SPS

101, Spring 2014, Final Exam Essay Questions

In the following pages you are going to see four image groups. Each image group is
composed of four images, and each image corresponds to one of the final four units
of SPS 101: Social Formations, Stratification and Inequalities; Political Organization
and Politics; Labor, Production and Commerce; Intellectual Production and Knowledge.
For each image set, two of which will appear in the exam, you are going to:
a) Pick one image, and hence one SPS unit, as the core of your essay
b) Discuss the major changes and transformations of the Early Modern world
(broadly defined here as the period from 1400 to 1800), based on the image &
the unit that you chose, BUT emphasizing the connections with the remaining
three units, based on the remaining three images.
c) In your essay you are required to refer to at least one primary or secondary
source from either Exchanges or SUCourse Readings to support your
argument(s). You do not need to quote the texts, but you should refer to their
arguments.
d) Since your essay is going to be about change, you are required to refer to
some of the continuities and changes between the Early Modern period and its
immediate past, the Middle Ages. For that, in each image set, one image is
going to be about the Middle Ages.

GOOD LUCK !!

Image Group I:

a) The frontispiece of Francis Bacons The Great Instauration, 1620, b) The diagram of an
eighteenth-century ship, c) Otto III Enthroned, Coronation Gospels of Otto III, Germany, ca.
997-1000, d) Luis de Mena, Las Castas (Escenas de Mestizaje; Mixing of the Races), 18th c.

Image Group II:

a) Plan of a medieval manor, b) Mechanical Model of the Cosmos, Machina mundi
artificialis, in Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum, 1596, c) The diagram of a
regulated slave ship, d) Frontispiece of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, 1651

Image Group III:

a) Adriaen van Ostade, Reading the News at the Weavers' Cottage, 1673, b) Pieter Bruegel,
Peasants Dance, 1568, c) Cleric, Knight and Workman, Li Livres dou Sant, France, late 13th
century, d) Fragment of a map produced in the workshop of Christopher Columbus, late
fifteenth century

Image Group IV:

a) Plan of an eighteenth-century plantation in the Caribbean, b) Heinrich Aldegrever, Hercules
and Hydra, 1550, c) Design for a Perpetual Motion Machine from the Handbook of Villard de
Honnecourt, ca. 1230, d) From: Theodor de Bry (after Hans Staden), Historia Americae, 1592.