Constantin Fasolt The University of Chicago Teaching

Ph.D. Columbia University, 1981 Karl J. Weintraub Professor Department of History and the College The University of Chicago 1126 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 Phone Office (773) 702-7935 Phone Department (773) 702-8397 Fax Department (773) 702-7550 Email icon@uchicago.edu

First, I have composed a Guide to the Study of Early Modern European History for students who are preparing for their oral examination for the Ph.D. degree in early modern European history. This guide explains what I consider to be the purpose and scope of the oral examination and what I usually expect students to be able to do. It also includes some basic advice on how to prepare yourself effectively and a list of books that I would like all of my students to have read. The bulk of it consists of bibliographies that will guide you to the more advanced literature in the various subfields of early modern European history (intellectual, social, economic, military, and so on) and to some of the basic tools of research (encyclopedias, handbooks, dictionaries, journals, paleography, chronology, and so on).

Next, there are three syllabi of graduate seminars I have taught (and in one case co-taught with my colleague Tamar Herzog). One of those seminars was devoted to the history of early modern European legal and political thought, another to the Protestant Reformation, and the third to the structures underlying early modern European society. These seminars were mainly designed for graduate students in their first or second year of the program, but more advanced students as well as students in our Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) could take them as well. The purpose of the seminars is both to introduce graduate students to a particular field of study and to guide them towards the completion of a major research project. They are taught in two consecutive quarters. During the autumn quarter the emphasis is on gaining familiarity with the field and developing a subject suitable for research; during the winter quarter the emphasis is on completing the research and on writing the paper or thesis, which involves a good bit of drafting, revising, and constructive criticism from participants in the seminar. In the case of first year students and MAPSS students the seminar usually culminates in the writing of an M.A. thesis. Graduate students who have already completed their M.A. thesis and their second-year seminar as well as graduate students whose main interests lie outside of early modern European history commonly take only the first quarter of the seminar, as a graduate colloquium.

Besides the seminar syllabi, you will find here syllabi for three courses I organized for a mix of beginning graduate students and advanced undergraduates. All three courses are intended to offer a combination of broad coverage with at least some detailed investigation, but they do so in rather different ways. The first is a survey of early modern European history from 1450-1650 that I taught in the winter of 2003. The second is a colloquium on the Protestant Reformation in Germany that I last taught in the winter of 2008. It takes the form of a systematic review of classic writings about the Reformation from Hegel to Lucien Febvre, followed by a thorough introduction to the views taken by professional historians in the last fifty years or so. The third is a year-long course on European social and political thought from the early Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. I first taught this course in two quarters at the University of Chicago, and then in an improved version in two semesters during a year I spent as a visiting professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The first semester covered the period from the early Middle Ages till about 1300; the second semester covered the period from the later Middle Ages to the beginning of the Enlightenment. Since the University of Chicago functions on a quarter system, I would not be able to cover the same amount of material as I did in Virginia, or else I would have to divide the course into three quarters. But neither the subject matter nor the intellectual approach would change.

More recently I put together an annotated guide to the most important secondary literature on medieval European social and political thought. This is written in a more narrative style. It should give you some sense of which books I think are good and why I think so. I compiled a similar guide to the literature on early modern political thought, but that is much briefer, for various reasons, some of which have to do with the state of the scholarship, and some with sheer lack of time. Finally, you will find here a list of some of the most important books available for the study of early modern European legal thought. This list is not annotated, but it is subdivided into sections listing reference tools, surveys, sources, and important works of interpretation.

UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING

Most of my undergraduate teaching consists of courses in the University of Chicago's vaunted Core Curriculum. I used to teach the "History of Western Civilization" sequence from antiquity to the present. For several years I also taught in the social sciences sequence known as "Classics of Social and Political Thought," where students read Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, St. Augustine's City of God, Machiavelli's Prince, Hobbes's Leviathan, Locke's Second Treatise of Government, Rousseau's Social Contract, and later works of comparable stature. When the Western Civilization sequence was reformed by a group of faculty concerned about declining undergraduate enrollments, I returned to teaching in the civilization sequence. It is now called History of European Civilization. The standard version of that course begins in the early Middle Ages, but I like to start in antiquity, with some readings selected from ancient Greeks, Romans, and the Bible. In my view, the purpose of this course is not so much to make students familiar with the rough outlines of the history of European civilization (though that is its purpose, too), but rather to teach students what historical change is, why it matters, and how it can be understood.

History is a very powerful way of explaining the world. But it is not the only way and it has itself had a long history. It is, in fact, one of the most characteristic features of European civilization, rather than merely a source of information about that civilization. In order to understand what that means, you have to be able to see through the secondary literature, see through the textbooks, learn what it means to know something about the past and how we come by such knowledge. We aim to do this by giving pride of place to reading original documents (in English translation) from the history of European civilization. Reading original documents and drawing lessons about the past from them is no easy task. In order to make that task as clear as I can, I have put together a guide in which I try to explain what I consider to be the elementary assumptions behind this course, and what exactly I expect the students who are taking it to accomplish in my class. It's written for undergraduates. But I have a sense that many graduate students could benefit from it as well.

Not all of my undergraduate teaching is in the core curriculum. Some of it consists of the mixed graduate/undergraduate courses about early modern Europe, the Protestant Reformation, and the history of medieval and early modern European social and political thought that I mentioned above. I have also taught courses that were entirely reserved for undergraduate students. They dealt with subjects like Martin Luther, early modern political thought, and the history of early modern Germany as viewed from the perspective of a single city, namely, Leipzig. The last such course I taught was devoted to Calvin's Institutes. The students read the whole of the 1559 edition of the Institutes, about 1,500 pages. You may think: how interesting can such a course be? Isn't that theology? Well, I can assure you it was one of the most interesting and enjoyable courses I have ever taught, and from what I heard from the students, I think they liked it just as much. If you want to know why, you'll have to come and take it with me the next time I offer it.