The convergence of intellectual and artistic change and the new energetic urbanism of the post-pestilence West appeared first and most strikingly in Italy. This burst of new ideas and activity was spurred on by the devastation of the Black Death, an event one historian called "the closest thing to a complete rupture" in the history of the world.

The goal of this field school's academic program will be to acquaint students with some of the major achievements in literature and art of humanists from and in Italy, in the centuries just before and just after the chief outbreaks of plague in mid-fourteenth century. The works themselves demand our attention. What their creation reveals about the resilience and determination, the capacity for change, of a culture that has endured catastrophic loss is even more important to consider.

Students will study these works along with the history of these times with the aim of relating developments in different disciplines to each other as well as to their economic, political and demographic contexts.

The program will consist of the following three courses for a total of 11 SFU units.

The following courses are designed to work together to give students a strong background in the debates, concerns and stresses of this turbulent and defining age, with the support of a class in Italian language and culture.

ENG 377-4: Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarca

This course will focus on the central writers and works of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance in Italy. With the help of some readings in history, this class will work to identify the key notions of this new intellectual effort. We will focus on the impact on all parts of life of the pestilences of the fourteenth century. By moving beyond their most celebrated works to some less familiar, we hope to reveal more about the motivating ideas of this movement, and about the relations between writers and artists in this energetic age.

ENG 378-4: Towns, Patronage, and Wealth: A Cultural Studies Approach to the Production of Literature and Other Arts in Post-Pestilence Florence

In Florence, both literary and visual arts were more than a diversion or preoccupation of the devout and the wealthy. Their production became significant businesses in their own right, and were affected not only by the pleasures but the ideas and the economy of Florentines. The social changes caused by the losses of the plague affected this evolution strongly. We shall proceed in this class by reading contemporary accounts by and about Italian artists, and by visiting their works in fieldwork in Florence and its vicinity.

ITAL 100-3: Introductory Italian

This course is designed to provide the student with the means of acquiring basic spoken fluency and reading facility.
Students who have already completed ITAL 100-3 will be responsible for enrolling in an alternate 3 or 4 unit Distance Education or Directed Studies course at SFU to ensure they are registered as a full-time student during the field school.

The field school courses can be applied to the Certificate in Italian Studies.