Witches, Whores and Rogues

Catalog description

What should we make of the disorderly people of the past? Were they acting out their dissent against powerful customs and institutions in their lives? Or were they the victims of those customs and institutions? In this course, we consider the lives of these disorderly people: the witches, prostitutes, criminals, escaped servants and slaves, criminals, cross dressers, and rowdies of early modern Europe and the Americas. The course will focus on several case studies featuring people considered to be troublemakers, or at the very least, non-conformist, by their contemporaries. We will use films, primary sources, book-length studies, and works of theory to develop our analyses of the problem of dissent, disorder, and resistance in the early modern past