![]() ![]() ![]() Gregory was keen to berate his contemporaries for their moral failings, his works provide remarkably detailed information on the habits and customs of his age. The bulk of the work is about the period when he was a bishop and thus a considerable political figure, and the structure is loose enough to find room for an almost endless series of anecdotes, told with immense verve. This Special Subject is built around the fullest and most readable historical work of the early middle ages, the Histories of a Gallo-Roman bishop of Tours, Gregory. she carries the heavy weight of the cares of state, she cherishes you with her goodness, she helps you by her service.”’ ![]() ‘“The noble Fredegund excels in all virtues. ‘“Hand over the murderess Fredegund” they said, “the woman who garrotted my aunt, the woman who killed first my father and then my uncle and who put my two cousins to the sword”.’ In addition to the writings of Augustine, we study texts of and about the great and the good in the Roman Empire, such as the pagan senator Symmachus or the Christian heiress Melania the Younger, who sought to guide (or to abandon) the ship of the late Roman state as it steered into crisis. How did contemporaries react to these events? (Did they notice?) This was also a regime under strain: in 378, a Roman Emperor was killed by barbarians in battle in 410, notoriously, the city of Rome was sacked twenty years later, as Augustine lay dying, barbarians had overrun the western Empire and were about to take over his town. Augustine’s Confessions and his City of God are texts about desire, disillusion, and being human-in a hot, pre-industrial autocracy almost unrecognisable to a modern audience. Relentlessly curious to observe how his own transformations related to the experience of others, Augustine watched the needs and frustrations of new-born babies, marvelled at the perfect physical control of contortionists and meditated on his mother's sudden cure from alcoholism. ![]() He had rejected the love of his life for the sake of his career as a public speaker, and then, having risen to the very top of his profession, he had given it all up to become bishop of a provincial town in North Africa. Augustine was a man who did not know why his life had taken the course that it had. 430) are not what you think.Īugustine is often typecast as a Church Father tormented by the memory of his youthful sexual urges- but the story he wanted to tell his contemporaries in the later Roman Empire was more complicated and more interesting than this. The Special Subjects currently on offer are: As a short scholarly piece of work it also acts as a warm-up to the thesis you will write in the following term, not least in that it requires proper academic presentation and referencing. The Extended Essay provides you with the opportunity not only to demonstrate your knowledge of an aspect of the subject in very great depth, encompassing both the relevant sources and historiography, but also to come to your own conclusions on the basis of close study of these. On the basis of even more detailed and intensive study of the material you will be able to deploy your skills in discussion and presentation from the Further Subject and Disciplines, and thus take more control of class- and tutorial-discussion indeed it is to be hoped that students will learn more from each other than their teachers. Your comprehension of how historians use sources is extended beyond that required in the Further Subject, and your knowledge of them will be tested in the most rigorous ways possible. Special Subjects get you the closest to the scholarly study of a subject of all the prescribed papers in the History School. ![]()
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