CMS250

This course surveys works of art and architecture produced from ca. 500 to 1100 C.E. and explores significant visual and cultural developments of the early medieval period. Beginning with the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire, students focus on emigration of Germanic tribes into Roman territories and the subsequent periods of Christianization, conflict, and exchange. Attention is paid to the ways medieval art has been used and misused in the modern era: the rise of race studies and "culture history" in the nineteenth century, the Nazis' use of archaeology as "evidence" for Germany’s Aryan past, and the deployment of medieval symbols by contemporary White Supremacists.