This mini-course will attempt to map out just what our cultural, social, and moral understanding of cowardice are. Is it about fearlessness or overcoming fear? Is the cowardice of routine social interaction the same phenomenon as cowardice in combat or in agonistic encounter? Cowardice is intimately connected with cultural understandings of masculinity. How is cowardice understood to apply to the actions or moral possibility of women? Is there any identifiable psychological experience of courage? Or is it the same as the psychological experience of cowardice? The subject is immense and we will hardly do it much justice. But we all must begin somewhere. Discussion will take off from the issues raised in the readings: These will be (subject to some last minute changes) cowardice dispositions before courts martial in the Vietnam and Korean war; brief selections from Herodotus, Aristotle’s Ethics, Thucydides; The Battle of Maldon, Hamlet, and selections from combat journals and memoirs of the American Civil War, the British Great War poets and memoirists, E.B. Sledge’s powerful memoir of the Pacific War and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.