This interdisciplinary history seminar for first-year students focuses on Europe's most famous capital city between 1550 and 1650, a period when Rome was a symbol of religious zeal, artistic creativity, and intellectual repression. We will explore these contradictions and their impact on cultural innovation by taking a close look at daily life in early modern Rome and at the lives of some of the city's most celebrated women and men. These saints, murderers, artists, and scientists include San Filippo Neri, Beatrice Cenci, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and Galileo. Course materials emphasize writings by historians, art and music historians, and historians of science, as well as visual, literary, musical, and documentary sources from the period. The seminar culminates with a research project on some individual or aspect of baroque Rome. |