In this class, we are going to explore issues related to the culture of peace and peacemaking. We will be considering discourse about peace, as well as peace institutions and treatises created to discuss situations of order, control, and human rights. Such discourses and institutions include philosophical, theological, medical, and otherwise political and cultural definitions of peace and peacemaking.
As we will see, it has become quite difficult to disentangle the discourses of peace from those of war -but we will explore how in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period there were specific movements to discuss peace in itself, and not only as a rea#ion to war, civil uprisings, and dinastic and power substitutions.
We will analyze texts and iconographic objects -from emblems and paintings to scenarios and spaces of peace and peacekeeping. We will pay a very special attention to the vocabularies of peace -to the semantic, lexical, and pragmatic fields of the discourses on peace, including therefore the semantics and pragmatics of images.
Our main focus will fall on the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, as well as the Iberian Empires and the Mediterranean bassin during the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period -that is, we will adopt a transatlantic and transmediterranean perspectiive, including an appropriate reading list. We will include, as well, discourses on peace created in Northern African and Northern and Central European spaces -for instance, from Ibn Rushd and Ibn Battuta to Saint Augustin and Saint Thomas, as well as the Treaty of Westfalia. We will, therefore, engage in a comparative cultural research dealing with different political, linguistic, religious, and national identities.
The pre-modern period is so far removed from us that it has been sometimes perceived like “a foreign country where things are different.” We will, however, look at this study of peace and peacemaking not in order to pinpoint differences, alterities, or otherwise taking a trip to a foreign country. We will engage in a historical and theoretical study that will also help us building our always problematic vocabularies and theories regarding peace, peacekeeping and the institutions of peace. For this reason, we will also be reading contemporary philosophy and theory.
Same as SPAN W3992
