Medieval Technology and Urban Life:  "A Thousand Years Without a Bath" or, What About Printing, Gunpowder, and the Magnetic Compass?
TSCIIN 440
M-W 4:15-6:30 PM Winter 2005
WCG 103
Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences
University of Washington, Tacoma
Michael Kucher <kucher at u dot washington dot edu> 

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A link to the Syllabus
Course Bibliography
Class Meeting and Assignments Schedule

If you want to get ahead of the curve:

• Make time for the course. Most students fail because of lack of time to devote to their studies. Most students succeed because they made school Job 1.
• Finish your first reading of the Decameron before our first class meeting. You will be required to read the book end-to-end, at least twice. Students who earn an "A" will likely be those who give it a third reading as well.
• Begin to keep a log of all the characters, with as much information about their occupations, houses, and habits as you can glean.
• Also, keep a running list of every place mentioned in the text. Then, find each place on a good map of the Mediterranean Basin. (An interesting take-home essay would be to have each of you map each character and story onto a map of the region.
• Start taking notes with each day's reading.  Write down whenever you see a pattern, of any sort.  Note the tasks people perform and with what technology they get through their daily routines.
  
• Start thinking about how you would define "technology" in the context of this course.
• And, of course, keep a list of your questions.
• I expect to see dog-eared copies of the Decameron on the first day of class on everyone's desk (and not because you bought yours used).
• Start browsing Cathedral Forge and Waterwheel in order to determine what themes and subjects most interest you.
• Start thinking about what sorts of critical book reviews you would like to write. Email me if you have a topic but don't know where to start finding the book.
• Start browsing the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph Strayer in the UWT library reference shelves. Look at Lynn White, jr.'s article, "Technology, Western."
• Also, start using the incredible web sites devoted to medieval topics published at various universities around the world.
  
• If you can read a little Italian, or Spanish, French, or Portuguese, glance at the original Italian version at the Decameron Web.
• And, if you couldn't already guess, an email account and web access will be required for this course. (We may be medievalists, but we're not Luddites.)  No matter who supplies your web access, you will need to figure out the UW libraries gain access to www.jstor.org and other licensed, fee-based web sites, the "hidden" web.  The library staff can help you with this.

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Decameron

Cathedral Forge and Waterwheel

Technology and Society in the Medieval Centuries: Byzantium, Islam, and the West, 500-1300
by Pamela O. Long

Interesting Links:

The UW Library History Pages

Paul Gans's excellent site at NYU, Medieval Technology Pages

The Decameron Web at Brown University

Paul Halsall's Medieval Sourcebook at Fordham University
See especially his brilliant  annotated guide to: Medieval History in the Movies

Labyrinth at Georgetown University

Plague and Public Health in Renaissance Europe published by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia

Digital Dante