one-hour formal lectures followed by a discussion period, to sessions where students present the points for discussion and explore them under the guidance of their tutor. The tutor provides a choice of questions for the final essay, which is expected to be a substantial and exemplary piece of work that should be valuable in future applications to postgraduate or professional programmes.

(Note: Students are required to choose a first and second choice of seminar, because each seminar is run only if a sufficient number of students select it)

Browse the comprehensive list of seminars.

Fall 2023 Seminars

Each seminar runs only if there is sufficient student demand. This seminar tells the story of two rival dynasties, and their struggle for dominance in north-western Europe over the course of the central Middle Ages. In England’s case, moreover, this conflict was instrumental in creating one of the most celebrated documents in history: the Magna Carta. All in all, it is an exhilarating tale of politics, sex and violence in a world of knights and castles, peopled by some of the most interesting personalities of the time: figures like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Thomas Becket, Richard the Lionheart, St Louis, and so on and so forth. However, there is much more to it than the mechanics of state-building in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In this module, we will also look very closely at related themes, such as ‘Church and State’ in the Middle Ages; gender and the nature of queenly power; community, society and culture; and chivalry, crusading and holy war.

 

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. The purpose of this course is to show how thinkers have analysed and justified the role and existence of the state, and to consider various theories of government. Based on the study of primary sources in translation, it also examines the philosophical and historical backgrounds of the various thinkers and how these affect their political thought. This term starts with Greek thought, and ends with the use made of classical political thought by Machiavelli.

Sample Syllabus:

  1. Plato, The Republic
  2. Aristotle, Politics
  3. Cicero, On Duties (On Obligations)
  4. The influence of the Bible on medieval political thought
  5. Augustine, City of God
  6. Carolingian political thought
  7. John of Salisbury, Policraticus
  8. Aquinas’s political thought
  9. Dante, On Monarchy
  10. Machiavelli, The Discourses

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only if there is sufficient student demand. This seminar explores the cultural and intellectual context of European revolutionaries during the nineteenth century. It centres on the careers and writings of figures such as Benjamin Constant, Henri de St-Simon, Robert Blum, Robert Owen, George Sand, Giuseppe Mazzini, Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels. Between the French Revolution of 1789 and the 1871 Paris Commune, Europe was shaken by a series of political, social, economic and cultural revolutions. The emergence of national identities, the impact of industrialism and the erosion of old hierarchical structures were among the contributors to this instability. No aspect of traditional society, from monarchy and religious orthodoxy to farming techniques a nd family patriarchy, remained unquestioned. After 1871 and the unifications of Germany and Italy, the internal peace of Europe seemed to have bee n re-established under conservative governments. Europe’s economic and political dominance over the rest of the world was solidified in this period through the expansion of global empires. Yet beneath the appearance of stability, the sources of new upheavals continued to grow.

Sample Syllabus

  1. Revolutions and revolutionaries
  2. Constant and the French Revolution
  3. Henri de St Simon
  4. Robert Owen and Utopian Socialism
  5. Robert Blum and 1848
  6. Guiseppe Mazzini and the Risorgimento
  7. Women and Revolution
  8. The Paris Commune
  9. Marx and Engels

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. Shakespeare came up to London from the country, where he had already been associated with household players, just after 1590. He entered a lively world of public performance, already marked by such major dramatic presences as Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd. In this, the first half of his career, he showed a readiness to turn his hand to anything (including fairly trashy piecework collaborations with other playwrights). The seminar explores the variousness of this output, both comic and tragic. It also investigates Shakespeare’s enormous contribution to one craze of the 1590s, the English history play, and concludes (as it began) with Shakespeare’s contemplation of Roman history.

Sample Syllabus:

  1. Introducing Shakespeare
  2. Titus Andronicus
  3. Henry VI, Part 2
  4. Romeo and Juliet
  5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  6. Themes and Issues
  7. Much Ado About Nothing
  8. Henry IV, Part 1
  9. Henry V
  10. Julius Caesar

View in the Course Database.

Spring 2024 Seminars

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. Against the backdrop of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, this course explores efforts to control the visual arts by both Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It considers a wide range of patrons (from small confraternities, to emperors and popes), as well as a broad range of examples that include artists such as Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Cranach, Rubens and Holbein. The geographical focus is expansive, including works from England, Italy, the Low Countries and Germany.

Using a variety of primary sources, students will explore contemporary debates surrounding the appropriate role and appearance of images, as well as considering fundamental questions concerning artistic liberty and interpretation - topics that transcend the chronological focus of this course and are pertinent to current debates concerning controversial artworks and exhibitions.  

Art and Censorship contrasts the iconoclasm that took place in large areas of Northern Europe with the ‘go-ahead’ given to images decreed at the Council of Trent (1545-63). It will also examine the phenomenon of a diluted or ‘soft’ iconoclasm in Catholic countries, evidenced in the transformations made to the ecclesiastical space in this period. Drawing upon the most recent scholarship concerning the impact of religious reform on artists and patrons, students consider the mechanisms used to control and vet the arts, the new genres and typologies that arose in this period, as well as what examples of artworks being rejected or criticised can tell us about the ‘ideal’ sacred image in this epoch.

Sample Syllabus:

  1. ‘Here the Arts Freeze’: The Impact of Iconoclasm
  2. Cranach’s Pragmatism
  3.  Hans Holbein in England
  4.  Brueghel’s Innovations
  5.  The Council of Trent and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment
  6.  Veronese and the Inquisition
  7.  Transforming the Sacred Space
  8. Caravaggio’s Rejected Works
  9.  Artist and Diplomat: Peter Paul Rubens

Introductory Readings

Marcia Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, Yale University Press, 2011

David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, University of Chicago Press, 1989

Jeffrey Chipps Smith, The Northern Renaissance, Phaidon Press, 2004

Linda Murray, The High Renaissance and Mannerism: Italy, the North and Spain 1500-1600 (numerous editions)

Renaissance Art Reconsidered: An Anthology of Primary Sources, eds. Carol Richardson, Kim Woods and Michael Franklin, Wiley-Blackwell, 2006

Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy 1450-1600 (numerous editions – focus in particular on the chapter concerning the Council of Trent and religious art)

Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2000

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. Have you ever suspected someone of crying crocodile tears? Or perhaps you have heard of halcyon days? Or have a belief that elephants are afraid of mice? All of these ideas, and so many besides, have their origin in the medieval bestiary, and its source, The Physiologus. The bestiaries are an influential genre of medieval writing that instructs readers to look at the natural world like a book and to interpret animal characteristics as symbols of spiritual truth.  Upwards of fifty different bestiary manuscripts survive, widely translated into vernacular European languages (especially Middle English and Middle French), as well as Latin. Each of these is a catalogue of real and imaginary beasts, trees and stones, providing morals on the basis of their characteristics. Bestiaries vary in richness of illumination, some made as intricate devotional tools, some for private display of wealth, and some appear to have been illustrated with illiterate audiences in mind. The images accompanying the text are part of the fundamental function of these books, and many of these narrative images were copied and survive on their own in other places, such as carvings, statues and buildings across Europe (one famous example being the London Underground Station, Elephant & Castle).

Bestiaries can be fascinating because of their illuminations (which are often fantastical and glorious) or the strangeness of the moralistic stories they tell about animals. In this course we will see how their influence goes far deeper than this, exploring the workings of nature as sign in medieval culture, the social history of ‘animal stories’, the bestiaries as a window into the intricacies of medieval textual transmission, and the influence of the bestiary on the forms in which natural scientific knowledge is expressed. Whilst the ‘heyday’ of the Latin bestiary in Western Europe (especially England) was in the 12-13th centuries, they depended upon earlier sources, especially the Physiologus (Alexandria translated into Latin c. 2-4th Century) and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (8th Century), and new bestiaries were made throughout the later medieval period.  Through weekly seminars focusing on specific bestiary manuscripts and related texts, this course will examine the evolving bestiary across the full medieval period and provide an opportunity to consider its echoes today. We will approach the bestiary with a global perspective and encourage intersectional consideration of these texts in relation to contemporary identities.

Students will work with bestiaries in many languages, including Latin, Old and Middle English, Middle French. This course will also make use of the rich resources of the special collections of the Oxford college libraries and Bodleian collections, including detailed digital facsimiles.

 

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. This seminar explores western political thought at a crucial period in its development, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It centres on readings from key texts in political thought, informed by consideration of the wider historical and intellectual context. Among the major themes of the era were the religious strife generated by the Reformations, the intellectual aspiration for rationality, and the increasingly intensive governments developed by western European states, including their colonial ventures. (Foreign language texts are read in English translation: there is no language requirement for this course.)

Sample Syllabus

  1. The Renaissance background
  2. More and Erasmus
  3. Reformation Political thought: Luther & Calvin
  4. Jean Bodin
  5. Thomas Hobbes
  6. John Locke
  7. David Hume, Political Essays
  8. Adam Smith
  9. Voltaire, Political Writings
  10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and The Social Contract

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only if there is sufficient student demand. Shakespeare’s career from 1600 is renowned for its deep analysis of the human capacity for depravity and for ruin. The seminar examines this increasingly sombre mood, contemporary with Elizabeth’s last years and the developing sense in England of what is often described as a ‘Counter-Renaissance’. We will read a problematic late comedy before approaching four of the great tragedies. These provide analyses of the human capacity to err disastrously in a manner that had been unmatched since ancient Athens. Yet at the end of his public career, Shakespeare discovered a new balance, and the course will conclude with a look at the late ‘tragicomic’ plays.

Sample Syllabus:

  1. Introducing Shakespeare
  2. Twelfth Night
  3. All’s Well that Ends Well
  4. Hamlet
  5. Othello
  6. King Lear
  7. Antony and Cleopatra
  8. Pericles
  9. The Winter’s Tale
  10. The Tempest

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. According to the classic definition of the subject, the Crusades came to an end more than 700 years ago. Yet they remain important for understanding the rhetoric of conquest, power and resistance concerning the future of the modern Middle East. As a result, it is possible to argue that, of all medieval topics, the Crusades is the one that has retained the most resonance into the present day. This seminar series will focus on the ‘Age of the Crusades’, 1095-1291: this takes us from the First Crusade, which set out from western Europe to capture Jerusalem in 1099, to the final destruction of Latin Christian polities in the Levant in 1291. However, it will also examine the remarkable afterlife of the crusading movement, considering the shifts in the patterns of remembrance that reflect the interests and preoccupations of later periods.

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. This seminar course explores early medieval heroic culture and beliefs from northern and western Europe, as presented in both older and later (West and North Germanic) literature and legend. It examines the historical background and related archaeological evidence as well as the ideological influences which shaped the texts. The seminar involves reading primary sources in translation.

Sample Syllabus:

  1.  Introduction to Viking Literature and Culture
  2. The Gods -  The Mythological Poems of the Poetic Edda
  3. The Heroes - The Heroic Poems of the Poetic Edda; Völsunga saga (and its historical background)
  4. The Saga - Gísla saga
  5. Introduction to Old English Literature and Anglo-Saxon Culture
  6. Legendary Heroes: Waldere, Widsith, Finnsburgh; Beowulf (with sources and analogues) 
  7. Historical Heroes: The Battle of Maldon, Brunnanburgh and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
  8. Christian Heroes: The Dream of the Rood, Edmund, Judith
  9. The Hildebrandslied with Scandinavian/Old Irish/Middle English analogues
  10. The Nibelungenlied

View in the Course Database.

Fall 2024 Seminars

Each seminar runs only if there is sufficient student demand. This seminar tells the story of two rival dynasties, and their struggle for dominance in north-western Europe over the course of the central Middle Ages. In England’s case, moreover, this conflict was instrumental in creating one of the most celebrated documents in history: the Magna Carta. All in all, it is an exhilarating tale of politics, sex and violence in a world of knights and castles, peopled by some of the most interesting personalities of the time: figures like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Thomas Becket, Richard the Lionheart, St Louis, and so on and so forth. However, there is much more to it than the mechanics of state-building in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In this module, we will also look very closely at related themes, such as ‘Church and State’ in the Middle Ages; gender and the nature of queenly power; community, society and culture; and chivalry, crusading and holy war.

 

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. The purpose of this course is to show how thinkers have analysed and justified the role and existence of the state, and to consider various theories of government. Based on the study of primary sources in translation, it also examines the philosophical and historical backgrounds of the various thinkers and how these affect their political thought. This term starts with Greek thought, and ends with the use made of classical political thought by Machiavelli.

Sample Syllabus:

  1. Plato, The Republic
  2. Aristotle, Politics
  3. Cicero, On Duties (On Obligations)
  4. The influence of the Bible on medieval political thought
  5. Augustine, City of God
  6. Carolingian political thought
  7. John of Salisbury, Policraticus
  8. Aquinas’s political thought
  9. Dante, On Monarchy
  10. Machiavelli, The Discourses

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only if there is sufficient student demand. This seminar explores the cultural and intellectual context of European revolutionaries during the nineteenth century. It centres on the careers and writings of figures such as Benjamin Constant, Henri de St-Simon, Robert Blum, Robert Owen, George Sand, Giuseppe Mazzini, Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels. Between the French Revolution of 1789 and the 1871 Paris Commune, Europe was shaken by a series of political, social, economic and cultural revolutions. The emergence of national identities, the impact of industrialism and the erosion of old hierarchical structures were among the contributors to this instability. No aspect of traditional society, from monarchy and religious orthodoxy to farming techniques a nd family patriarchy, remained unquestioned. After 1871 and the unifications of Germany and Italy, the internal peace of Europe seemed to have bee n re-established under conservative governments. Europe’s economic and political dominance over the rest of the world was solidified in this period through the expansion of global empires. Yet beneath the appearance of stability, the sources of new upheavals continued to grow.

Sample Syllabus

  1. Revolutions and revolutionaries
  2. Constant and the French Revolution
  3. Henri de St Simon
  4. Robert Owen and Utopian Socialism
  5. Robert Blum and 1848
  6. Guiseppe Mazzini and the Risorgimento
  7. Women and Revolution
  8. The Paris Commune
  9. Marx and Engels

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. Shakespeare came up to London from the country, where he had already been associated with household players, just after 1590. He entered a lively world of public performance, already marked by such major dramatic presences as Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd. In this, the first half of his career, he showed a readiness to turn his hand to anything (including fairly trashy piecework collaborations with other playwrights). The seminar explores the variousness of this output, both comic and tragic. It also investigates Shakespeare’s enormous contribution to one craze of the 1590s, the English history play, and concludes (as it began) with Shakespeare’s contemplation of Roman history.

Sample Syllabus:

  1. Introducing Shakespeare
  2. Titus Andronicus
  3. Henry VI, Part 2
  4. Romeo and Juliet
  5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  6. Themes and Issues
  7. Much Ado About Nothing
  8. Henry IV, Part 1
  9. Henry V
  10. Julius Caesar

View in the Course Database.

Spring 2025 Seminars

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. Have you ever suspected someone of crying crocodile tears? Or perhaps you have heard of halcyon days? Or have a belief that elephants are afraid of mice? All of these ideas, and so many besides, have their origin in the medieval bestiary, and its source, The Physiologus. The bestiaries are an influential genre of medieval writing that instructs readers to look at the natural world like a book and to interpret animal characteristics as symbols of spiritual truth.  Upwards of fifty different bestiary manuscripts survive, widely translated into vernacular European languages (especially Middle English and Middle French), as well as Latin. Each of these is a catalogue of real and imaginary beasts, trees and stones, providing morals on the basis of their characteristics. Bestiaries vary in richness of illumination, some made as intricate devotional tools, some for private display of wealth, and some appear to have been illustrated with illiterate audiences in mind. The images accompanying the text are part of the fundamental function of these books, and many of these narrative images were copied and survive on their own in other places, such as carvings, statues and buildings across Europe (one famous example being the London Underground Station, Elephant & Castle).

Bestiaries can be fascinating because of their illuminations (which are often fantastical and glorious) or the strangeness of the moralistic stories they tell about animals. In this course we will see how their influence goes far deeper than this, exploring the workings of nature as sign in medieval culture, the social history of ‘animal stories’, the bestiaries as a window into the intricacies of medieval textual transmission, and the influence of the bestiary on the forms in which natural scientific knowledge is expressed. Whilst the ‘heyday’ of the Latin bestiary in Western Europe (especially England) was in the 12-13th centuries, they depended upon earlier sources, especially the Physiologus (Alexandria translated into Latin c. 2-4th Century) and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (8th Century), and new bestiaries were made throughout the later medieval period.  Through weekly seminars focusing on specific bestiary manuscripts and related texts, this course will examine the evolving bestiary across the full medieval period and provide an opportunity to consider its echoes today. We will approach the bestiary with a global perspective and encourage intersectional consideration of these texts in relation to contemporary identities.

Students will work with bestiaries in many languages, including Latin, Old and Middle English, Middle French. This course will also make use of the rich resources of the special collections of the Oxford college libraries and Bodleian collections, including detailed digital facsimiles.

 

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. This seminar explores western political thought at a crucial period in its development, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It centres on readings from key texts in political thought, informed by consideration of the wider historical and intellectual context. Among the major themes of the era were the religious strife generated by the Reformations, the intellectual aspiration for rationality, and the increasingly intensive governments developed by western European states, including their colonial ventures. (Foreign language texts are read in English translation: there is no language requirement for this course.)

Sample Syllabus

  1. The Renaissance background
  2. More and Erasmus
  3. Reformation Political thought: Luther & Calvin
  4. Jean Bodin
  5. Thomas Hobbes
  6. John Locke
  7. David Hume, Political Essays
  8. Adam Smith
  9. Voltaire, Political Writings
  10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and The Social Contract

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only if there is sufficient student demand. Shakespeare’s career from 1600 is renowned for its deep analysis of the human capacity for depravity and for ruin. The seminar examines this increasingly sombre mood, contemporary with Elizabeth’s last years and the developing sense in England of what is often described as a ‘Counter-Renaissance’. We will read a problematic late comedy before approaching four of the great tragedies. These provide analyses of the human capacity to err disastrously in a manner that had been unmatched since ancient Athens. Yet at the end of his public career, Shakespeare discovered a new balance, and the course will conclude with a look at the late ‘tragicomic’ plays.

Sample Syllabus:

  1. Introducing Shakespeare
  2. Twelfth Night
  3. All’s Well that Ends Well
  4. Hamlet
  5. Othello
  6. King Lear
  7. Antony and Cleopatra
  8. Pericles
  9. The Winter’s Tale
  10. The Tempest

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. According to the classic definition of the subject, the Crusades came to an end more than 700 years ago. Yet they remain important for understanding the rhetoric of conquest, power and resistance concerning the future of the modern Middle East. As a result, it is possible to argue that, of all medieval topics, the Crusades is the one that has retained the most resonance into the present day. This seminar series will focus on the ‘Age of the Crusades’, 1095-1291: this takes us from the First Crusade, which set out from western Europe to capture Jerusalem in 1099, to the final destruction of Latin Christian polities in the Levant in 1291. However, it will also examine the remarkable afterlife of the crusading movement, considering the shifts in the patterns of remembrance that reflect the interests and preoccupations of later periods.

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. This seminar course explores early medieval heroic culture and beliefs from northern and western Europe, as presented in both older and later (West and North Germanic) literature and legend. It examines the historical background and related archaeological evidence as well as the ideological influences which shaped the texts. The seminar involves reading primary sources in translation.

Sample Syllabus:

  1.  Introduction to Viking Literature and Culture
  2. The Gods -  The Mythological Poems of the Poetic Edda
  3. The Heroes - The Heroic Poems of the Poetic Edda; Völsunga saga (and its historical background)
  4. The Saga - Gísla saga
  5. Introduction to Old English Literature and Anglo-Saxon Culture
  6. Legendary Heroes: Waldere, Widsith, Finnsburgh; Beowulf (with sources and analogues) 
  7. Historical Heroes: The Battle of Maldon, Brunnanburgh and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
  8. Christian Heroes: The Dream of the Rood, Edmund, Judith
  9. The Hildebrandslied with Scandinavian/Old Irish/Middle English analogues
  10. The Nibelungenlied

View in the Course Database.

Fall 2025 Seminars

Each seminar runs only if there is sufficient student demand. This seminar tells the story of two rival dynasties, and their struggle for dominance in north-western Europe over the course of the central Middle Ages. In England’s case, moreover, this conflict was instrumental in creating one of the most celebrated documents in history: the Magna Carta. All in all, it is an exhilarating tale of politics, sex and violence in a world of knights and castles, peopled by some of the most interesting personalities of the time: figures like Eleanor of Aquitaine, Thomas Becket, Richard the Lionheart, St Louis, and so on and so forth. However, there is much more to it than the mechanics of state-building in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In this module, we will also look very closely at related themes, such as ‘Church and State’ in the Middle Ages; gender and the nature of queenly power; community, society and culture; and chivalry, crusading and holy war.

 

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. The purpose of this course is to show how thinkers have analysed and justified the role and existence of the state, and to consider various theories of government. Based on the study of primary sources in translation, it also examines the philosophical and historical backgrounds of the various thinkers and how these affect their political thought. This term starts with Greek thought, and ends with the use made of classical political thought by Machiavelli.

Sample Syllabus:

  1. Plato, The Republic
  2. Aristotle, Politics
  3. Cicero, On Duties (On Obligations)
  4. The influence of the Bible on medieval political thought
  5. Augustine, City of God
  6. Carolingian political thought
  7. John of Salisbury, Policraticus
  8. Aquinas’s political thought
  9. Dante, On Monarchy
  10. Machiavelli, The Discourses

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only if there is sufficient student demand. This seminar explores the cultural and intellectual context of European revolutionaries during the nineteenth century. It centres on the careers and writings of figures such as Benjamin Constant, Henri de St-Simon, Robert Blum, Robert Owen, George Sand, Giuseppe Mazzini, Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels. Between the French Revolution of 1789 and the 1871 Paris Commune, Europe was shaken by a series of political, social, economic and cultural revolutions. The emergence of national identities, the impact of industrialism and the erosion of old hierarchical structures were among the contributors to this instability. No aspect of traditional society, from monarchy and religious orthodoxy to farming techniques a nd family patriarchy, remained unquestioned. After 1871 and the unifications of Germany and Italy, the internal peace of Europe seemed to have bee n re-established under conservative governments. Europe’s economic and political dominance over the rest of the world was solidified in this period through the expansion of global empires. Yet beneath the appearance of stability, the sources of new upheavals continued to grow.

Sample Syllabus

  1. Revolutions and revolutionaries
  2. Constant and the French Revolution
  3. Henri de St Simon
  4. Robert Owen and Utopian Socialism
  5. Robert Blum and 1848
  6. Guiseppe Mazzini and the Risorgimento
  7. Women and Revolution
  8. The Paris Commune
  9. Marx and Engels

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. Shakespeare came up to London from the country, where he had already been associated with household players, just after 1590. He entered a lively world of public performance, already marked by such major dramatic presences as Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd. In this, the first half of his career, he showed a readiness to turn his hand to anything (including fairly trashy piecework collaborations with other playwrights). The seminar explores the variousness of this output, both comic and tragic. It also investigates Shakespeare’s enormous contribution to one craze of the 1590s, the English history play, and concludes (as it began) with Shakespeare’s contemplation of Roman history.

Sample Syllabus:

  1. Introducing Shakespeare
  2. Titus Andronicus
  3. Henry VI, Part 2
  4. Romeo and Juliet
  5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  6. Themes and Issues
  7. Much Ado About Nothing
  8. Henry IV, Part 1
  9. Henry V
  10. Julius Caesar

View in the Course Database.

Spring 2026 Seminars

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. Have you ever suspected someone of crying crocodile tears? Or perhaps you have heard of halcyon days? Or have a belief that elephants are afraid of mice? All of these ideas, and so many besides, have their origin in the medieval bestiary, and its source, The Physiologus. The bestiaries are an influential genre of medieval writing that instructs readers to look at the natural world like a book and to interpret animal characteristics as symbols of spiritual truth.  Upwards of fifty different bestiary manuscripts survive, widely translated into vernacular European languages (especially Middle English and Middle French), as well as Latin. Each of these is a catalogue of real and imaginary beasts, trees and stones, providing morals on the basis of their characteristics. Bestiaries vary in richness of illumination, some made as intricate devotional tools, some for private display of wealth, and some appear to have been illustrated with illiterate audiences in mind. The images accompanying the text are part of the fundamental function of these books, and many of these narrative images were copied and survive on their own in other places, such as carvings, statues and buildings across Europe (one famous example being the London Underground Station, Elephant & Castle).

Bestiaries can be fascinating because of their illuminations (which are often fantastical and glorious) or the strangeness of the moralistic stories they tell about animals. In this course we will see how their influence goes far deeper than this, exploring the workings of nature as sign in medieval culture, the social history of ‘animal stories’, the bestiaries as a window into the intricacies of medieval textual transmission, and the influence of the bestiary on the forms in which natural scientific knowledge is expressed. Whilst the ‘heyday’ of the Latin bestiary in Western Europe (especially England) was in the 12-13th centuries, they depended upon earlier sources, especially the Physiologus (Alexandria translated into Latin c. 2-4th Century) and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (8th Century), and new bestiaries were made throughout the later medieval period.  Through weekly seminars focusing on specific bestiary manuscripts and related texts, this course will examine the evolving bestiary across the full medieval period and provide an opportunity to consider its echoes today. We will approach the bestiary with a global perspective and encourage intersectional consideration of these texts in relation to contemporary identities.

Students will work with bestiaries in many languages, including Latin, Old and Middle English, Middle French. This course will also make use of the rich resources of the special collections of the Oxford college libraries and Bodleian collections, including detailed digital facsimiles.

 

View in the Course Database.

Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. This seminar explores western political thought at a crucial period in its development, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It centres on readings from key texts in political thought, informed by consideration of the wider historical and intellectual context. Among the major themes of the era were the religious strife generated by the Reformations, the intellectual aspiration for rationality, and the increasingly intensive governments developed by western European states, including their colonial ventures. (Foreign language texts are read in English translation: there is no language requirement for this course.)

Sample Syllabus

  1. The Renaissance background
  2. More and Erasmus
  3. Reformation Political thought: Luther & Calvin
  4. Jean Bodin
  5. Thomas Hobbes
  6. John Locke
  7. David Hume, Political Essays
  8. Adam Smith
  9. Voltaire, Political Writings
  10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and The Social Contract

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Each seminar runs only if there is sufficient student demand. Shakespeare’s career from 1600 is renowned for its deep analysis of the human capacity for depravity and for ruin. The seminar examines this increasingly sombre mood, contemporary with Elizabeth’s last years and the developing sense in England of what is often described as a ‘Counter-Renaissance’. We will read a problematic late comedy before approaching four of the great tragedies. These provide analyses of the human capacity to err disastrously in a manner that had been unmatched since ancient Athens. Yet at the end of his public career, Shakespeare discovered a new balance, and the course will conclude with a look at the late ‘tragicomic’ plays.

Sample Syllabus:

  1. Introducing Shakespeare
  2. Twelfth Night
  3. All’s Well that Ends Well
  4. Hamlet
  5. Othello
  6. King Lear
  7. Antony and Cleopatra
  8. Pericles
  9. The Winter’s Tale
  10. The Tempest

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Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. According to the classic definition of the subject, the Crusades came to an end more than 700 years ago. Yet they remain important for understanding the rhetoric of conquest, power and resistance concerning the future of the modern Middle East. As a result, it is possible to argue that, of all medieval topics, the Crusades is the one that has retained the most resonance into the present day. This seminar series will focus on the ‘Age of the Crusades’, 1095-1291: this takes us from the First Crusade, which set out from western Europe to capture Jerusalem in 1099, to the final destruction of Latin Christian polities in the Levant in 1291. However, it will also examine the remarkable afterlife of the crusading movement, considering the shifts in the patterns of remembrance that reflect the interests and preoccupations of later periods.

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Each seminar runs only subject to sufficient student demand. This seminar course explores early medieval heroic culture and beliefs from northern and western Europe, as presented in both older and later (West and North Germanic) literature and legend. It examines the historical background and related archaeological evidence as well as the ideological influences which shaped the texts. The seminar involves reading primary sources in translation.

Sample Syllabus:

  1.  Introduction to Viking Literature and Culture
  2. The Gods -  The Mythological Poems of the Poetic Edda
  3. The Heroes - The Heroic Poems of the Poetic Edda; Völsunga saga (and its historical background)
  4. The Saga - Gísla saga
  5. Introduction to Old English Literature and Anglo-Saxon Culture
  6. Legendary Heroes: Waldere, Widsith, Finnsburgh; Beowulf (with sources and analogues) 
  7. Historical Heroes: The Battle of Maldon, Brunnanburgh and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
  8. Christian Heroes: The Dream of the Rood, Edmund, Judith
  9. The Hildebrandslied with Scandinavian/Old Irish/Middle English analogues
  10. The Nibelungenlied

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