Bibliography and Course GuideThe following is a guide to reading for this Honours Option, together with an outline of the topics covered. The bibliography is indicative rather than exhaustive, and you will be expected to use the University Library catalogue and trace footnotes and references within the works listed so as to compile a fuller basis for your research. The curriculum is also amplified by descriptions of each subject in order to give you an idea as to how the module builds into a comprehensive overview of early modern European thought.
Advice on ReadingSome of the set texts listed below (in bold) will be explored by you for essays or for your presentations to the seminar. I will supply you with a class reader containing photocopies of key passages from these texts. This should be brought to every class as it will provide the basis of group discussion.However, you should be aware that (not least on economical and ecological grounds) the set-text reader is extremely selective, intended to stimulate some ideas rather than to summarise the full contents of each work. You should therefore be prepared to read other passages, if not the complete text, wherever practicable: this is especially true where you are contemplating essays, presentations, or examination answers on a particular work or subject. An acceptable essay on Machiavelli's political thought, for example, cannot be based entirely upon the few (and inevitably unrepresentative) pages of The Prince reproduced in the reader. All of the secondary literature, like almost all of the primary literature (the exceptions are asterisked), is available in the University Library. Some of it may also be found in the Class Library in St Katharine's Lodge.
Resources on the World Wide WebThe outline bibliographies for each topic also include some references to materials on the World Wide Web which, as a historian of thought, you might find interesting. You may well also want to explore the Web more widely for information on the figures and ideas we'll be studying. Bear in mind, however, that the modern world - and especially the electronic world - is inhabited not just by people with purely academic interests but by groups who claim to adhere to particular early-modern belief-systems and seek to persuade others to do so. You should therefore be on the look-out for overly-enthusiastic discussions of systems such as numerology, Stoicism and the occult, as well as, more predictably, of Christian theology, and be prepared to approach them with due circumspection.
Index
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