Spring 2006

SOCS 641
History of the Papacy, 1500-Present

Printy,Michael O.

01/23/2006 - 05/06/2006
Thursday 06:30 PM - 09:00 PM

Public Affairs Center 421

This course looks at the issues and problems facing the papacy in "modern times" broadly construed, namely the period from about 1500 to the present. Abortion and euthanasia; homosexuality and feminism; war, poverty and globalization: these are the problems with which the papacy in recent years has contended and, in some sense, defined itself. Our goal is to comprehend these more recent issues within a longer historical trajectory of the papacy. After a brief survey of the development of the papacy from the Early Church to the Reformation, we will look at the "modern problems" the have confronted the popes, including, among others, the emergence of the secular state; the Enlightenment; the social, industrial, and political revolutions in the 19th and 20th century; Marxism and communism, anti-Semitism, fascism and world war; the secularization of western society, and the global competition for souls.

Readings include Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners. A History of the Popes; A. D. Wright, The Early Modern Papacy, and Bernhard Schimmelpfennig, The Papacy. There will also be a course reader of primary sources.

Three papers will be required.

A syllabus for this course is available at:
http://www.wesleyan.edu/masters/courses/Spring_2006/Spring_2006_Syllabi/syb_socs641.html


Michael Printy (B.A. Yale University; M.A., Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley) is visiting faculty in the history department. He specializes in European intellectual history, and is the author of Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and co-editor of A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Brill, 2010). He has published articles in Modern Intellectual History, German History, The Journal of the History of Ideas, and History and Theory. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is currently working on a book on religion and philosophy in the German Protestant Enlightenment.

ENROLLMENT INFORMATION

Consent of Instructor Required: No

Format: Seminar

Level: GLSP Credits: 3 Enrollment Limit: 18

Texts to purchase for this course:
Eamon Duffy, SAINTS AND SINNERS: A HISTORY OF THE POPES (Yale University Press), Paperback

A.D. Wright, THE EARLY MODERN PAPACY: FROM THE COUNCIL OF TRENT TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1564-1789 (Longman), Paperback

Walter Ullmann, A SHORT HISTORY OF THE PAPACY IN THE MIDDLE AGES (Routledge), Paperback

OPTIONAL TEXTS:

J.N.D. Kelly, THE OXFORD DICTIONARY OF POPES (Oxford University Press), Paperback

READING MATERIALS AVAILABLE AT BROAD STREET BOOKS, 45 BROAD STREET, MIDDLETOWN, 860-685-7323

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