HIST 2053 - Medieval Europe: Crusades to the Black Death

North Terrace Campus - Semester 2 - 2015

At the heart of medieval civilisation were ideals about empire, kingship, chivalry, crusading and the nature of Christian society. These ideals had a powerful impact on people?s behaviour, but they also came into conflict with the often brutal realities of medieval life. By the fourteenth century, the civilisation of medieval Europe was facing a crisis brought about by internal divisions, external threats, economic upheaval and the Black Death. This course explores the relationship between medieval ideals and medieval realities. It is structured around four modules: (i) We begin by exploring the world of Charlemagne and his successors in the ninth and tenth centuries, who attempted ? and failed ? to create a well ordered, Christian empire at the heart of Europe; (ii) The second module focuses on the crusading ideal and the expansion of European power in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; (iii) In the third module we will explore the flourishing of European civilisation and culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that was associated, above all, with the growth of towns and trade; (iv) In the final module we discuss the crisis of medieval civilisation that was brought about by conflicts within the Church, the great struggle between France and England, and the Black Death.

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Course Details

Course Code	HIST 2053
Course	Medieval Europe: Crusades to the Black Death
Coordinating Unit	Historical and Classical Studies
Term	Semester 2
Level	Undergraduate
Location/s	North Terrace Campus
Units	3
Contact	Up to 3 hours per week
Available for Study Abroad and Exchange	Y
Prerequisites	At least 12 units of level 1 Arts courses
Incompatible	HIST 2042 or HIST 3042
Assessment	Annotated bibliography & abstract 20%, research essay 50%, take-home examination 30%

Course Staff

Course Coordinator: Dr Claire Walker

This course is taught by:

Dr Claire Walker
e-mail: claire.i.walker@adelaide.edu.au
phone: 831 35159
office: Napier 312

Dr Gareth Pritchard
e-mail: gareth.pritchard@adelaide.edu.au
phone: 831 34529
office: Napier 306

Course Timetable

The full timetable of all activities for this course can be accessed from Course Planner.

Formal contact hours consist of:

2 x 50-minute lectures per week
1 x 50-minute tutorial per week

The course is divided into four modules, which we study in turn:

1. Empire in C.9th and C.10th Europe.
2. The Crusades and the expansion of Europe in the C.11th and C.12th.
3. The flourishing of European civilization in the C.12th and C.13th.
4. The crisis of medieval civilization in the C.14th and C.15th.

Course Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1	demonstrate a broad knowledge of the history of Europe in the middle ages and the ways in which historians have interpreted and explained this history.
2	identify and use effectively a wide variety of secondary sources relevant to the study of Europe in the middle ages, and in particular to understand and critically to evaluate the arguments of historians.
3	contextualise and interpret a wide variety of primary sources, including medieval texts, images and physical artefacts.
4	construct evidence-based arguments in which students engage with the key debates about the nature of European society in the middle ages.
5	communicate their own ideas about medieval history - both orally and in writing - in a manner that is clear and persuasive.
6	access and use effectively the wide range of relevant primary and secondary sources on medieval history that are available on-line.
7	develop and communicate their ideas about the middle ages within the scholarly conventions of the discipline of history.

University Graduate Attributes

This course will provide students with an opportunity to develop the Graduate Attribute(s) specified below:

University Graduate Attribute	Course Learning Outcome(s)
Knowledge and understanding of the content and techniques of a chosen discipline at advanced levels that are internationally recognised.	1
The ability to locate, analyse, evaluate and synthesise information from a wide variety of sources in a planned and timely manner.	2, 3
An ability to apply effective, creative and innovative solutions, both independently and cooperatively, to current and future problems.	4
Skills of a high order in interpersonal understanding, teamwork and communication.	5
A proficiency in the appropriate use of contemporary technologies.	6
A commitment to the highest standards of professional endeavour and the ability to take a leadership role in the community.	7

Learning Resources

Required Resources

A short course reader will be made available to students at the beginning of the course.

Recommended Resources

Maurice Keen, The Pelican History of Medieval Europe, available from UniBooks, is a useful introduction to and survey of the Middle Ages. It is not supposed to be a comprehensive, authoritative textbook. Keen’s book has its advantages; it is cheap, well written and has a strong analytical theme on the nature of the Middle Ages. Its disadvantages are firstly that it covers a limited timeframe, 800-1449 and is geographically limited to Western and Central Europe. However, there are plentiful resources in the Library and on the Internet to cover what Keen does not. It is highly recommended that you purchase the Course Reader, a collection of essays and primary sources, particularly relevant to the tutorial topics, available from Image and Copying.

Other general texts (many do not cover the whole period, c450-c1450):
Malcolm Barber, The Two Cities: Medieval Europe, 1050-1350
Judith M. Bennett & C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe, A Short History
R. H. C. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe from Constantine to Saint Louis
A Daniel Frankforter, The Medieval Millennium
Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World
Edward Peters, Europe and the Middle Ages
Joseph R. Strayer, The Middle Ages
Brian Tierney, Western Europe in the Middle Ages

Some other useful background reading:

Carolly Erickson, The Medieval Vision
Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou
Eileen Power, Medieval People
Jonathan Riley-Smith, What were the Crusades?
Richard Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages
Richard Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages
R. W. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, 1215-1515
Philip Ziegler, The Black Death

Online Learning

Myuni will not just be used as a repository of material but as an interactive learning tool. For example, multiple-choice quizzes will consolidate the knowledge gained by students from the course textbook and lectures, and prepare students for the tutorials and written assessments. Students in tutorials will work in groups to address specific themes in the course (e.g. the image and the reality of the Crusading movement or the image and reality of medieval monasticism) which will be posted on Myuni as a learning resource for all students taking the course.

PowerPoint presentations and audio recordings of lectures will be available at the MyUni course site. Librarians at the Barr-Smith library have also compiled a very useful guide to sources on Australian History held by the University. This can be accessed online at:
http://www.library.adelaide.edu.au/guide/hum/history/Medieval.html
Learning & Teaching Activities

Learning & Teaching Modes

The course will be delivered through the medium of interactive lectures and small-group tutorials.

Workload

The information below is provided as a guide to assist students in engaging appropriately with the course requirements.

The course involves 156 hours of study (including formal contact hours, private research and assessments).

Learning Activities Summary

Lectures

There will be two lectures each week, which will provide students with a basic core of factual knowledge about the themes that we cover in the course. These sessions will also identify key analytical problems that will be discussed in tutorials and addressed in the course assessments. They will not only identify in advance issues for discussion in tutorials, but they will discuss any difficult or interesting issues that have arisen in previous tutorials. The lectures will NOT consist of fifty-minute monologues by members of staff. They will instead comprise a range of interactive learning activities (quizzes, group problem-solving activities etc.) in which the students will be divided into small groups.

Tutorials

Each student will attend one tutorial per week. Tutorials will be based on small-group discovery and problem-solving activities. For example, a lecture might outline a debate between historians about the impact of the Black Death. In the tutorial, students will engage with this debate on the basis of a range of primary and secondary sources that have been distributed in advance. In a following lecture, the debate will be addressed again, the main positions summarised, and a vote taken. The material covered in lectures and tutorials will thus be closely integrated to facilitate student learning and engagement.

Student support and research skills

Various small exercises in the lectures and tutorials, and on Myuni, will familiarise students with the basic skills they need to research and write their assessments. Staff will be available for individual consultation during specified office hours. The staff who teach this course will work closely with the history librarian to provide additional support.

Specific Course Requirements

N/A

Small Group Discovery Experience

The weekly tutorials will involve numerous small-group activities in which students will be given problems to address that are related to the themes being covered in the lectures. The work completed by small groups of students in the tutorials will be fed back into the course in subsequent lectures or via Myuni. There will also be some small-group work in the lectures.

The University's policy on Assessment for Coursework Programs is based on the following four principles:

Assessment must encourage and reinforce learning.
Assessment must enable robust and fair judgements about student performance.
Assessment practices must be fair and equitable to students and give them the opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned.
Assessment must maintain academic standards.

Assessment Summary

The precise deadlines for submission will be published in the course handbook, which is available on the Myuni site for this course.

Assessment Task	Task Type	Due	Learning Outcome
Annotated bibliography and abstract	Formative and summative.	Second half of first term.	2, 5, 6, 7
Research Essay	Formative and summative.	Second half of second term.	2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Take-home examination	Summative.	End of course.	1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

The precise deadlines for the submission of course work will be given to students at the outset of the course.

Assessment Related Requirements

N/A

Assessment Detail

The first assessment is a short annotated bibliography and abstract. The purpose of this exercise is to prepare students for their research essay. Students will have to identify monographs and articles that are relevant to their research essay and identify the key arguments and place them in their historiographical context. Students will also write a short abstract in which they summarise the analysis they intend to develop in their research essays.

The second assessment is a research essay. Students will be given a list of questions pertaining to specific themes in the course, but they will also be encouraged to devise questions of their own if they so wish.

The third assessment is a take-home examination. In the last week of term, students will be given a small collection of primary documents drawn from the documents contained in the course handbook. The documents in the take-home exam will cover all four modules of the course. Students will have one week to write three document analyses. Each of these analyses must relate
to a different module. Thus, in the synoptic assessment, students will have to engage with three of the four modules covered by the course.

Submission

Students will submit all their assessments on-line via Myuni. Instructions on how to do this will be given to students at the outset of the course.

Course Grading

Grades for your performance in this course will be awarded in accordance with the following scheme:

M10 (Coursework Mark Scheme)
Grade	Mark	Description
FNS		Fail No Submission
F	1-49	Fail
P	50-64	Pass
C	65-74	Credit
D	75-84	Distinction
HD	85-100	High Distinction
CN		Continuing
NFE		No Formal Examination
RP		Result Pending

Further details of the grades/results can be obtained from Examinations.

Grade Descriptors are available which provide a general guide to the standard of work that is expected at each grade level. More information at Assessment for Coursework Programs.

Final results for this course will be made available through Access Adelaide.

Student Feedback

The University places a high priority on approaches to learning and teaching that enhance the student experience. Feedback is sought from students in a variety of ways including on-going engagement with staff, the use of online discussion boards and the use of Student Experience of Learning and Teaching (SELT) surveys as well as GOS surveys and Program reviews.

SELTs are an important source of information to inform individual teaching practice, decisions about teaching duties, and course and program curriculum design. They enable the University to assess how effectively its learning environments and teaching practices facilitate student engagement and learning outcomes. Under the current SELT Policy (http://www.adelaide.edu.au/policies/101/) course SELTs are mandated and must be conducted at the conclusion of each term/semester/trimester for every course offering. Feedback on issues raised through course SELT surveys is made available to enrolled students through various resources (e.g. MyUni). In addition aggregated course SELT data is available.

Once SELTs have been collected and the results analysed, the course convenor will send a document to all students informing them of how their feedback will be taken into account in future versions of the course.
Student Support
Policies & Guidelines
This section contains links to relevant assessment-related policies and guidelines - all university policies.
Fraud Awareness

Students are reminded that in order to maintain the academic integrity of all programs and courses, the university has a zero-tolerance approach to students offering money or significant value goods or services to any staff member who is involved in their teaching or assessment. Students offering lecturers or tutors or professional staff anything more than a small token of appreciation is totally unacceptable, in any circumstances. Staff members are obliged to report all such incidents to their supervisor/manager, who will refer them for action under the university's student’s disciplinary procedures.

The University of Adelaide is committed to regular reviews of the courses and programs it offers to students. The University of Adelaide therefore reserves the right to discontinue or vary programs and courses without notice. Please read the important information contained in the disclaimer.

Authorised by:	Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Academic)
Maintained by:	Course Outlines Administrator