This course introduces students to the intellectual and cultural history of the Middle Ages, with particular emphasis on the 13th-15th centuries and with particular focus on changing ideas and sensibilities about the natural world, miracles, and magic. Topics will include medieval science (cosmology, physics, human biology and psychology), alchemy, learned and popular magic, medicine, concepts of the body and space, visionary experience, institutional frameworks (e.g. schools, pilgrimages, church courts), media of communication (e.g. art, books, inscriptions, sermons, rituals, folklore), and the murky relationship of philosophy, theology, and popular culture. The course will also consider the late medieval background to Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution. Sources in English translation, discussion of relevant works of medieval art (and on the use of medieval art by cultural historians). Christopher Ocker is Professor of History at the San Francisco Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, and an affiliated member of the History Department at the University of California. A specialist in late medieval religion and thought, his publications include Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge 2002), Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525-1547 (Leiden 2006, runner-up for the first Gerald Strauss Prize of the Sixteenth Century Studies Society), Johannes Klenkok: A Friar's Life, c. 1310-1374 (Philadelphia 1993), and numerous articles that explore the intersection of theology, religious mentalities, politics, and social life between the year 300 and 1600. Awarded fellowships by the Institute for European History in Mainz, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society, Ocker has been a visiting scholar of the Max Planck Institute for History in Gottingen, Germany, the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Constance, Cambridge University, and the American Academy in Rome.