Early Modern Studies MA

The MA will teach you critical reading skills, the ability to assess and weigh evidence, and construct persuasive arguments. It combines training in book history, bibliography, and paleography with a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of the early modern period.

Students undertake modules to the value of 180 credits.

The programme consists of three core modules (45 credits), between two and four optional modules (45 credits) and a dissertation (90 credits).

• Reframing the Renaissance
• Forging the Early Modern
• Unstitching the Early Modern: Archival and Book Skills

Students choose up to 45 credits from a list which varies each year. An up-to-date list is available on our department website. Below is an indicative list, showing modules that have been offered previously.

• Shakespeare in his Time
• Sex and the Body in Early Modern Europe
• Confessional Cultures in the Dutch Republic & England, c.1500-c.1700
• Early Modern Science
• Web 0.1: Early Modern Information Culture, c.1450-c.1750
• Aztec Archaeology: Codices and Ethnohistory
• Continental Connections: Britain and Europe in the Eighteenth Century
• I.T. for Graduate Research
• Paradoxes of Enlightenment: German Thought from Leibniz to Humboldt
• Beginners Latin for Research
• Metamorphosis: The Limits of the Human
• Seeing Through Materials: Matter, Vision and Transformation in the Renaissance
• Wolfram von Eschenbach's 'Parzival'
• Men on the Moon: Cosmic Voyages in the Early Modern Period

All students undertake an independent research project which culminates in a dissertation of 18,000 words.

The programme is delivered through a combination of tutorials, seminars, workshops, presentations, class discussions and library, archive, museum and gallery visits. Assessment is through essays, annotated bibliography and the dissertation.