Corso di laurea in Storia

The course will offer an introduction to the History of Religions, with a focus on the history of the discipline and the methods of analysis developed by different scholarly strands. The aim is to provide some critical and methodological tools to interpret religions as historical phenomena, embedded in specific cultural and social contexts.

• Knowledge and understanding: identifying and assessing the problems and methods of the history of religions, and the historical contexts of the sources and authors analyzed
• Applying knowledge and understanding: reading, understanding and interpreting a document in the light of its historical context of production
• Judgment autonomy: applying an appropriate method of analysis to documents, situating the authors in the historiographical debate, and asking appropriate questions related to course issues
• Communicative skills: using the scientific terminology and being able to produce historically appropriate arguments
• Learning skills: attaining the necessary tools of analysis for the historical and critical study of religions

Religion: Definitions, Critical Tools, and Historiography

The course will retrace the history of the term and the concept of “religion” from Antiquity to the 21^st century. The selected authors and texts will show the multiple definitions that have been ascribed to the term “religion” over the centuries. Attention will be put to analyzing such texts in their historical and cultural contexts. The course materials will be available on the Moodle platform.

All classes will be held in-person.

36-hour course for 6 weeks, 2 days per week for 3 hours each session (Thursday, and Friday).

The course will be offered in the first part of the first semester.

The final examination will be an oral exam. It will focus on the topics covered in the course and the volume listed in the bibliography. It will assess the understanding of the course’s materials and the student’s critical autonomy, language property, and argumentative ability.

Students who achieve an independent vision of the themes explored in class, combined with good critical capacity, a command of expression using precise language, will be assessed with a very good or excellent grade (28–30 and honours); a primarily mnemonic or somewhat under developed acquisition of the contents of the course, with a linguistic and logical competence which is not always adequate will be valued with a grade from fair (21–24) to good (25–27); a minimal level of understanding of the contents of the course, combined with gaps in training or inadequate linguistic and logical competence, will earn a sufficient grade (18–20); the absence of the minimal level of understanding of the course contents, combined with inadequate linguistic and logical competencies and with training gaps, will produce an insufficient grade (<18/30).

For attending students, the exam will cover the topics discussed in the classes and the book by Natale Spineto, Gli studi di storia delle religioni. Profilo storico, Milano, Mondadori Education, 2023.

For non-attending students, the exam will be based on the following books:

- Natale Spineto, Gli studi di storia delle religioni. Profilo storico, Milano, Mondadori Education, 2023

- Natale Spineto, La festa, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2015.

Inserire qui il testo in inglese (massimo 4000 caratteri). Non eliminare l’indicazione “English” tra le parentesi quadre; è necessaria per la creazione dell’etichetta di visualizzazione del testo in inglese. Una volta inseriti i testi eliminare queste indicazioni in modo che non risultino visibili agli studenti.