Lectio Humana
Lectio Humana engages students in reading discussions on major works and authors that are cultural touchstones. Works explored include Catherine’s Dialogues, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s dramas.
“Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.” -T. S. Eliot
Sign Up Now for the Fall 2025 Reading Group!
Collegium Institute invites you to sign up for the Fall 2025 Reading Group, where we will be exploring John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Sessions will be facilitated by Joe Perez-Benzo.
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Previous Seminars
2024-25
So great is Shakespeare’s capacity to capture universal human experiences in language that Harold Bloom, the greatest literary critic of the last half century, advanced the claim that Shakespeare invented the human. Following Shakespeare, we asked what a piece of work is man: a giddy thing or a quintessence of dust? We examined Shakespeare’s thoughts on love, religion, politics, friendship, ambition, work, and leisure. And yes, we will pose the famous question—to be or not to be? We examined four of Shakespeare's masterpieces of history, tragedy, comedy, and romance: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest. Not only will we study Shakespeare on the page, we also experienced Shakespeare on the stage through a live showing of Much Ado About Nothing at the Lantern Theater Company in Philadelphia.
2023-24
Can you be happy amidst misery? If your possessions, your pleasures, your reputation, your friends, and your family all fail you, if they are all taken from you, what do you have left? For Boethius, these questions were not merely theoretical, but a dreadful reality. Stripped of power, pleasure, fame, riches, friends, and family, with a death sentence hanging over his head, Boethius sought refuge in the embrace of Lady Philosophy as recounted in a dazzling work of poetry and prose called the Consolation of Philosophy. But why seek consolation for concrete woes in the airy abstractions of philosophy? Boethius' answers to this pressing question deeply influenced the likes of Alfred the Great, Chaucer, Elizabeth I, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Dante. This semester we read through arguably the single most important work of philosophy from the Fall of Rome to the rise of Scholasticism, and we confronted the classic question of philosophy's purpose in our lives.