hmm. this new course offering for the upcoming semester has just come around on the english mailing list:


Harvard Divinity School 2218: Seminar on the Apocalyptic Imagination in the Middle Ages

Offered by Richard Emmerson, Medieval Academy of America

This course studies the influence of the Book of Revelation (the biblical Apocalypse) on the literary, religious, and visual culture of the Middle Ages. Although students will read the biblical book and be introduced to major exegetical approaches to its interpretation during the Middle Ages, the focus will be less on Revelation itself as on the many varied ways in which it influenced medieval culture. Students will study a wide range of verbal and visual texts produced over a thousand-year span throughout Europe, including commentaries and histories, sermons and saints’ lives, eschatological plays and visionary poetry, illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts and early printed books, and sculpture and stained glass. The course concludes by contrasting the medieval tradition with the new interpretations, polemical uses, and cultural representations of the Apocalypse introduced during the Protestant Reformation.


what think? i can't take more than one class outside the department and i don't really want to take more than two medieval courses in a semester. there is also the history of science medical texts class that i'd blogged about earlier. obviously i know very little about religion and am very interested in medicine, but the emmerson would, i feel, be good for me. on the other hand, the medical texts class appeals because no one in english is teaching research and methodology and i really need to attend a skill-oriented rather than content-heavy class. hmm.