Course Description


This course will look at the relationship between governments and individuals in Europe from the later part of the Roman Empire to the beginnings of the early modern period. (circa 1500)  During our exploration of the subject we will analyze and assess the dichotomy between the strong growth of centralized states and those individuals that they ruled.  At times this relationship worked smoothly while at times individuals decried the growing trends of royal power.  As a corollary, the course will need to explore the beginnings of European states as well as their relationship with the Church.  We will also explore how legal innovations and political theories developed to support the expansion of government and later to protect the role of the individual citizens.  The course will begin with selected readings from St. Augustine as well as some attention to the late Roman ideas of empire and kingship.  Next we will examine Germanic kingship and law, Byzantine concepts of empire and citizen and Carolingian political thought as it relates to our subject matter.  Shifting to the eleventh century we will read some of the debates surrounding the Gregorian reform, followed by readings by Otto of Freising, John of Salisbury and Thomas Aquinas as well as some secondary descriptions of the developing republican theories in northern Italy.  We will trace many of the origins of republicanism and the individual identity associated with this movement through ecclesiastical institutions, the rise of parliaments, the growing power of city-states and the development of universities.  We will begin to end the course by looking at growth of French and English monarchy and those critics and supporters of this trend.  We will also examine the decline of the German Empire and how some individuals saw their greatest protection as resting on this institution.  And lastly we will look at the problems of authority within the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as they relate to the growing demand for individual identity that in many ways shaped the Renaissance and the modern era.  This course will continually look at the evolution of the problem between government and the individual as well some of the proposed solutions along the way.  We will also continuously look at the role of religion and its relationship to the body politic as well the linkages between the past and the modern era.