CORE C139   Pre-Modern Households

An exploration of the household when the “idea” of the household was not necessarily attached to place or to the psychological dynamics we associate with the word “home.” Classical and medieval writers used the household as a sign of the strengths and weaknesses of a political community whose order reflected hierarchies of power. Beginning with Aristotle and ending with tales of Robin Hood, readings include philosophical, political, historical and literary texts from classical Greece, Italy, France, and England from about 800 BCE to 1500 CE that offer pictures of rural, ecclesiastical, and aristocratic households which prompt considerations of both the nature of power and the realities of gender, class, and race in relation to that power. Though political theorists conceived of the orderly household as emanating from a powerful and wise figure of male rule, literary texts offer depictions of male folly and female wisdom and thereby reconceive and refigure the household as a site of discourse about the nature of power and thus of order.