Trace Western civilization from ancient Near Eastern and Hebrew foundations through Greece, Rome, Christianity, Byzantium, Islam, and medieval Europe to the crises that reshaped society before 1500.
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Explain how cities, institutions, specialized labor, religion, writing, and Hebrew and Greek inheritances frame the course’s understanding of Western civilization.
Compare the political structures, religious beliefs, economies, laws, and cultural achievements of Near Eastern, Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman societies.
Analyze the development and decline of Greek city-states, the Roman Republic and Empire, Byzantine rule, and medieval monarchies.
Trace the development of Hebrew religion, Christianity, Islam, medieval church institutions, doctrinal disputes, reform movements, and devotional practices.
Explain how manorialism, feudal obligations, guilds, trade, universities, representative assemblies, and church authority organized medieval European life.
Evaluate how invasion, conquest, demographic change, famine, plague, warfare, revolt, and institutional conflict disrupted societies while preserving or reshaping earlier traditions.
This course traces the development of Western civilization from the first cities and empires of the ancient Near East to Europe’s late medieval crises. It examines Hebrew religion and history, the institutions and cultural achievements of Greece, and Rome’s transformation from republic to empire alongside the rise of Christianity. The course then follows the survival of Roman traditions in Byzantium, the emergence of Islam, and the formation of early medieval Europe through Germanic kingdoms, missionary activity, and Carolingian reform. Its medieval sections connect peasants, nobles, towns, guilds, universities, monarchies, papal authority, crusading, and religious life within a changing social order. The concluding lessons analyze famine, plague, war, revolt, political instability, and church division. Throughout, political institutions, economic arrangements, religious beliefs, literature, philosophy, law, and material culture reveal both continuity and transformation across civilizations.
Professor of Humanities · Faulkner University
Jason Jewell is a professor of humanities whose teaching covers Western civilization, European history, the Great Books, and the relationship between faith and culture.
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