Definition: Worldview
Worldview is a set of propositions and perspectives about the organization and the hierarchies of the material, immaterial, and social worlds. Worldview is a complex, dynamic, and often contradictory series of interrelated ideas, observations, symbols, and practices that in their entirety define a culture and the individuals within that culture.
Richard Hooker
Washington State University
Weltanschauung: a particular philosophy or view of life; a conception of the world. [Welt world + Anschauung perception]
The Oxford English Reference Dictionary
A. Background reading [29pp.]
Continental Europe to 1054
Europe, the Church and Economic Growth to 1300
Europe, Plague and Progress in the 1300s
Europe in the 1400s
* Assignment: The student must identify 1-3 people, events or ideas which they believe have most contributed to the development of Western Civilization/worldview and discuss the lasting impact of the person, event or idea on Western Civilization today. Each answer must be in the form of a paragraph which provides specific information about the person, event or idea. No late assignments accepted.
B. Geography
Periodical Historical Atlas of Europe
A Medieval Atlas
Remnants of the Roman Empire around the year 500
De Imperatoribus Romanis
C. Primary Source Readings
1. The Capitulary De Villis
2. Capitulary of Charlemagne
3. The Qu'ran
4. Pope Urban's call for the first Crusade
5. Western Views of the Crusaders
6. Eastern View: Anna Comnena on the Crusaders
7. Usamah Ibn Munqidh, Autobiography
8. Peter Abelard, Historia Calamitatum
9. Magna Carta
10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae
11. The Golden Bull of the Emperor Charles IV
12. Jean Froissart, Chronicles: On the Hundred Years War
13. Jean Froissart, Chronicles: On the Jacquerie
15. Accounts of Medieval Fairs & Markets, c. 998-1250
*Assignment
Upon completion of reading, the student will address the following issue in a one-page, type-written essay: "The Magna Carta is often thought of as the cornerstone of liberty and the chief defense against arbitrary and unjust rule in England. In fact it contains few sweeping statements of principle, but is a series of concessions wrung from the unwilling King John by his rebellious barons in 1215. However, the Magna Carta established for the first time a very significant constitutional principle, namely that the power of the king could be limited by a written grant (law)."
Question: How is the power of the king limited? What general (e.g. political, religious, economic, social) rights are beyond the power of the king? Provide specific examples to support your argument.
D. Web sites
Annenberg/CPB, Middle Ages
Minnesota State University, The Middle Ages
University of Evansville, Medieval Europe
*Assignment
The student will select/be assigned one of the above Web sites. Upon examination of the Web site, the student will respond to the questions posed by the following worksheet for the purpose of evaluating the Web site: http://www.lib.purdue.edu/ugrl/staff/sharkey/interneteval/docs/worksheet3.pdf
E. Historians' Discussion
John Van Engen, "The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem." [JSTOR: History]
Ronald G. Witt, "The Landlord and the Economic Revival of the Middle Ages in Northern Europe, 1000-1250." [JSTOR: History]
*Assignment
The student will select/be assigned one of the above secondary articles from the Historians? Discussion. Upon completion of the reading of the article, the student will identify the author?s thesis (main argument), 2-4 points the author uses to support the thesis and formulate 3 questions raised by the article.
F. Worldview Characteristics
The Middle Ages is the period in which the tense and often disruptive multiculturalism of Europe standardized into a clearly definable, single cultural entity.
The early history of the Middle Ages might be regarded as the period in which this conflictual multiculturalism still largely characterizes the European experience; it differs, however, in the introduction of a shared cultural practice: Christianity. The history, you might say, of early medieval Europe is about the acquiring of a world view that all Europeans would eventually hold in common, the Christian world view. For the glue that turned the multilingual, multicultural group of peoples into a single people was this religion: it not only united Europe in a single religious world view, it also gave Europe a single language: Latin. This early period, which saw the same types of migrations and multiculturalism as the classical and prehistoric periods, is the story of the introduction of a standard cultural form and its consequent social structure on the various peoples of Europe.
The later Middle Ages can be understood as the period in which Europe as a continental culture was defined. This is the period when the large-scale migrations of individual cultures and ethnic groups comes to a halt. During this period, Europeans begin to consider themselves as a more or less single culture that they can define against other cultures, such as the Byzantines, the Islamic world, and Asia.
Political institutions settle down into a more or less shared structure. From the church in Rome to England, authority largely takes the same forms and is legitimated in largely the same way.
This period is also marked by significant rewriting of European history. In the late medieval histories of Europe concerning the classical period, the various figures and stories of central and northern Europe from the classical period, such as the stories of Arthur or Atilla, are all recast to conform to the European social and religious practices of the time. In other words, the experience of early European history is re-imagined by Europeans to look like the European experience in the late medieval period. The history of the classical world is also rewritten to the point where it becomes unrecognizable. The history writing of high Middle Ages can be best understood as a large-scale translation of pre-Christian European, Greek and Roman history into medieval social, religious, and political practices; this means, of course, that early European history starts looking a whole lot like classical history which, in its turn, looks a whole lot like the contemporary experience in late medieval Europe. As with everything else in this period, this rewriting of history was a powerful force in standardizing European culture and identity.
The high Middle Ages was the period when most ethnic groups defined themselves historically as the cultural and social descendants of the classical world. The technology which began the standardization of the disparate European cultures was Christianity; the myth that would cement this standard identity was a myth of common origin in the cultures of Greece and Rome.
The Middle Ages is understood as two different processes that are not devisable in terms of time, since they happened to different degrees and at different times for the various cultural, ethnic and national groups. The standard historical terms for these processes are "Early Middle Ages" and "Late (or High) Middle Ages." The early Middle Ages is characterized by a process in which the European prehistoric and classical multiculturalism and migrations continues to characterize the European experience with two significant changes: the introduction of writing and Christianity. The late Middle Ages is characterized by a process in which individual cultures or ethnic groups begin to define themselves as part of a larger, homogenous European culture. This process is marked by a series of historical trends in social structure, the structure of authority, religious experience and organization, education, and culture. These processes occurred at different times for various ethnic groups and, for some ethnic groups, this process was antithetical to the process going on in the rest of Europe.
In the high Middle Ages, Europeans believed that the center of all truth and experience was in God and that an overweaning concern with material phenomenon was a serious neglect of one's soul and one's dependence on God. The medievals also deeply distrusted human perception. Not only was human perception variable and untrustworthy, the material world itself was deceptive. Rather than a vehicle for truth, the material world was put in place to actively distract humans from the real task--living the sort of life that would get you into heaven.
