Women in the Liberal Arts Tradition

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Course Description

Philosophy, Wisdom, the Liberal Arts, the Muses, and the Virtues are personified as women in the long tradition of classical education, including the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena, who was often accompanied by the owl of knowledge. Many educators in the tradition, from Plato to Philip Melanchthon, argue that girls should be educated alongside boys, which frequently occurred in castles, courts, cathedrals, and convents, the latter of which functioned as places of higher education for women until the rise of universities and the dissolution of convents during the Reformation. Despite the education that many women received in the arts and sciences, and despite the availability of their works, their role in the liberal arts tradition and their writings are not well known, leaving them largely absent from the curricula of most classical schools. This course, taught by Dr. Brian Williams and designed with MAT graduate and guest lecturer Joelle Hodge, celebrates the lives and writing of women in the classical tradition, and identifies the ways that their works can be recovered and incorporated into school curricula in order to present students with a more true and fulsome picture of the tradition and to provide students with the opportunity to learn from and be inspired by these wise and eloquent women.

The women covered in this course span the centuries and were each chosen for her unique contribution to the pursuit of truth, goodness, beauty, or holiness.

About the Instructor and Guest Lecturers

Guest lecture content is also provided by course architect Joelle Hodge along with Amy Snell, Angel Parham, Anika Prather, Carrie Eben, Christine Perrin, Jesse Hake, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Kathryn Smith, and Nicole Koopman. Along with Brian Williams, Teacher Assistant TBD will support graduate students enrolled in this course.

Prior to her current VP role with Classical Academic Press, Joelle has also served CAP by helping to launch their online school, Scholé Academy, where she served as their Director for several years. As a consultant, she engages with educators across the country, tailoring workshops for classical schools and co-ops that seek to train their teachers in the fundamentals of dialectic- and rhetoric-stage pedagogy. In 2021, she was honored to become a Bluestocking in Residence through the Society For Women of Letters.

This course is offered separately for transferable graduate credits through a partnership with the Templeton Honors College. When you are enrolled with Templeton, you will be assigned a professor with additional readings and course work beyond the video lecture content here, and you will complete your work within their university’s learning management system.