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Course Description

This course examines the complex interaction between the claims of History and Biography to be objective and the individual perspectives that are written into every narrative of the past. We focus on those figures from the fifteenth to the turn into the seventeenth century whom we believe we know most about: queens, kings, counselors, intellectuals, artists, rebels, and controversial candidates to posterity, to investigate these questions. To evaluate the validity of historical representations of particular women and men we consult contemporaneous official chronicles, primary documents -- letters, diaries, autobiographies, spies’ reports, as well as imaginative accounts from earlier times and our own. We compare later historiographies and historical fictions by Hilary Mantel and others with the most recent scholarly evidence and speculative accounts. We consider the cinematic history and biography of particular figures. Taking Plutarch’s approach in Parallel Lives, we study several “parallel” figures, identifying their individual “history” and “biography,” as well as their documented contact. We examine the ways each individual shapes an existence according to personal character, public goals, and the interplay of events, and the way historians, biographers, novelists, and dramatists construct lives for their own interests. Students will have the opportunity to create the biography of any historical actor of their choice.
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