This is the syllabus page for the spring 2007 version of J. B. Owens's upper-division undergraduate and graduate course, History 453/553, Renaissance Creativity. The sole purpose of this page and all of the pages linked to it is to provide an orientation for those students enrolled in History 453/553.

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Renaissance Creativity: Syllabus

This is syllabus for J. B. Owens's sections of the upper-division undergraduate and graduate course RENAISSANCE CREATIVITY.

The official catalogue description is: Examination of the conditions promoting individual creativity among Europeans in the first global age, 1400-1700. Special emphasis on geospatial research on the history of printing.

The course is designed to support the History major and the new M.A. in Historical Resources Management. Paying particular attention to the Historical Thinking Objectives section, History majors should read the Undergraduate History Curriculum. History 453 emphasizes objectives 2, 6, 7 & 9.

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Preface
Thanks in part to the famous nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt, but also to a number of Renaissance intellectuals themselves, this period has the popular reputation of a great age of individual creativity and genius. Certainly it produced its share of major artists, composers, natural scientists, political and social theorists, theologians, and writers of imaginative literature. Yet all of these men and women worked in social and cultural environments that enhanced and constrained their efforts. Through a comparative study focusing on the period from Francesco Petrarca to Isaac Newton in Europe (which is also roughly the period between the great demographic crises of the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries), this course will attempt to discover some of the factors that contributed to the production of art, literature, music, philosophy, science, and theology.

In part, the course will be organized around a video series entitled The Renaissance: The Origins of the Modern West, which reflects well the ideas about this period of one of its well-known historians, Theodore K. Rabb. Rabb first developed many of the themes of this video series in a short book entitled The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (1975), which is available in the ISU library.

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Books
The following book is to be purchased by all students and brought to ALL class sessions.

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Student Responsibilities
You are expected to come to class prepared to offer the ideas you have developed while doing the assigned reading and to ask questions about matters that are not clear to you. Grades will be based on the exams, the project, and on student class performance (discussed in the next section). Because class attendance is important, it is MANDATORY. Moreover, if you miss more than one (1) class without obtaining a PRIOR excuse from the instructor, you will fail this course. A seating chart will be established, and attendance will be taken.

NOTE BENE: Permission to submit late work or to be absent from class will only be granted if PRIOR notification has been sent to the instructor's e-mail address OWENJACK_ at _ISU.EDU, unless such notification is impossible. Because exams and the project will be graded on points and failure to complete work will give the student a zero for the assignment, no one should submit unexcused late work nor fail to make up any missed assignment for which an excuse has been obtained.

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Examinations
There will be four essay-format examinations in this course. All will be written in class (Liberal Arts, room 328) at the beginning of the class session of the date for which they are scheduled: 6 February, 6 March, 3 April, and 8 May (this last from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m.). Each of the first three will carry equal value to each other, and the fourth will be worth double the value of each of the first three.

All exams will be ESSAY format. For each of these exams, you will need to bring to class the type of examination book known as a "blue book" (using the smaller of the two available sizes). Students will only need one blue book for each of the first three exams, but some students might require more than one for the fourth exam. Therefore, you should come prepared.

To understand how your examinations will be graded, READ in the WebCT document entitled "Introduction to Doing Well," the section "Grading Exams." In this handout, you will also find considerable information about preparing for and taking the examinations. All essay-format exams must start from an understanding of the assigned readings.

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Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice
During almost every class session, there will be short writing exercises, based on the reading assignment for that day, or some students will be asked to speak about a relevant aspect of the course material. Some of the written assignments will be done outside of class (as "homework"). All of the written assignments will emphasize some aspect of the Thinking Performance Stages, which are explained in the chart in the companion file to the "Doing Well" document. These student performances constitute DELIBERATE PRACTICE, which is designed to move you toward the EXPERT PERFORMANCE level of thinking. Of course, these performances will help you prepare for the examinations, and they constitute the "class participation," which, along with the examinations, will contribute to your final grade in the course. The written exercises will be graded as follows: 0 (not attempted or submitted); 1 (submitted the completed assignment); 2 (met expectations); 3 (exceeded expectations).

The focus of these assignments and the examinations will be the course hypothesis stated on the Viewpoint Page. Therefore, you should become familiar with this document as early as possible in the course.

Grades will be based on the exams, the project, the scores on other written exercises, and on class participation. Because class attendance is important, it is MANDATORY. Moreover, if you miss more than one (1) class session without obtaining a PRIOR excuse from the instructor, you will fail this course. A seating chart will be established, and attendance will be taken.

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Student Project
Read the page about the student project.

By 2:30 p.m. on Friday, 12 January, you will select the author on whom you will concentrate for your project. See the list of suggested authors.

By the beginning of class on 16 January, you must have read the web page about the student project and be prepared to discuss it. Failure to be prepared for a discussion of this material will result in a failing grade for the course.

The project will be due in my e-mailbox no later than 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, 26 April. This project will be worth approximately 15% of your final grade.

You MUST READ the pages on course citation style and plagiarism. For this course, there are strict standards, explained on these pages, for the style of bibliography entries and notes and for the citation of any words or ideas that are not your own. Because failure to observe these standards precisely will lower significantly your grade on your project, make sure you seek clarification of anything on these pages that you do not understand.

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Reading Assignments and Class Topics

Moving to this page will inform you about the temporal organization of the semester's course work.
"One of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one."
- Clifford Geertz -

Please send any questions or comments about this syllabus to J. B. Owens at OWENJACK_ at _ISU.EDU or if your system will support the process, you can mail me NOW. Please include your name and e-mail address in the body of your message.

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All contents copyright © 1996, 1998, 2004, 2007.
J. B. Owens
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Revised: 7 January 2007


URL:  http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/rencr/syllabus.html