MRST 341 - Studies in the Renaissance

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as ENGL 341) In-depth study of selected Renaissance texts and the questions they raise about their context and interpretation.

Topic 2019/20b: Sex and the City in 1600: Gender, Marriage, Family, and Sexuality in Early Modern London. This course explores everyday life in the rapidly expanding early modern metropolis of London at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. We pay special attention to religious, social, legal as well as informal control mechanisms that influenced issues of gender, marriage, and sexuality in various layers of London society. We anchor our investigations in a handful of plays by Beaumont, Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Jonson, Marston, Middleton, Rowley, and Shakespeare, but also explore other literary and non-literary texts. By situating our early modern texts in the cultural and historical contexts in which they were written and performed, we will be able to appreciate the historical differences as well as the occasional continuities between early 17th century and early 21st century interpretations and representations regarding such basic cultural and social issues as citizenship, class and gender difference, political agency, race and ethnicity, urbanization, and subject-formation. Zoltán Márkus.

One 2-hour period.