If you go back through my blog entries from my freshman and
sophomore years, you’ll see that I wrote a lot about the different courses I
had each semester. While I was abroad, I didn’t keep this blog up
to date about my academics, so I thought I’d use this post to reflect on the
courses I had while I was abroad. An easy enough feat since I only had three classes: History of Magic and Witchcraft in
Early Modern Britain and Ireland, Love Poetry, and From the Vote to the Pill:
Twentieth Century Women Writers.
In History of Magic, I learned that Ireland had really low rates of witchcraft trials compared to Scotland and
England. These low prosecution
rates didn’t necessarily correlate to lack of magical belief, though. Often,
Celtic areas, such as Ireland, that did not have very fervent witch-hunts still
had strong belief in magic. Some places that emphasized belief in malevolent fairies, for instance,
saw less need to blame misfortunes on witches; this was particularly true for the Highlands
of Scotland. Some areas also believed in more benign versions of witches, such
as “butter witches,” which usually only did smaller evils like messing with crops, and in the evil
eye, which was when someone’s glance (usually unintentionally) cursed someone.
As a Religion major, I was interested in the religious component of witchcraft belief. In particular, the demonic view of
witchcraft focused on a witch’s pact with the devil. In witchcraft trials, those
prosecuted were sometimes made to say the Lord’s Prayer as a test. Not being
able to say the Lord’s Prayer was a sign of that pact with the devil. Some
clergy seemed to believe it was necessary to uphold witchcraft belief in order to
sustain a supernatural worldview that allowed for the existence of God. While
some churches took on the main responsibility for prosecuting witches, it’s
also interesting to note that some churches discouraged witch-hunts. For
example, some churches would decrease the amount of witchcraft accusations by
charging the accuser with slander, rather than going after the witch.
Protestant-Catholic conflict could also be seen in witch-hunts, since suspected
witches, particularly in England, were often “papists,” or Catholics, being accused by Protestant officials or neighbors.
Love Poetry gave an overview of different periods and kinds
of love poetry, including ancient, Victorian, marital, and Sapphic. The best
part of this class was the exposure I received to all different sorts of poetry. One poet
I was introduced to during the class was D.H. Lawrence. I went on to read his
collection of love poetry on my own, which I really enjoyed. I hope to go back
to some of the other poets I liked when I have more free time to read. For this
course, we had seminars where we discussed in closer detail the poetry we read.
One of my favorite aspects of this course was preparing for seminars with my
friend Zoe. We would choose a poem to focus on and discuss it together, and I
feel like we really learned a lot from each other.
From the Vote to the Pill: Twentieth Century Women Writers
was probably my most interesting course. In that class, we looked at the
work of female writers through the twentieth century, and even into the
present-day, through a feminist interpretive lens. One of the books we read was
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf,
which I absolutely loved. I think, in this course, I did the academic work of
the semester that makes me most proud. For my first essay, I wrote about
Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing and
its portrayal of a crisis of masculinity, and for my second essay, I wrote
about Bella’s quest for family and Edward as a father-figure in Stephenie Meyer’s
Twilight.
While the courses—or “modules,” in keeping with the terms
used at the University of Ulster—fell a bit short of my expectations, probably
because I’m used to Americans’ more active class participation, I got a chance to study a lot that I wouldn’t have learned
about otherwise.
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