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Fall semester seminar & topic in fall 2008

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Fall 2004 Seminar

"Encountering Worlds: Human Views of Nature"

Dates: August 30 - December 10, 2004

Faculty

Carol Neel, History, Colorado College (Ph.D., Cornell University).

John Horner, Psychology, Colorado College (Ph.D., Duke University).

Description of the seminar

How has human beings’ sense of their place in the natural world changed across time? How are contemporary perspectives on the cosmos and ecology different from prior cultures’? These questions are fundamental to scholarship in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences, especially public policy, in the 21st century. The 2004 Newberry Seminar in the Humanities challenges contemporary visions of humankind’s place in nature with the perspectives of multiple pasts, and encourages participating students interested in literary and visual arts, history, and the sciences to engage critically in framing their future.

Below,left: Facsimile of “the fourth month, April; Inka Raymi, feast of the Inka,” illustration in Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala, Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobierno (early 17th century). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

This seminar will offer a wide-ranging adventure in the resources of a great library. Among many other possibilities, the Newberry Library’s collections in the history of printing will offer students the opportunity for exploring premoderns’ sense of the relationship between the natural and the human worlds. Its collection in the history of cartography will develop participants’ ability figuratively to see past people’s worlds — both their cosmos and the geography in which they envisioned themselves. The Library’s collection on Native Americans will represent to students how cultural encounter allows us to rethink the relationship between civilization and nature, and even redefine humanity.

Below,right: Leonardo da Vinci, from the notebooks The Self in Context. Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

Nature in interdisciplinary perspective

At the same time, the seminar’s common discussion will develop students’ interests and capabilities with its interdisciplinary approach to the materials of past and present. One instructor is a medieval historian with a background in classical and vernacular literatures. The other is an experimental psychologist with training in the biological sciences and history of science. Their syllabus for readings and group activities will bring together central textual and visual works in the Western literary tradition and in intellectual and scientific history as evidence for how historical peoples have understood the world around them. It will continually ask whether ordinary people understand or believe the scientific visions of intellectual elites. Texts and discussions will query how economic, social, and religious life express alternate visions of who and how humankind is in our natural context. Together, students in “Encountering Worlds” will explore how our relationship with nature shapes human possibilities as described in literature and history.

The seminar will begin with a practicum in evidence. What tools and materials does the Newberry Library offer for finding out the views of the people of the past? Do archives lie? Can we find the history of ideas in images as well as texts? It will continue with studies in the development of classical and medieval cosmologies, and literatures and images about beasts. The most famous of medieval people, Francis of Assisi, lived among animals. How can his sensibility be accessible to us? Can it be so completely? How could medieval Englishmen, for instance, imagine themselves on the far rim of a wheel-like world turning around Jerusalem, like that in the image below?

Facsimile of a world map in an English psalter (c. 1250) from P.D.A. Harvey, Medieval Maps (London, 1991). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries broke the medieval worldview -- or, from another perspective, opened the possibility for modern science and technology. What did this great transition in intellectual history mean to Europeans of the early modern period? How did elites read such works as Galileo’s Starry Messenger, which effectively shredded medieval maps and sent Francis and his animals into trackless space? Did peasants ever hear of this cataclysm? The 19th century came to understand human beings in the cosmos and among beasts as themselves the products of long evolutionary process. How has this reframing of human nature in nature predicated economic globalization, and more particularly the articulation of an American identity of what was recently, from the European perspective, a new continent? How do images of Native Americans throughout the 19th century reflect change and continuity in Euro-Americans’ visions of indigenous peoples, themselves, and the land they now shared? How did the Native Americans understand their own place in the world?

Below: "Of the picture and shape of the Mantichora." In Edward Topsell, The History of foure-footed beastes. Describing the true and lively figure of every beast. (London, 1607). Courtesy of the Newberry Library.

Learning through research

Wrestling with such questions, seminar participants from a wide range of majors and potential majors will look beyond their disciplines to consider the varying relationship among the sciences, social sciences, and humanities in history and theory. But the heart of this Newberry seminar will be students’ independent exploration of the collections by means of the various methodologies they have together developed. Each student will, throughout the semester, work closely with both professors in the choice of a sustained research topic. S/he will prepare for in-depth, individual work with preliminary group and individual assignments for oral and written presentation, and from the early weeks of the semester will meet regularly with seminar staff to gather primary sources and useful critical perspectives. By the end, each student will have completed a substantial essay based in original research -- a scale of achievement usually reserved for senior work in colleges within the consortia. In a final conference-format presentation of this independent work to peers and other scholars working and teaching at the Newberry, each student will become an active participant in a community of scholars.

This interdisciplinary seminar can be tailored to fits students’ individual academic goals. Depending on their research topic, they can earn credit in natural science, history, literature or the visual arts.