Note:  This is an old version of HIST 323.  The current Spring 2000 syllabus for this course can be read at <http://www.wesleyan.edu/~wpinch/Hist323.htm>.

[The difference is the upper case H in Hist323.htm.]
 
 
 

Religious belief was a important factor in the evolution of historical consciousness:  this is well known and fairly well understood.  Less well understood is the exact role of religion in history.  Is religion -- whether as mentality, belief, ideology, institutions, or movements -- an agent of historical change, or does religion simply occupy a place on the sidelines of history, subject to other forces?  What do religion and religious experience reveal about the history of mentality, ideology, and consciousness?  What is the relationship between religion and culture?  Does religion operate differently in "the Orient" as opposed to Europe and North America?

These are the main issues and questions this seminar is designed to address.  Our approach is straightforward:  We will read some of the classics in and beyond the discipline of history since the late eighteenth century.  The criteria for choosing the authors is equally straightforward:  Each either had something radical and important to say about religion and society, or the author's approach to consciousness has been of such foundational importance as to influence the course of history writing generally.  Not all the authors, it must be noted, were sympathetic to religion -- either personally or as a category of analysis.  The first half of the semester will be spent reading and discussing theorists, the second half practitioners.  Obviously the list of scholars cannot be exhaustive; nor, as will be evident from the list below, does the boundary between theory and practice always hold.  However, the hope is that by offering a wide variety of approaches and interpretations, students will be exposed to a representative sampling of the scholarship that has informed the historical consideration of religion since the Enlightenment.

The current readinglist, subject to alteration:

• David Hume, Writings on Religion
• G. W. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History
• Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader
• Charles Darwin, Descent of Man and reactions to it and Origin of Species.
• Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
• Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic & The Spirit of Capitalism
• Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return
• Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels
• Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down
• Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries
• Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France
• Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
• Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization

• Answers to questions.  Each week every student will submit ahead of time brief answers to the following questions:  1. What is the argument of the work?  2. What is the author's conception of religion?  3. How does religion figure in the argument of the work?  Each answer should be approximately 100 words in length, for a total of 300 words.  These should be typed and double-spaced.  They will form the basis of a portion of the grade; more importantly, they will be a foundation from which students will advance their views in discussion.

• Presentations.  Each week two students will make ten to fifteen-minute presentations contextualizing the author's life and work.  In addition to being purely informative, these presentations will serve to inspire preliminary questions and discussion.  The presentations will complement each other as follows:

Life.  One student will report on the basic biographical details of the author's life, including nationality, religion, dates and circumstances of birth and death, political views, personal quirks, and significant historical context (e.g., the individual lived in exile, or was executed for his activities in the French Resistance).

Work.  The other student will report on the scholarly and historical significance of the author and work, including intellectual influences, the immediate reception of the work, and its wider influence on (and beyond) the discipline of history.  (Naturally, this latter task is more challenging when assessing recent authors.)
 

Students are encouraged to bring in teaching aids in the form of illustrations, quotes, maps, handouts, etc.  It is expected that each student will perform twice during the semester, once in each category described above; however, this ultimately depends on the number of students in the seminar.  These presentations will form the basis for a portion of the grade in the course.  In addition to quality of content, the ability to communicate ideas orally will be evaluated.  In addition, the instructor will each week endeavor to show how the understanding of religion in the work in question informed the author's other writing.
 
• Journals.  Each student will keep a weekly (and even daily) journal that records his or her own reflections on religion in history.  The entries can be one or two paragraphs per week, or ten or twenty pages per week.  There is no prescribed page length.  However, these journals will form the basis for a portion of the final grade, so they must be neat, concise, and thoughtful -- and they must reflect, refer to, and build upon the weekly readings and discussions in the seminar.