About the Program

Minor

The program in Medieval Studies offers an undergraduate interdisciplinary minor in Medieval Studies. The minor has three principal purposes:

1. To give undergraduate students who have an interest in Medieval Studies the benefit of advising about what courses are available in the various departments and how certain courses might fit together into a meaningful sequence or cluster.

2. To enable students to be informed about lectures, colloquia, social events, and conferences of interest to them.

3. To allow those undergraduates who complete substantial work in Medieval Studies to have that fact acknowledged. Should those students wish to pursue further academic work after graduation, their chances of success in the competition for admission to graduate school will be enhanced not just because of the official notice on their transcript but because they will have gained greater professional competence through informed participation in the Medieval Studies program at Berkeley.

Declaring the Minor

Undergraduates who contemplate applying for the minor should contact the graduate/undergraduate adviser to discuss their interests and needs.

Students may declare the minor only in their final semester. To declare, download a "Completion of an L&S Minor" form from the College of Letters and Sciences website. Students should fill out the form and take it to the adviser in their major first. This adviser must certify that the requirements for the major are fulfilled and sign at the bottom of the form. Then take the form to the Medieval Studies adviser.

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Minor Requirements

​Students who have a strong interest in an area of study outside their major often decide to complete a minor program. These programs have set requirements and are noted officially on the transcript in the memoranda section, but they are not noted on diplomas.

General Guidelines

1. All courses taken to fulfill the minor requirements below must be taken for graded credit.
2. A minimum of three of the upper division courses taken to fulfill the minor requirements must be completed at UC Berkeley.
3. A minimum grade point average (GPA) of 2.0 is required for courses used to fulfill the minor requirements.
4. Courses used to fulfill the minor requirements may be applied toward the Seven-Course Breadth requirement, for Letters & Science students.
5. No more than one upper division course may be used to simultaneously fulfill requirements for a student's major and minor programs.
6. All minor requirements must be completed prior to the last day of finals during the semester in which the student plans to graduate. If students cannot finish all courses required for the minor by that time, they should see a College of Letters & Science adviser.
7. All minor requirements must be completed within the unit ceiling. (For further information regarding the unit ceiling, please see the College Requirements tab.)

Requirements

Recommended Courses

Students who are contemplating advanced work in Medieval Studies should, if possible, take HISTORY 4B  early in their undergraduate career. Other lower division courses are also recommended (e.g., ITALIAN 30), but only upper division courses can be counted toward the minor.

Courses

Medieval Studies

Faculty and Instructors

Faculty

Sabrina C. Agarwal, Associate Professor. Bioarchaeology, skeletal biology, gender research, biological and evolutionary anthropology, osteology and osteoporosis, health and disease, paleopathology.
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Asad Ahmed, Associate Professor. Islam (social and intellectual history).
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Diliana Angelova, Assistant Professor. Gender, early Christian art, Byzantine art, late antique art, the Virgin Mary, early Christian empresses, imperial iconography, power and material culture, the empress Helena, the relic of the True Cross, urban development of Constantinople, textiles, ivories, mythology in Byzantine art, myth and genre in Archaic and Classical Greek art, romantic love in ancient and medieval art.
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Albert Russell Ascoli, Professor. Italy, national identity, literature and history, Dante, authorship and authority, Ariosto, Machiavelli, Petrarch, Boccaccio, epic and romance, Renaissance, early modern, Middle Ages.
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Frank Bezner, Associate Professor. Medieval Latin literature; Medieval literary culture; Neo-Latin; Intellectual history.
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Steven Botterill, Associate Professor. Italian literature and culture, Dante.
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Susanna Elm, Professor. History of the Later Roman Empire, pagan - Christian interactions, ancient medicine, slavery and the evolution of Christianity, leadership and empire, reception of antiquity.
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Beate Fricke, Associate Professor. Medieval art and architecture, idolatry, iconoclasm, history of allegory, formation of communities, incest, anthropophagy, animation, emergence of life and procreation, theories and practices in use of images and relics, visual and material culture, Carolingian Art, Gothic Art, Ottonian Art.
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Kate Heslop, Assistant Professor. Medieval Studies, Old Norse literature, Viking and medieval Scandinavia.
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David Hult, Professor. Literary theory, medieval French literature, allegory, hermeneutics, text editing, French Studies.
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Rosemary Joyce, Professor. Latin America, anthropology, gender, archaeology, sexuality, museums, cultural heritage, ethics, Central America, feminism.
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Steven Justice, Professor. English, late medieval literature, medieval Latin, Chaucer, hagiography, Latin religious thought, literary criticism.
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Geoffrey Koziol, Professor. Medieval history, History of Medieval Christianity, Medieval Political Institutions.
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Henrike Lange, Assistant Professor. Medieval art.

Niklaus Largier, Professor. Religion, literature, German, history of medieval and early modern German literature, theology, mysticism, secularism, senses, sensuality, history of emotions, passions, asceticism, flagellation, sexuality.
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Margaret Larkin, Professor. Near Eastern studies.
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Daniel Lee, Assistant Professor. Political theory, history of political thought, jurisprudence.

Maria Mavroudi, Professor. Byzantine studies.
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Jennifer Miller, Associate Professor. English, philology, paleography, hagiography, medieval literature, literature in old & middle English, historiography, medieval rhetorical culture, insular political relations, multilingualism, translation & textual transmission, dialectology.
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Maureen Miller, Professor. Medieval history.
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Ignacio Navarrete, Professor. Spanish literature: poetry, poetic theory, narrative and culture, history of the book, Cervantes, Don Quixote, Medieval and Early Modern Spanish literature. Modern Spain.
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Maura Bridget Nolan, Associate Professor. Chaucer, drama, Middle English literature, Gower, Lydgate, medieval, 16th century, literary form, style.
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Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, Professor. Old English language and literature, textual criticism, Medieval Studies.
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Irmengard Rauch, Professor. Semiotics, Germanic linguistics, linguistic archeology, paralanguage, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, linguistic fieldwork, socio-cultural and cognitive approaches to language variation and language change, contrastive analysis and linguistic methodology, Gothic, Modern High German and its dialects, Old/Middle High/Early New High German.
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Thomas F. Shannon, Professor. Linguistics, control, German, Dutch, syntax, phonology, naturalness, syllable structure, complementation, ergative phenomena, passivization, perfect auxiliary selection, word order, processing factors syntactic phenomena, cognitive, functional grammar, corpus.
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Elaine C. Tennant, Professor. German, Habsburg court society in the early modern period, the development of the German language at the end of the middle ages, the Middle High German narrative tradition, literary and cultural traditions of the holy roman empire, European reactions.
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Emily Thornbury, Associate Professor. Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature.
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Jonas Wellendorf, Assistant Professor. Old Norse language and literature, Scandinavian mythology, Scandinavian cultural history (Viking Age and Middle ages).
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Emily Zazulia, Assistant Professor. Medieval and Renaissance Music, the intersection of musical style, complex notation, and intellectual history.

Lecturers

Kathryn Klar, Lecturer.

Annalee Rejhon, Lecturer.

Emeritus Faculty

Carol J. Clover, Professor Emeritus. Medieval studies (Northern Europe), film (especially American).
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Mary Kay Duggan, Professor Emeritus.

Charles Faulhaber, Professor Emeritus. Medieval Spanish literature; medieval rhetoric; codicology, paleography; computerization of scholarly methodology.
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John Lindow, Professor Emeritus. Old Norse-Icelandic literature, Scandinavian folklore, Finno-Ugric folklore, Pre-Christian religion of the North, Scandinavian mythology.
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Daniel Melia, Professor Emeritus. Rhetoric, oral literature, Celtic studies, Celtic languages (Welsh, Irish), folklore, medieval history and literature.

James T. Monroe, Professor Emeritus.

David H. Wright, Professor Emeritus. Art from Augustus to Charlemagne, palaeography and codicology, late Roman numismatics, Art History, Manuscript Illumination, Codicology, Numismatics.
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