Medieval-Enlightenment Humanities

My second-year students have worked really hard this semester. Below, a tribute to them: the list of works whose excerpts they valiantly soldiered through at the behest of their crazy instructor. (I didn't fully realize how crazy this was until I actually sat down to type out the list. Yikes.)

St. Benedict, Rule of St. Benedict

Einhard, Life of Charlemagne

Letters from King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII

Magna Carta

St. Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Canons of Lateran IV

The Rule of the Franciscan Order

The Primitive Constitutions of the Order of Friars Preacher

Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

Giovanni Boccacio, Decameron

Canons of the Council of Constance

Dante, Inferno (no excerpting here--we walked alongside Virgil & his pupil to the depths of despair)

Diary of Christopher Columbus

Nican Mopohua

Bartolomeo de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies

Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance

Machiavelli, The Prince

Martin Luther, 95 Theses and Babylonian Captivity

John Calvin, Genevan Catechism and Institutes

Schleitheim Confession

39 Articles of the Church of England

William Roper, Life of Sir Thomas More

Canons of the Council of Trent

St. Francis de Sales, The Catholic Controversy

St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises

St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle

Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina
Francis Bacon, aphorisms from the Novum Organum

Descartes, Discourse on Method (and a short jaunt into Meditations on First Philosophy for my favorite Descartes passage)

John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government and Letter Concerning Toleration

Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense

Greco-Roman Roots of Civilization

I'm very proud of my freshmen class. Most of them come to JPII with no exposure to studying the great works of Western civilization, and most dove right into the material and really worked hard to understand what was going on in each work and how they connected to each other.

This semester covered excerpts from the following works:

• Much of Homer's Iliad
• All of Sophocles, Antigone
• Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
• Plato, Apology
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Metaphysics and Politics
• Polybius, Histories
• Cicero, On Duties
• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
• Gospel of Matthew
• Acts of the Apostles
• Letters to the Romans and Galatians
• St. Justin Martyr, First Apology
• St. Clement of Alexandria, On Philosophy
• Passion of the Holy Martyrs Felicity and Perpetua
• David Bentley Hart, "Human Dignity was a Rarity Before Christianity"
• St. Augustine, City of God
• Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order