Retro Readings: Desert

DESERT/HNRC 301VH-003
THURSDAYS, 5-6:15 p.m., FALL 2019
GEAR 243

The deadline to apply to our Retro Readings courses (via this application form) is 11:59 p.m. on Friday, March 29, 2018.

In the Christian imaginary, the deserts of late ancient Egypt, Syria and Palestine witnessed the transformation of human bodies into dazzling vessels of the divine, bridging the distance between the heavens and the earth. Female and male hermits mastered the wilderness in vertical, horizontal and subterranean modes of domination.  They did so in imitation of the Savior’s movement through space: across the desert, into the depths of Tartarus and out again to ascend the celestial highway. Desert bodies inhabited holes cut into the earth. They took up residence in ancient tombs and cisterns. They persisted in wooden coffins with dimensions smaller than their own bodies, theatrical spaces designed to perform how asceticism enlarges the soul so that the body can hardly contain it. They lifted themselves high above the desert, displaying their bodies in cliff dwellings, abandoned Roman forts, city gates, towering columns and rivers over which they miraculously floated.  They dueled with mummies, monsters, and demons for ultimate control over the numinous wastelands of the later Roman Empire.  They achieved such notoriety that emperors solicited their advice and members of the senatorial class made pilgrimages to their cells to beg for blessings.

DESERT invites honors scholars from multiple colleges and majors to mine ascetic texts and spaces in three principal ways:

• Meditation on biblical and patristic portraits of ascetics and their desert habitats.
• Analysis of the desert as a technique of conversion as well as an unexpected rival to Roman imperial power.
• Investigation of the desert’s legacy in the realm of Christian architecture.

What's in it for you?

• Gauge the theological, spatial, and gendered contribution of asceticism to the rise of western Christendom (ca. 200-900).
• Discover how the desert setting of Christianity's origins has influenced the religion's history and the politics of the region.
• Participate in an optional visit to a functioning monastery in the United States, a living testimony to the enduring power of the desert in contemporary times. 

What's expected of you?

• Active participation in class, as we discuss religious hermits, their desert dwellings and the mythos that surrounded them through history.
• Thorough engagement in all assignments and projects, which will form a significant part of the course curriculum.
• An open-minded approach to all course topics and respect for your fellow classmates' contributions.

About Lynda Coon:

Honors College Dean Lynda Coon has launched a series of innovative honors courses since joining the history faculty in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences in 1990. She helped to create the Honors Humanities Project (H2P) and as dean she has developed Signature Seminars, Forums, Retro Readings courses and the Honors Passport study abroad experience. Coon’s research focuses on the history of Christianity from circa 300-900. Her first book, Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity, explored the sacred biographies of holy women in late antiquity. Her second book, Dark Age Bodies: Gender and Monastic Practice in the Early Medieval West, focused on the ritual, spatial and gendered worlds of monks in the Carolingian period (ca. 750-987). She is currently researching a book on imagining Jesus in the Dark Ages.