HI 407: Topics in Medieval Religious Culture

Spring 2025 – Jennifer Hunter

Topic for Spring 2025: Marriage, Sex, and Ritual in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. This course will explore the ritualized nature of marriage and sex among Christians, Jews, and other people from late antiquity into the medieval period. The course will explore topics such as  betrothals and weddings, religious authority and marriage, ritual power and sex, ‘magical’ methods to conceive children with desirable traits, and the material objects that people used to help ritualize their marital and sexual lives. Students will be introduced to primary sources and different methodological approaches on how to interpret them. Students will receive an overview of scholarship from a variety of fields, including history, religious studies, ritual studies, and feminist approaches to the study of ritual. This will be a seminar style course in which students will be expected to read course materials in order to nurture their own curiosity, contribute to classroom discussion, and to lay the foundation upon which to conduct their own research project. BU Hub Areas (Effective Spring 2021): Writing- Intensive Course, Historical Consciousness, Research and Information Literacy.