Master 2024/2025

The Сhurch in East and West: Later Middle Ages and Renaissance

Type: Compulsory course (Rus' and the Medieval World)

Area of studies: History

Delivered by: School of History

Where: Faculty of Humanities

When: 2 year, 1, 2 module

Mode of studies: offline

Open to: students of one campus

Master’s programme: Medieval Studies

Language: English

ECTS credits: 6

Contact hours: 30

Course Syllabus

Abstract

This course aims to familiarize students with basic confessional peculiarities of the Western Christian traditions (Catholicism, Protestantism) as compared to the Eastern Christianity, in the period running, roughly, from the XIIIth through the XVIIth centuries. Thus, a comparative approach is crucial and central for this course. Besides, this course will explore some aspects of the impact exerted by specifically confessional factors upon states, societies, and cultures of the Latin West (in France, Germany and Poland taken as examples) in comparison with medieval and early modern Russia. Methodologically this seminar course will be based on Max Weber’s tradition, and its recent developments; students are supposed to be acquainted with that tradition and able to apply it in a creative manner. In seminars, problem of common and different in two Christian traditions will be analyzed on the basis of a very attentive readings of some relevant medieval and early modern sources; on the other hand some individual historical situations and conjunctures will be studied too. The same way, cultural trends generated by Renaissance and studia humanitatis will stand in focus of our attention – as much as they affected the European Church history. Students will enrich their experience of working on primary sources (reading and interpretation; in English translations) dealing with the Church history.