090045 SE Lateinisches Seminar: Studieren wir mal was Anderes! (2019W)

Classical literature is overworked; likewise, the big names in theology. One can learn something by bringing the right productive question to a corpus. Historians must work that way. One can read what everyone else reads (or should be embarrassed for not having read), but one can also read things others don’t read. “Off piste” means “off the beaten path.” What is less commonly read, let alone taught. One cannot read whole works in a seminar, especially not long whole works, such as Augustine’s De Civitate Dei. But there are many shorter works that provide different windows, both literary and historical, onto the world. This sort of study may be challenging—there may be no translations, for example, but one might make a discovery or a contribution. At the very least one learns how to research.

This seminar will be devoted to a selection of shorter texts that advise and warn against various types of misbehavior and sin. These will take the form of sermons, treatises, and letters. We’ll begin with dicing and the Pseudo-Cyprianic De aleatoribus. Other texts will be announced in due course after discussion about possibilities and topics. I am already thinking about topics such as lying, vandalism, melancholic discontent, superstition. The material in the course will have obvious contributions to make to Sittengeschichte, history of the emotions, and history of morality.