Art and Literature: from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
This course will be taught in English.
Join Dr. Claudia Gil de la Piedra for a four-session ateand ideas that shaped European society from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
Claudia holds a degree in French Literature with a specialization in translation from UNAM, a master’s degree in Contemporary Mexican Literature, and a PhD in Latin American Studies. She is a university professor, literary critic, translator, and published researcher whose work encompasses Gothic and fantastic literature, cultural history, francophone Caribbean literature, and the relationship between storytelling and society.
Rather than approaching these centuries as a sequence of styles and historical events, Claudia will connect the works we examine with the societies that created them. We will explore how people understood religion, nature, power, fear, knowledge, and the unknown, and how those beliefs appeared in buildings, stories, images, fantastic creatures, and symbols.
Session 1 (Aug 26) Medieval Bestiaries and Mythology
Fantastic creatures, legends, and the symbolic imagination of the medieval world.
Session 2 (Sep 2) Gothic Architecture in Central Europe
How Gothic buildings expressed faith, authority, community, and the divine.
Session 3 (Sep 9) Humanism and the Emergence of the Renaissance
The new ideas that transformed European art, literature, philosophy, and society.
Session 4 (Sep 16 TBC) The Renaissance in Italy and France
Architecture and painting shaped by classical traditions, proportion, perspective, and human experience.
Throughout the atelier, a cathedral will become more than a building, and a fantastic creature more than an imaginary animal. Each work will serve as an entry point into the fears, aspirations, beliefs, and structures of the society that produced it.
Those who joined our previous ateliers, will recognize Claudia’s distinctive approach: using art and literature to enter the everyday experience of another time and see familiar ideas from a different perspective.
Expect a rich and engaging conversation filled with history, strange creatures, remarkable buildings, beautiful works of art, and new ways of looking at the past.