Education is a Delicate Commodity

To quote A Man for All Seasons, "She is full of education, and it is a delicate commodity." I laugh every time I think of this line, but in truth, More might well have said "scarce" rather than just "delicate."
Anyways, just in case anyone was wondering, these are the books I'll be reading and studying in London next spring.


Part I: The Beginning of the West (c. 500 BC to 1050 AD)
A. Greco-Roman Civilization
B. The Judeo-Christian/Greco-Roman Synthesis
C. Germanic Tradition and the Birth of Western Civilization

• Readings:
  Sophocles, Antigone
  Thucydides, Peloponnesian War
  Aristophanes, Lysistrata
  Plato, Republic
  Petronius, My Dinner with Trimalchio
  Virgil, Aeneid
  Sappho, Catullus, Ovid: Selected Poems
  Genesis, I and II Samuel, Job, Amos
  Luke, Acts, Romans
  Augustine, Confessions
  Bede, A History of the English Church
  Gregory the Great, Dialogues, Bk II: St. Benedict
  The Song of Roland
  Beowulf

Field Excursion to Bath


Part II: The Maturing of the West (1050 to 1600)
A. The Medieval Worldview: 1050-1300
B. The Dissolution of the Middle Ages: 1300-1500
C. The Reformation and the End of Medieval Civilization: 1500-1600

• Readings:
  Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles
  Aquinas, Treatise on Happiness, Treatise on Law
  Dante, The Divine Comedy
  Abelard, The Story of My Misfortunes
  Thomas of Celano, Lives of St. Francis
  Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
  Erasmus, The Praise of Folly
  Vergerius, The New Education
  Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man
  Vasari, Life of Leonardo da Vinci
  Machiavelli, The Prince
  Luther: Selected Sermons and Hymns
  Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
  Thomas Kempis, Imitation of Christ
  Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises
  Donne: Selected Poems
  Shakespeare, Hamlet

Field Excursions to Canterbury and Cambridge


Part III: The Modern World (1600 to 1900)
A. The Seventeenth Century Crisis of Authority
B. The Age of Enlightenment
C. The Age of Revolution and Reform

• Readings:
  Voltaire, Candide
  Milton, Paradise Lost
  Bacon: Selected Essays
  Descartes, Discourse on Method
  Locke, Second Treatise on Government
  Swift, Gulliver's Travels
  Pope, Essay on Man
  Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire
  Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
  Kant, What Is Enlightenment?
  Rousseau, Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts & Sciences
  Goethe, Faust
  Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats: Selected Poems
  Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England
  Marx, The Communist Manifesto
  Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Dickenson: Selected Poems
  Flaubert, Madame Bovary
  Darwin, On the Origin of Species
  

Field Excursion to Hampton Court Palace


Part IV: The Twentieth Century
A. An Era of Uncertainty: 1890-1914
B. The Culture of Despair: 1914-1945
C. Cultural Cacophony and the Postmodern World: 1945 to the Present

• Readings:
  Freud, Interpretation of Dreams
  Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
  Peirce, The Fixation of Belief
  Hardy, God's Funeral
  Ibsen, Hedda Gabler
  Yeats: Selected Poems
  Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
  Kierkegaard, The Present Age
  Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est
  Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
  Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
  Lawrence, Odor of Chrysanthemums
  Ibsen, A Doll's House
  T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
  Yasmina Reza, Art
  Middleton and Walsh, Truth is Stranger Than It Used to Be

Yes, I'm wildly happy with this list... just imagine the discussions we'll be having! :)