What is the value of the arts in vulnerable worlds? Has this value changed over time? Can the arts of the past still speak to our present vulnerabilities? This course explores the aesthetics of vulnerability from a historical perspective, focusing on our present relationship to medieval worlds. Relying on a broad understanding of “art” and “vulnerability,” we will consider the history of art’s unique capacities to soothe or unsettle us in times of extreme crisis – whether by constructing alternative narratives of resiliency or escape, meditating on experiences of physical and emotional fragility, exposing hidden inequities that target the most vulnerable, or cultivating cultures of care. Class resources will strive to reflect the diversity and complexity of the medieval in a global context through multiple mediums and genres. Along the way, we’ll consider how engaging with the artistic vulnerabilities of another time and/or place can help expose desensitivities and thicken our cultural categories of the vulnerable. Students will be invited to share and reflect on their own aesthetic encounters with the precarious past and present through self-designed projects.