3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

How do books come to life? Behind every masterpiece is a tale of hard work, dialogue with other texts, and constant negotiations with social and material circumstances that evolve over time. This course opens up the "laboratory" of figures of the European Renaissance like Erasmus, Machiavelli, and Montaigne to explore the world of writerly culture in its manifold expressions, including authorial revision, self-translation, controversy, censorship, intertextuality, and forgery. Our own laboratory will be the Department of the Special Collections, where we will spend a good deal of our time handling manuscripts and early printed books. Course may be used to satisfy major requirements in both French and Italian sections.