Western Civ Since 1600

History 107 at the College of Wooster

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The Web on History – Versailles and More

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The kinds of resources available on the web — some scholarly, some entertaining, some put together by academics, some by amateurs — is overwhelming. I’ll try to point out a few interesting sites as we go along.

For lots of pictures and a nice historical overview, take a look at the Official Site of the Chateau of Versailles. To learn more about the Sun King, Louis XIV, you’ll get a lot out of this website.

And there are great images and chronologies and texts devoted to the English Civil Wars of the 17th c. See this on on the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Calvin and Hobbes

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You can’t understand the 16th c. and the Protestant Reformation without understanding a thing or two about John Calvin (1509-1564). Born in France, trained as a lawyer, rooted in European humanism, Calvin made a profound mark on western religion (and by extension, on western culture and society) as a religious reformer. Like Luther and Zwingli, Calvin preached the primacy of the bible — “For anyone to arrive at God the Creator he needs Scripture as his Guide and Teacher” — and rejected papal authority. He put his ideas in practice, constructing a new Church in Geneva and enforcing a strict moral code for the city.

We haven’t gotten to Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) yet — but we will hear about him next week. The English philosopher, a materialist through and through, is best known for his work in political philosophy. In Leviathan (1651), he set out the basis for legitimate government in a theory of the social contract and argued for the necessity of a strong central authority as the bulwark against moral and social disorder. How else to escape “the war of all against all,” an anarchic society in which life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”? Hobbes’ thought provided a foundation for much of western political thinking to come — a liberal tradition that emphasized the importance of the individual and the social contract, the need for power to be legitimized, as well as a conservative tradition that took a dim view of human nature and put its trust in central authorities to keep human disorder in check.

Despite their distance in time — and the vast differences in their views of the spiritual and material worlds — the two speak to each other in powerful ways.

Week 2 – History on Film

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A few generations of scholars have now demonstrated just how loose the relationship between history and history on film usually is. Grand historical dramas are meant, first of all, to entertain. But a good historical film has a lot of power: to bring the past to life, to give us as sense for the texture of the past, to raise important questions of fact and interpretation.

Take a look at Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I considering the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots. It does reveal the challenge to authority that Elizabeth endured. And why not a quick look at Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth for a dramatic picture of the Spanish-English conflict of the early 17th c.

For a portrait of the religious wars that tore France apart in the 1560s and 70s, see this trailer from “Queen Margot,” based upon the very fictionalized 19th c. novel of Alexandre Dumas. The imagery is stunning.

I held up Michel de Montaigne as a heroic figure of the 16th c, the literary pioneer of the “Essay,” a man who questioned human pretense and certainty before he questioned the ways of others. Kenneth Clark gives a nice portrait of the man and his ideas in his BBC series “Civilisation.”

Finally, for a portrait of Spanish obscurantism, you might take a look at the Spanish Inquisition. The Emperor of Spain – from the 15th c. – used the special power granted by the Pope to root out heresy in Spain. You’ll see an account of the principal features of the Spanish Inquisition here and here.

Week 1 – On the Study of Western Civ

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Should students study Western Civ as an introduction to the modern world? Or would they do better with World History? It’s been a topic of much debate. I tried to give you a bit of the history of the idea of “western civilization” and the college course as taught in the U.S. since the First World War. You’ll see that the very idea became a contentious one in the late 1980s and 1990s as students, faculty, educators and politicians argued over the proper matter of a liberal education. See a couple articles from the New York Times that reveal something of the debate at its loudest (and perhaps least enlightening) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Here and here. Or see this more recent piece looking back at it. Here.

If you want a fuller history of the course, take a look at the AHR Forum from 1992 on “The Rise and Fall of Western Civilization” or William McNeill’s meditations on “World History and the Rise and Fall of the West.”

We spent some time this first week thinking about Samuel Huntington’s definition of Western civilization and his contention that the West was locked in a struggle – “the clash of civilizations” he called it in his important 1996 book – with the civilizations of Asia, Islam, Russia, India, Africa, Latin America. As you should have understood, I was sharply critical of his central idea that civilizations were so clearly defined. But I suggested that his picture of the inheritance of Western Civ. is useful in laying out the central terms of the “triumphant” vision of Western Civ. There has been soooo much debate on Huntington and his thesis. Take a look at this lecture by the man himself or at this response by Edward Said. Looking to the example of India, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that the real fault lines are those that exist within societies. See her lecture, drawn from her book, “The Clash Within.”

What else will help to start thinking about western civilization and the study of history? You could watch this silly computer animation. Or contemplate what you might remember from this course five years after Wooster by watching Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University.