Early Moderns: Old Western Culture

This course utilizes lectures and readings from the Old Western Culture curriculum. As an integrated humanities class, it offers the student an overview of the history, theology, philosophy, poetry and art produced by authors from the Early Modern period. Reading these authors is essential to understand our world today. Students will watch lectures by master teachers Wes Callihan, Dr. Peter Leithart, Dr. Jonathan McIntosh, and Dr. Mitch Stokes. They will read timeless texts, learn from some of the brightest minds in history, and complete assignments in a Workbook to guide them through their journey. In weekly recitations with Dr. Soderberg, students will discuss the weekly material, share insights, and pursue wisdom together.

Note: this course counts for the 11th & 12th grade Integrated Humanities credit required by the Kepler Education Diploma Track.

Course Objectives:

1. To gain an appreciation for the main historical figures and overall cultural framework of the Early Modern period.
2. To become proficient in the conversational approach to learning: close readings, interpretive questions, and Socratic discussions of the texts.
3. To develop lateral thinking skills by analyzing and synthesizing themes and motifs.
4. To write persuasively about perennial human questions.
5. To learn from both the mistakes and triumphs of the past, to help us live more faithfully in the present.

Texts: (students will read all, or selections from the following)

*Through the Old Western Culture Readers, students can easily access a print edition or e-book of the works covered in each unit. (Note: Roman Roads Media offers a special 25% discount on all Old Western Culture lectures, Workbooks, and Readers for students at Kepler Education.)

Quarter 1 - Rise of England

• Sonnet 3, 55, 60, 73, 103, & 106
• King Lear, Richard III, and Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
• A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, Holy Sonnet X, Holy Sonnet XIV, Meditation XVII by John Donne - Redemption, The Collar, Love III by George Herbert
• To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell
• On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, The Hymn, On His Blindness, On the Late Massacre in Piedmont, Paradise Lost by John Milton

Quarter 2 - Poetry & Politics

• Essay on Criticism, The Iliad (excerpt), and Ode on Solitude, Essay on Man by Alexander Pope
• De Descriptione Temporum by C.S. Lewis
• Reflections on the Revolution in France & Selected Letters and Speeches by Edmund Burke
• Selected Poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Intimations of Immortality by William Wordsworth
• Selected Poems by Lord Byron
• On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats
• Ode to the West Wind by Percy Shelley
• Democracy in America (selections) by Alexis de Toqueville
• Selected Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
• Selected Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Robert Browning, Selected Poems
• Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
• Christina Rosetti, Selected Poems
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, Selected Poems

Quarter 3 - The Enlightenment

• What is Enlightenment? by Emmanuel Kant
• The Sidereal Messenger, Letter to Benedetto Castelli & Letter to Duchess Christiana of Tuscany by Galileo Galilei
• Discourse on Method & Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes
• Principia (Laws of Motion and Gravity), General Scholium (Selection), Opticks, Query 28 & 31 (Selections) by Sir Isaac Newton
• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Sections IV, V, XII) by David Hume
• An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (selections) by Thomas Reid

Quarter 4 - The Novels

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Selections from Book V)
• The Bet by Anton Checkov
• De Descriptione Temporum by C. S. Lewis

What Do We Mean by "Old Western Culture"?