The course aims to provide students with an overview of the main issues (thematic and punctual events) that articulated the period between the fifth and fifteenth centuries in the Euro-Mediterranean space, with a particular focus on events involving the Italian peninsula. Beyond the notionistic dimension, which can be acquired by the student through the study of the indicated textbook, with respect to which the lecturer will propose an orientation guide, the course will emphasize both the main historiographical debates and the most famous interpretative 'theses' (e.g., the problem of periodization of the Middle Ages and Le Goff's 'long Middle Ages,' the 'Long Middle Ages,' the 'Pirenne thesis,' etc.) and the openness to a dimension of cultural history, especially literary history.
The main objective of the course is to ensure that the student has a clear awareness of the articulation of the timeline coinciding with the period that is referred to as the Middle Ages, and is able to correctly place a series of events along this line. The student should also have a sketchy idea of the main names in modern historiography associated with each topic so that he or she will be able to pursue in-depth study independently. A series of reflections (e.g., on the notion of 'barbarian,' 'crusade,' 'heresy,' 'communal freedom,' etc.) will finally provide the student with tools to correctly decrypt some modern ideological messages and contem