300-400 level courses are on special topics and are more advanced. They often presuppose some basic knowledge in the field and should be more difficult courses than courses at the 1-199 levels. The department is trying to insure that some 400 level courses, although substantially more difficult, are also small in size; they thus may be suitable for graduate students.
HIST 408 The World of Dante
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
SEM
The course will focus on the life and most of the literary and philosophical works of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), a Florentine and Tuscan political figure, moral philosopher, poet, and exile, as well as on those of some of his predecessors and contemporaries. It will also deal with an extended world of Dante, that is, the immediate Florentine and Tuscan setting of most of his life, and on the larger spatial and chronological world of his perspective on Europe. Dante's son Pietro called his father a "theologian, philosopher, and a poet." To be either or both of the first two of these required a mental horizon far wider than that of Florence or Tuscany, and our course will reach out into those areas of the world in which philosophy and theology had a recognized existence and the means by which Dante got them and how he and others used them.
