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Course begins May 29, 2025
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Weekly live sessions from 1:00 to 2:30pm Eastern U.S. time
Week 1
The Roman World in Flux: Barbarian Migration and Ethnogenesis
This module begins with the Germanic peoples' impacts on the late Roman world, most importantly their migration and settlement in Roman territory, the "barbarization" of the army and bureaucracy, and the eventual establishment of independent kingdoms in the wake of the empire's demise. Students will learn not only the history of the barbarian kingdoms' origins but also the state of modern debates about the meaning of nation, ethnicity, and identity in the late Roman world.
Week 2
Politics and Warfare
How were the barbarian kingdoms governed, and how did they conduct war? This module will introduce students to the structures and norms of early medieval governance, with a focus on the role of violence in elite competition for power, from harem assassinations to large-scale slaughters on the battlefield. We will learn how kings tried (and failed) to maintain loyalty within their courts and how the barbarian way of war impacted wider civilian society.
Week 3
Law, Economics, and Inequality
How were disputes and delicts dealt with, and who meted out justice? How was wealth distributed? This module will interrogate the nature and reach of early medieval civil and canon law as well as broader conceptions of criminal and economic justice. Most importantly, we will learn how expectations of justice were predicated on issues of class, gender, and religion.
Week 4
Women and Gender
What roles could women play in the home, in government, and in the church? How did early medieval people think about masculinity and femininity? This module will explore the female lifecycle from birth, to marriage, to childbearing, and the limited opportunities for leadership and self-determination provided by the church. We will see how women of different classes navigated barbarian society and how instances of gender-bending temporarily challenged both men's and women's prescribed gender roles.
Week 5
Religion and the Church
This module will examine the religion of the Germanic peoples, their conversion to Christianity, and the various forms of religious conflict that their kingdoms witnessed. We will study the enormous role that the church played as a religious and civic authority in medieval society and the ways it was resisted by religious outsiders and the laity. More broadly, students will learn how early medieval people across religious traditions conceived of the cosmos and the spiritual world.
Week 6
Archaeology and Material Culture
This final module uses online multimedia to introduce students to the material remains of the barbarian kingdoms as they exist today in museums and archaeological sites. Students will learn how to "read" the iconography of barbarian jewelry, weaponry, and other artwork, and they will become acquainted with elements of early medieval architecture. Finally, students will learn about recently-developed technologies currently helping archaeologists shed light on this period.
Meet Your Instructor
Kent Navalesi
Kent Navalesi is a historian of religion in Late Antiquity specializing in the cult of the saints in post-Roman Gaul. He received his PhD in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2020 and was most recently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Kentucky's Lewis Honors College. He has taught several courses on premodern history and enjoys introducing students to the foreign but fascinating worldviews of the premodern world. Kent is currently working on a monograph, The Prose Lives of Venantius Fortunatus: Hagiography and the Laity in Sixth-Century Gaul, which examines the ways stories of episcopal and monastic saints contributed to the construction of particularly lay styles of piety.