Are you interested in Renaissance folklore or early cultures and art? Every semester at UMBC, a number of departments offer undergraduate elective courses on Global medieval and early modern topics. The Middle Ages (500-1500) and Early Modern era (1400-1700) are periods of history related to many of the global practices, ideas, and social systems we are fammiliar with today. It’s not just history and literature, either. Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) encompasses live theatre, Renaissance-era music, archaeology, comedy, folklore, and many more subjects and materials.
Medieval and early modern history spans centuries, transgressing boundaries like vast oceans and languages, and has been maintained, in large part, through the preservation of primary source documents that have often been carefully transcribed, catalogued, reproduced, and circulated around various institutions and archives. Here at UMBC, Special Collections holds hundreds of early modern books and manuscripts in the Rare Books Collection. These items range from historical chronologies of treatise on naval battles in the Mediterranean, manuscripts about the natural sciences, English documents about witchcraft, Latin comedic works and literature, Italian transcriptions of classical works, and a great deal of eighteenth and nineteenth century local and international travel logs.
Although early modern colonial history is often framed in popular culture as an archaic era, far removed from modern life, many of these centuries-old documents shed light on how interconnected the medieval, and subsequently, the early modern time period was. Many items in the Rare Books collection show how scholars from various cultures valued the dissemination of literature and acknowledged the importance of historic and cultural preservation.
For students and prospective scholars interested in ancient and early history, music, English, politics, and religious studies, UMBC offers a wide array of undergraduate courses that can apply to the Medieval and Early Modern Studies minor. These include English courses covering Renaissance-era literature, the history of the medieval Mediterranean, Atlantic Revolutionary history, African-American women’s history, West African History, and Islamic culture and society. For full requirements for the MEMS minor and potential faculty advisors: click here. A wide range of primary source materials about sixteenth-century travel in the Mediterranean and Atlantic regions are also accessible via AOK library and online through sites like GALE and JSTOR through an institutional login.
Getting to Know the Sources
To help you get started, former MEMS minor and current History graduate student Amina Thiam has catalogued all of the Renaissance and Early Modern sources in Special Collections, putting them into a searchable database with keywords and categories. Amina has also profiled several of the sources that intrigued her, so read on to get a glimpse of some books that you too could explore in Special Collections. There’s nothing like holding a piece of history in your hands!
The items featured are from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and have been used by students, faculty, and alumni, as well as the public, to enhance studies of race, slavery, gender, music, and literature. These books are just a few examples that support the idea that the Age of Enlightenment was a time of connection and syncretism, wherein literate people spread tales of travels, trade, and history, outside the confines of continental Europe and its many traditional (white) histories of interaction in the American colonies.