History 331: Home, History 331: Schedule of Readings and Assignments

*Hans Medick, "Historical Event and Contemporary Experience: Capture and Destruction of Magdeburg in 1631," History Workshop Journal 52 (2001): 23-48;
*Marc R. Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560-1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 144-78 also in *David Luebke, ed., The Counter-Reformation: The Essential Readings (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 165-97.

Assignments:

Students in the 13:30 tutorial: Devise an outline, in one or two typed pages, of the article by Medick. You may use point form. Imagine your outline as a lecture outline. It should be clear and logical, helping students to follow the main themes and principal facts of the article without overwhelming them with too much detail. At the end of your outline, add one or two questions that will generate a discussion of the entire article. In other words, the questions should not be the type that can be answered in one sentence.

Students in the 14:30 tutorial: Your assignment is similar to that of the students in the 13:30 tutorial, except that Forster's chapter will be the subject of your outline and discussion questions.

At the very beginning of class, I will call upon two students from each tutorial to put an outline of Medick's article / Forster's chapter on the board along with one or two discussion questions. You will hand in your outlines to me at the end of this class (i.e. Tuesday, 9 November). I will not accept outlines that are not typed or that are not submitted in class.

Do not assume, however, that you will necessarily discuss the subject of your outline in a group discussion so that you can get away with reading only one of the assigned texts! I might very well ask 13:30 students to answer discussion questions on Forster and 14:30 students to answer discussion questions on Medick.

Glossary for the chapter in Forster:

  • Hochstift: the territory under the immediate jurisdiction of the Bishop of Speyer.
  • Alumnat: the cathedral school in Speyer.
  • Pfarrer: a Catholic pastor, i.e. the priest in charge of a Catholic parish.
  • Amt: an administrative district. We came across this word in Sabean, Power in the Blood.
  • Kurpfalz: Electoral Palatinate, i.e. the territory goverened by the Elector Palatine.
  • Gemeinde: the local parish community.

    Locate Speyer on the maps in Asch, The Thirty Years War, x-xii. Online maps.
    Photos of Speyer: the top three are of the cathedral. Here is another one and yet another one. Construction of the cathedral began in 1030. It was consecrated in 1061. The French forces of Louis XIV invaded the Palatinate in 1689 and severely damaged the cathedral, setting fire to it on 31 May 1689. Reconstruction took place between 1758 and 1777, but soon thereafter, during the French Revolutionary Wars, the cathedral was severely damaged and had to be torn down. It was newly erected between 1818 and 1821. In 1981, UNESCO designated the cathedral as a site of world cultural heritage. (Will that prevent future destruction from armies advancing from the west?)

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