RELG 250 - Religion, Othering, Violence in the Middle Ages

Slaves, Muslims, Jews, Black Africans, lepers, prostitutes, homosexuals (now LGBTQ), and witches, were often viewed as foreigners and foes in the European Middle Ages. Students deconstruct the shifting and nuanced role religion played in constructing and regulating identity alterity, and notions of deviance, heresy, and Otherness across selected chronological periods and discrete geographical contexts. Primary and secondary sources foreground the strategic ways in which religious practices, prescriptions, canons, sacred texts, and mythic ideologies and prejudices coalesced with regional laws and practices to legitimate or transgress social and political boundaries, delimit daily social interactions, and foment individual, inter-religious, and group violence. Medieval religious texts, legal narratives, courtly literature, plays, romance, art, and iconography provide captivating records of religion’s role in fomenting justifications of militant piety, and conversely, tolerance and inclusion, toward minorities in the Middle Ages.

Credits: 1
Prerequisites: None
Major/Minor Restrictions: None
Class Restriction: None
Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression
Liberal Arts CORE: None

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