Religion, Science and Literature in the Middle Ages and in Early Modernity

Joachim Küpper

In this lecture series, the question of how the relation between religion and emerging science is staged in important medieval and early modern literary texts will be discussed. The first lecture will treat some general problems pertaining to the subject and then will focus on Dante’s Divine Comedy. The second lecture will discuss Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore and will raise the question of whether or not the specific religious context is determinant for the relation between religion and science. The third lecture will give a contrastive analysis of two different approaches to the question, Calderón’s La vida es sueño and Cervantes’s Quijote, and will discuss in particular to which extent the medieval and the early modern attitudes towards religion and science diverge (from each other).

I: Dante, La divina commedia

II: Leone Ebreo, Dialoghi d’amore

III: Calderón, La Vida es sueño; Cervantes, Quijote