Building a Church: Christianity and Imperium in the First Millennium (CH8002Z)

Content

The first millennium of the Church saw the greatest expansion of the Roman Empire, its collapse in the west, the rise of competing centres of power from Rome to Constantinople to Aachen. During the same period, Christianity developed from a small and persecuted Jewish cult to an expansive monotheistic state church, before being internally divided and threatened in the east by the rise of the Golden Horde and Islamic Caliphates. In this unit students will travel from the early eastern cave churches to the centre of Roman power, to monasteries from Nitria in North Africa, to Kiev and Iona. From the splendour of the Byzantine Hagia Sophia to the Carolingian renaissance of Charlemagne’s court at Aachen. In this unit, students will discover how the early Church went from the periphery to the centre of power, and then as the millennium approached was confronted by the rise of a new monotheistic evangelising religion that threatened the Eastern Church’s very survival.

Learning outcomes

Unit sequence

This unit is a pre-requisite to postgraduate elective units in Church History.

Pedagogy

Direct instruction and self-directed learning approach (flipped learning) to learning discipline-specific skills (demonstrating an understanding of concepts in history, reading primary and secondary historical documents, writing an argumentative essay, preparing, and delivering an oral presentation, and classroom dialogues) through lectures, tutorials with targeted learning activities, and formative and summative assessment tasks.

Indicative Bibliography

• Fletcher, R. A. 1999. The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Herrin Judith. 2013. Margins and Metropolis: Authority Across the Byzantine Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Ludlow, Morwenna. The Early Church. I.b. Tauris History of the Christian Church, V. 1. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009.

Assessment