This class introduces students to historical thinking and how historians work in the specific context of Medieval Europe’s intellectual history. The content of the class explores how books were made by hand in the Middle Ages and how their production both created and reflected developments in the culture of reading and interpretation that laid the ground for our own institutions of learning. We will look at reproductions of medieval books in Special Collections as well as digitized manuscripts. Students will also learn about varieties of medieval scripts and practice writing them. This class also shares with all History 150 classes the goal of learning to “think like a historian,” which includes reading historical sources carefully and critically—whether they were written a thousand years ago or as examples of more recent scholarship.(5T)