Course Description: This course introduces you to late medieval and early modern worlds through a global perspective via a shared ambition to perfect nature. It covers a time frame of roughly 1100 – 1700 CE and follows people in different cultures and locales along the fabled silk road stretching from its eastern terminus in China throughout Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, and western endpoints in Europe. The organizational rubric for this journey is the magical, occult, and early scientific quest for the Philosopher’s Stone as recorded from a variety of interlocking perspectives. While this alchemical tradition at first blush appears to concern itself with the transmutation of metals, the esoteric tradition contained within it held truths about the structure of the universe, the place of humans within the natural cosmos, and held forth the promise of enormous wealth, prolonged life, and the transformation of energy. As such, its practical and philosophical principles touched on subjects as diverse as astrology, art, magic, medicine, philosophy, religion, and statecraft. After laying out a fundamental critical framework of concepts and orientations, the course will proceed along the silk road in search of the tiger, the dragon, the green lion, the golden city, and the salamander while attending to more modern concepts such as views of the self, identity (race, gender), class hierarchy, and the ethics of genetic modification. In what historian of science William Newman calls “the quest to perfect nature,” we will explore the mysterious workings of power and the pursuit of empire that cuts across the major premodern civilizations of Arabic, Chinese, European, Indian, and Ottoman cultures.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Demonstrate broad familiarity with multiple premodern societies through their exploration of alchemy and the discipline of the history of science and medicine
2. Analyze primary source readings in philosophy, literature, and art
3. Synthesize secondary scholarship produced from different disciplines into a coherent narrative
4. Compare the political, social, philosophical, and artistic contributions of different early societies
5. Develop a holistic sense of how premodern societies are similar to and different from modern societies
6.  

This course meets the UC Davis Global Learning Curricular objectives.

GEs: AH, WC, WE