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Byrne, Aisling Nora. "The otherworlds of medieval insular literature." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610076.
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Meir, Amira. "Medieval Jewish interpretation of pentateuchal poetry." Thesis, McGill University, 1994. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=28842.
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This dissertation studies parts of six medieval Jewish Torah commentaries in order to examine how they related to what we call Pentateuchal poetry. It examines their general approaches to Bible interpretation and their treatments of all Pentateuchal poems. It focusses on qualities we associate with poetry--parallelism, structure, metaphor, and syntax--and explores the extent to which they treated poems differently from prose.The effort begins by defining Pentateuchal poetry and discussing a range of its presentations by various ancient writers. Subsequent chapters examine its treatment by Rabbi Saadia Gaon of Baghdad (882-942), Abraham Ibn Ezra of Spain (1089-1164), Samuel Ben Meir (1080-1160) and Joseph Bekhor Shor (12th century) of Northern France, David Kimhi of Provence (1160-1235), and Obadiah Sforno of Italy (1470-1550).
While all of these commentators wrote on the poetic passages, none differentiated systematically between Pentateuchal prose and poetry or treated them in substantially different ways. Samuel Ben Meir, Ibn Ezra, Bekhor Shor, and Kimhi did discuss some poetic features of these texts. The other two men were far less inclined to do so, but occasionally recognized some differences between prose and poetry and some phenomena unique to the latter.
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Turner, Kerry Lynn. "Pagan Nostalgia and Anti-Clerical Hostility in Medieval Irish Literature." Youngstown State University / OhioLINK, 2001. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ysu1008344167.
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Neidorf, Leonard. "The Origins of Beowulf: Studies in Textual Criticism and Literary History." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11366.
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Beowulf is preserved in a single manuscript written out around the year 1000, but there are many reasons to believe that the poem was composed several centuries before this particular act of manual reproduction. Most significantly, the meter of Beowulf reveals that the poet regularly observed distinctions of etymological length that became phonologically indistinct before 725 in Mercia. This dissertation gauges the explanatory power of the hypothesis that Beowulf was composed about three centuries before the production of the extant manuscript. The following studies test the hypothesis of archaic composition by determining whether it is able to accommodate independent forms of evidence drawn from the fields of linguistics, textual criticism, and literary history.
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Grange, Huw Robert. "Sublime and abject bodies : saints and monsters in late medieval French and Occitan hagiography." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.607654.
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Gornall, Alastair Malcolm. "Buddhism and grammar : the scholarly cultivation of Pāli in Medieval Laṅkā." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.608160.
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Thomson, David (David Ker). "The language of loss : reading medieval mystical literature." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=59912.
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One of the unfortunate corollaries of poststructuralist theorizing about literary texts has been the equation of a skepticism concerning language with a skepticism concerning meaning. The menace of unrestrained relativism has tended to polarize the critical community into proponents of a 'logo-diffuse' onto-epistemology and proponents of a 'logo-centric' one, and critical practice has followed this lead. The critic who attempts to situate literature within the parameters of such a debate is likely to fail unless he or she appeals to a much more extensive discourse, one which antedates the provincial contours of the current discussion. Medieval mysticism is a significant entry in the lineage of influence which comprises the western tradition. This thesis looks at the apophatic or negative strategies of mystical texts in order to locate meaning in the interplay of negation and affirmation with which they are concerned.
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Brooks, Kathryn L. "Anticlerical Sentiment in Castilian and Galician-Portuguese Medieval Literature." PDXScholar, 1996. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/5084.
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Clerical sexual incontinence was a prevalent satirical theme during the Middle Ages manifested by anticlerical sentiment towards reprobate clergymen and the laws that they disobeyed. This satirical genre of literature targeted not only the cleric of a small town, but bishops and cardinals who were also abusers of canon law. The anticlerical theme originated in Western Europe in the time of Constantine when early Christianity was competing with many religions for dominance. In the fourth century, Constantine, through the Edict of Milan, granted religious tolerance to all, thus allowing Christianity to become a major religion. Clerical celibacy originated from the writings of early church fathers such as Augustine of Hippo, Origen, and Tertullian, who determined that celibacy provided greater spiritual access to God. Early patristic church fathers supported the ideal of sexual celibacy for Christians in order to spiritually overcome the other religions. In the fourth century A.D., the church demanded that the clerics remain celibate even though they were married. By the twelfth century, canonical laws demanded that clerics not marry and remain celibate. These laws initiated an extreme sexual repression of clerics who began to sexually seek women, refusing them absolution for their sins if they refused the clerics' sexual advances. The purpose of this thesis is to establish that the corrupt clerics victimized the laity, who, although fearing for their salvation, produced satirical poetry expressing their anticlerical sentiment. This thesis also will present literature that discusses the pros and cons of clerical concubinage. There are three different forms of articulation in this thesis. The first is didactic and teaches the reader by demonstrating literature that encouraged clerical celibacy. The second illustration is satirical poems with the seven deadly sins as a recurrent theme. These poems are divided into two groups: the first is the poems written by the nobility, and the second is the popular anonymous poems, sung to music for peasant entertainment. The third articulation is the proponents of clerical concubinage. This poetry reflects the human side of companionship and need during a tumultuous time when people banded together in order to survive.
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Charlier, Marie-Madeleine. "La lettre de rémission : un problème d'intertextualité." Thesis, McGill University, 1985. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=63304.
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Djordjevic, Ivana. "Mapping medieval translation : methodological problems and a case study." Thesis, McGill University, 2002. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=82856.
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The extent to which translation moulded Middle English romance as an emerging genre remains largely unexamined. In this dissertation I identify the principal methodological difficulties that have prevented scholars from giving due attention to this problem, and offer a case study in which I look at how translational procedures shaped the romance of Sir Beves of Hampton, a translation of the Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone .Having outlined the practical difficulties posed by the intricate textual tradition of Boeve and Beves, the multilingualism of medieval England, and the scarcity of concrete evidence regarding the audience for Middle English romance, I focus on methodological issues: the inability of equivalence-based definitions of translation to accommodate medieval translation practice, the futility of attempts to demarcate translation from adaptation, and the difficulty of integrating different textual levels in the study of translations.
In the first two analytical chapters of the dissertation I concentrate on those aspects of Beves that can best highlight the importance of translation processes in the constitution of the genre. I begin by examining the way in which the translator dealt with the most important translational constraints, some of which, like language, were beyond his control, while others, such as versification, were partly self-imposed. I then proceed to study the workings of the so-called laws of translation (explicitation, simplification, and repertorization) in the process whereby Boeve became Beves. The analyses carried out in these two chapters allow me to contest the received opinion according to which the author of Beves treated his original very freely. I show that, on the contrary, the distinctive features of the Middle English text result from a constant productive tension between source and target.
My study ends with an analysis of what happens when the translator's impulse to be faithful to his source is frustrated by the inaccessibility of the socio-historical context of the original. I examine the most closely translated sections of the poem to show how unrecognized topical references are flattened into literary cliches, which bring into the text their own generic connotations and disassemble some of the carefully constructed thematic parallels and analogies of the Anglo-Norman romance.
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Stevenson, Harald Edward. "The French and neo-Latin epigram (1530-1560)." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.648873.
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Sawyer, Daniel. "Codicological evidence of reading in late medieval England, with particular reference to practical pastoral verse." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2016. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8c21053f-e347-4349-9cc4-b1fa0229e95a.
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This study advances and adds detail to our history of the reading of verse in England c.1350-1500. Scholarship has established major twelfth- and thirteenth-century changes in reading, and linked these changes to manuscripts containing the modern Middle English verse canon. Historians of early modern reading have also argued for distinctive changes in their own period. But the examination of reading between these two clusters of change has been limited. This study therefore asks how later medieval Middle English verse was read. The surviving copies of The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae, two hugely successful religious instructional poems, form the primary body of evidence. This body is augmented by reference to hundreds of other manuscripts containing Middle English verse. Together, these can reveal much about what was normal and abnormal in reading. They are also an important part of the context for the reading of more canonical Middle English verse. Manuscript studies often proceeds through case studies of individual books and unusual evidence such as marginalia. This thesis turns to codicology to understand more widespread evidence for reading, combining qualitative case studies with quantitative techniques borrowed and developed from continental scholarship. The first chapter examines evidence of provenance, revealing that both The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae were read by an impressive range of people and remained current into the sixteenth century. The second chapter considers the navigational aids used in copies of both poems. Reading in this period has been characterised as 'discontinuous', but it could be discontinuous in diverse ways, and readers also read continuously. The third chapter is a large-scale study of books' size and shape, showing how these features can reveal books' reading histories, sometimes in counterintuitive ways. The fourth chapter contends that readers in this period attended closely to rhyme and probably read for balanced rhyme structures. The fifth chapter uncovers the ways in which these poems were rewritten for new readers and investigates the composition of the Southern Recension of The Prick of Conscience, arguing that this new text was partly a formalist intervention. The conclusion summarises the new 'baseline' history of the reading of Middle English verse which is offered here, and gestures towards implications for our reading of the Middle English poems which are canonical today.
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Chang, Na. "The East and the West in the travel writings of the late medieval East and West." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708975.
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Ward, Jessica D. "Conjugal Rights in Flux in Medieval Poetry." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2014. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500176/.
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This study explores how four medieval poems—the Junius manuscript’s Genesis B and Christ and Satan and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Parliament of Fowls—engage with medieval conjugal rights through their depictions of agentive female protagonists. Although many laws at this time sought to suppress the rights of women, especially those of wives’, both pre- and post-conquest poets illustrate women who act as subjects, exercising legal rights. Medieval canon and common law supported a certain amount of female agency in marriage but was not consistent in its understanding of what that was. By considering the shifts in law from Anglo-Saxon and fourteenth century England in relation to wives’ rights and female consent, my project asserts that the authors of Genesis B and Christ and Satan and the late-medieval poet Chaucer position their heroines to defend legislation that supports female agency in matters of marriage. The Anglo-Saxon authors do so by conceiving of Eve’s role in the Fall and harrowing of hell as similar to the legal role of a forespeca. Through Eve’s mimesis of Satan’s rhetoric, she is able to reveal an alternate way of conceiving of the law as merciful instead of legalistic. Chaucer also engages with a woman’s position in society under the law through his representation of Criseyde’s role in her courtship with Troilus in his epic romance, Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer disrupts his audiences’ expectations by placing Criseyde as the more agentive party in her courtship with Troilus and shows that women might hope to the most authority in marriage by withholding their consent. In his last dream vision, The Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer engages again with the importance of female consent in marriage but takes his interrogation of conjugal rights a step further by imagining an alternate legal system through Nature, a female authority who gives equal consideration to all classes and genders.
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Mair, Olivia. "Merchants and mercantile culture in later medieval Italian and English literature." University of Western Australia. English, Communication and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2006. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2006.0088.
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[Truncated abstract] The later medieval Western European economy was shaped by a marked increase in commerce and rapid urbanisation. The commercialisation of later medieval society is the background to this research, whose focus is the ways in which later medieval Italian and English literature registers and responds to the expanding marketplace and the rise of an urban mercantile class. What began as an investigation of the representation of merchants and business in a selection of this literature has become an attempt to address broader questions about the later medieval economy in relation to literary and artistic production. This study is therefore concerned not just with merchants and their activities in literature, but also the way economic developments are manifested in narrative. Issues such as the moral position and social function of the merchant are addressed, alongside bigger economic issues such as value and exchange in literature, and to some extent, the position of the writer and artist in a commercialised economy. The study is primarily literary, but it adopts a cross-disciplinary method, drawing on economic and social history, literary criticism, art history and sociology. It begins with an assessment of the broader socio-economic context, focusing on ecclesiastical and social responses to the growth of … This chapter discusses the thirteenth-century Floris and Blauncheflur (c. 1250), and the late fourteenth-century Sir Amadace, Sir Launfal, Octavian and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in relation to the commercialised economy and with reference to late medieval thought concerning value, exchange and the role and function of merchants. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1380s) is the subject of the third and final chapter, “Narrative and Economics in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales”. Chaucer treats commerce and merchants with a complexity very close to Boccaccio’s approach to commerce. Both writers are acutely aware of the corruption to which merchants are susceptible, and of the many accusations levelled at merchants and their activities, but they do not necessarily perpetuate them. Rather than discussing exclusively the tales that deal extensively with merchants and commerce, or that told by the Merchantpilgrim, this discussion of the Canterbury Tales focuses on the Knight’s Tale, the Man of Law’s Tale and the Shipman’s Tale and the way they relate to broader ideas about the exchange and the production of narrative in the Canterbury Tales as a whole.
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Upton, Christopher A. "Studies in Scottish Latin." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1986. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/2734.
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This thesis examines certain aspects of Scottish Latin, particularly in the period 1580-1637. The first chapter chronicles the endeavours of John Scot of Scotstarvet to compile an anthology of Scottish Latin poetry, based on the unpublished letters to Scot in the NLS. Both the letters and contemporary verse indicate that the project was under way twenty years before the Delitiae was printed and that John Leech was an important influence. Leech's letters to Scot highlight Scot's editorial reticence, confirmed by the alterations in Scotstarvet's own verse. The final product was more a reflection of the taste and ethos of the early 1620s, after which Scot apparently ceased to collect material. The second chapter documents the attempts to impose a national grammar upon the schools, akin to the Lily-Colet grammar in England. Attempts to provide a radical alternative to Despauter, firstly by a committee and later by Alexander Hume, were inhibited by the inherent conservatism of teaching establishments. The most successful of the new grammars, those by Wedderburn and the Dunbar Rudiments, remained as general introductions to Despauter. Evidence for the composition of Latin verse in schools and universities, both statutory and manuscript, is assessed in the third chapter. Active involvement in the practice by local authorities influenced the range and extent of verse being written after 1600. The poetry of David Wedderburn of Aberdeen, promoted by the town council, reflects that influence. The importance of teaching methods upon a poet's future development is most clearly seen in the verse of David Hume, discussed in the fourth chapter. Hume continually re-works and re-evaluates the themes of his adolescent verse, measuring them against the achievements of James VI, whose birth he had earlier celebrated. The thesis concludes with a check-list of Scots whose Latin verse was printed before 1640.
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Stoll, Daniel. "The Aesthetics of Storytelling and Literary Criticism as Mythological Ritual: The Myth of the Human Tragic Hero, Intertextual Comparisons Between the Heroes and Monsters of Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Exodus." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2020. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/577.
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For thousands of years, people have been hearing, reading, and interpreting stories and myths in light of their own experience. To read a work by a different author living in a different era and setting, people tend to imagine works of literature to be something they are not. To avoid this fateful tendency, I hope to elucidate what it means to read a work of literature and interpret it: love it to the point of wanting to foremost discuss its excellence of being a piece of art. Rather than this being a defense, I would rather call it a musing, an examination on two texts that I adore: Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Exodus
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Taylor, Laura Anne. "The representation of land and landownership in medieval Icelandic texts." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9057797d-81bd-4d28-a438-4e4d5ee000c0.
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This thesis investigates the representation of land and landownership in medieval Icelandic texts. I shall demonstrate that there is scant homogeneity in this representation; the variation between different narratives is startling and unusual. I seek to categorise this variability by identifying the lack of a secure tradition surrounding land and landownership, and exploring the possibilities open to the saga author to use land practices and myths as literary devices or to glorify the past. I also examine variability caused by the differences in the realm of 'actual' experience. I shall explore a range of narratives, from stories of the initial settlement of Iceland, to issues of inheritance, to conveyance and to dispute over territory. The last chapter takes a flip-side view of landownership to consider the representation of the landless of family saga narrative. The texts which I shall examine are the Íslendingasögur, Landnádmabók and Íslendingabók. Throughout the thesis I also make reference to Grágás for illumination and comparison. In the first and second chapters I also include archaeological evidence for discussion.
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Gow, Andrew Colin. "The Red Jews: Apocalypticism and antisemitism in medieval and early modern Germany." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186270.
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The Red Jews are a legendary people; this is their history. From the late thirteenth to the late sixteenth century, vernacular German texts depicted the Red Jews, a conflation of the Biblical ten lost tribes of Israel and Gog and Magog, as a savage and unnaturally foul nation, who are enclosed in the 'Caspian Mountains', where they had been walled up by Alexander the Great. At the end of time, they will break out and serve the Antichrist, causing great destruction and suffering in the world. The hostile identification (c. 1165) of Jews with the apocalyptic destroyers of Ezekiel 38-39 and Revelation 20 expresses a new and virulent antisemitism that was integrated into the powerful apocalyptic traditions of Christianity. None of the few scholars who have noticed the Red Jews in medieval and early modern vernacular texts has sought out, collected and examined the complete body of medieval and early-modern sources that feature the Red Jews. This study provides a long-term analysis of the intimate connections between antisemitism and apocalypticism via a forgotten and submerged piece of German 'medievalia', the Red Jews. The legend gradually dissipated. Until the beginning of the seventeenth century it was a medieval lens through which Germans saw events relating to the Turkish threat in the East; after that time, the Red Jews disappeared from European texts.
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Lucey-Roper, Michelle M. "The Visio Baronti in its early medieval context." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2000. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:955edffb-dab7-4cb7-8810-6e719b02231f.
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The focus of this thesis is the Visio Baronti (VB), an account of a seventh-century monk's journey to the other world. This text serves as a metaphoric fulcrum to support a more extensive study of early medieval conceptions of the other world and the historical context in which visionary accounts were produced. Chapter 1 contains an introduction to ideas of the other world, a survey of types of visionary experiences, their uses, imitations and historiographical responses to them. Chapter 2 focuses on medieval and modern responses to visions. This chapter includes a survey of the terminology for dreams and visions found in theoretical writings, compares dream theory with otherworld visions and identifies medieval methods of determining the validity of a visionary experience. Chapter 3 investigates the manuscript tradition of the VB, in order to illuminate medieval receptions and treatments of this text. Because the text appears unusual for the seventh century, chapter 4 provides an analysis of the grounds for dating the VB to the seventh century, while chapter 5 treats the VB in its seventh-century monastic context and assesses what influences shaped this text. Chapter 6 compares Barontus's vision with ninth-century visions and other Carolingian writings to consider Carolingian interest in the VB in light of their contributions to the genre. Chapter 7 examines the artistic response to this text through an examination of the illustrations which accompany the text in the ninth-century St Petersburg manuscript. A brief conclusion to this study follows.
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Dearnley, Elizabeth Claire. "French-English translation 1189-c.1450, with special reference to translators and their prologues." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609530.
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Machado-Matheson, Anna-Maria. "Madness as penance in medieval Gaelic sources : a study of biblical and hagiographical influences on the depiction of Suibne, Lailoken and Mór of Munster." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.609646.
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Wong, Alexander Tsiong. "Aspects of the kiss-poem 1450-1700 : the neo-Latin basium genre and its influence on early modern British verse." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.708782.
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Walther, James T. "Imagining The Reader: Vernacular Representation and Specialized Vocabulary in Medieval English Literature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2592/.
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William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman was probably the first medieval English poem to achieve a national audience because Langland chose to write in the vernacular and he used the specialized vocabularies of his readership to open the poem to them. During the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, writers began using the vernacular in an attempt to allow all English people access to their texts. They did so consciously, indicating their intent in prologues and envois when they formally address readers. Some writers, like Langland and the author of Mankind, actually use representatives of the rural classes as primary characters who exhibit the beliefs and lives of the rural population. Anne Middleton's distinction between public-the readership an author imagined-and audience-the readership a work achieved-allows modern critics to discuss both public and audience and try to determine how the two differed. While the public is always only a presumption, the language in which an author writes and the cultural events depicted by the literature can provide a more plausible estimate of the public. The vernacular allowed authors like Gower, Chaucer, the author of Mankind, and Langland to use the specialized vocabularies of the legal and rural communities to discuss societal problems. They also use representatives of the communities to further open the texts to a vernacular public. These open texts provide some representation for the rural and common people's ideas about the other classes to be heard. Langland in particular uses the specialized vocabularies and representative characters to establish both the faults of all English people and a common guide they can follow to seek moral lives through Truth. His rural character, Piers the Plowman, allows rural readers to identify with the messages in the text while showing upper class and educated readers that they too can emulate a rural character who sets a moral standard.
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Burgoyne, Lynda. "Structures du théâtre mediéval : la Vie de Mgr. Sainct Loys." Thesis, McGill University, 1985. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=63307.
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Elia, Catherine Ann. "Medieval Christocentric Imagery in Selected Novels by Georges Bernanos." PDXScholar, 1995. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/5024.
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In the fictional world of the twentieth century author, Georges Bernanos, a medieval spirituality is reflected through Christocentric imagery. This study highlights the Christocentric focus of medieval spirituality found in three bernanosian characters: Donissan in Sous le Soleil de Satan, Chantal in La Joie, and le cure d'Ambricourt in Journal d'un cure de campagne. Two medieval images, the Mirror and the Way, provided a backdrop for considering common thematic characteristics. This study is divided into two parts. Part One comprises two chapters which present background for textual analysis in Bernanos' three novels. Chapter one explores formative elements in medieval spirituality. These include: descriptions of the medieval mindset, clerical and ecclesial influences, devotional trends related to themes of Christocentric imitation, edification images, specifically, the Mirror and the Way, and chivalry. Chapter two presents formative elements in Bernanos' spirituality. Familial, clerical and ecclesial influences of his childhood contributed to his Christocentric spirituality. Biographical descriptions of Bernanos' adolescent and adult years reveal similarities of his lived experience to medieval themes of pilgrimage, chivalry and imitation. In Part Two, Donissan, Chantal and le cure are considered in the context of medieval trends to imitate Christ. Images of the Way and the Mirror emerge in the four chapters of this section. In chapter three, a textual analysis is presented which juxtaposes virtuous qualities of each main character to the virtues of the medieval devotion to the Infancy. In chapters four and five, the characters are described in relation to another major devotional trend of medieval times: the Passion. Chapter four considers the bernanosian saints as imitators of Jesus' agony while chapter five addresses their imitation of his Way of the cross. In both chapters, imagery related to medieval Christ-like imitation is identified. Chapter six highlights themes of death and resurrection, the culminating steps of the medieval journey of imitation. Descriptions of Bernanos' saintly instruments of grace emphasize their adherence to the medieval pursuit towards wholeness. Dawn imagery and the theme of communion of saints are treated in this discussion of transformation. Endnotes accompany each of the six chapters.
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Grimes, Jodi Elisabeth. "Rhetorical Transformations of Trees in Medieval England: From Material Culture to Literary Representation." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2008. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc12130/.
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Literary texts of medieval England feature trees as essential to the individual and communal identity as it intersects with nature, and the compelling qualities and organic processes associated with trees help vernacular writers interrogate the changing nature of this character. The early depiction of trees demonstrates an intimacy with nature that wanes after the tenth-century monastic revival, when the representation of trees as living, physical entities shifts toward their portrayal as allegorical vehicles for the Church's didactic use. With the emergence of new social categories in the late Middle Ages, the rhetoric of trees moves beyond what it means to forge a Christian identity to consider the role of a ruler and his subjects, the relationship between humans and nature, and the place of women in society. Taking as its fundamental premise that people in wooded regions develop a deep-rooted connection to trees, this dissertation connects medieval culture and the physical world to consider the variety of ways in which Anglo-Saxon and post-Norman vernacular manuscripts depict trees. A personal identification with trees, a desire for harmony between society and the environment, and a sympathy for the work of trees lead to the narrator's transformation in the Dream of the Rood. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Junius 11 manuscript, illustrated in Genesis A, Genesis B, and manuscript images, scrutinizes the Anglo-Saxon Christian's relationship and responsibility to God in the aftermath of the Fall. As writers transform trees into allegories in works like Genesis B and Geoffrey Chaucer's Parson's Tale, the symbolic representations retain their spontaneous, organic processes to offer readers a visual picture of the Christian interior-the heart. Whereas the Parson's Tale promotes personal and radical change through a horticultural narrative starring the Tree of Penitence and Tree of Vices, Chaucer's Knight's Tale appraises the role of autonomous subjects in a tyrannical system. Forest laws of the post-Norman period engender a bitter polemic about the extent of royal power to appropriate nature, and the royal grove of the Knight's Tale exposes the limitations of monarchical structures and masculine control and shapes a pragmatic response to human failures.
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Avis, Robert John Roy. "The social mythology of medieval Icelandic literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2837907c-57c8-4438-8380-d5c8ba574efd.
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This thesis argues that the corpus of Old Norse-Icelandic literature which pertains to Iceland contains an intertextual narrative of the formation of Icelandic identity. An analysis of this narrative provides an opportunity to examine the relationship between literature and identity, as well as the potency of the artistic use of the idea of the past. The thesis identifies three salient narratives of communal action which inform the development of a discrete Icelandic identity, and which are examined in turn in the first three chapters of the thesis. The first is the landnám, the process of settlement itself; the second, the origin and evolution of the law; and the third, the assimilation and adaptation of Christianity. Although the roots of these narratives are doubtless historical, the thesis argues that their primary roles in the literature are as social myths, narratives whose literal truth- value is immaterial, but whose cultural symbolism is of overriding importance. The fourth chapter examines the depiction of the Icelander abroad, and uses the idiom of the relationship between þáttr (‘tale’) and surrounding text in the compilation of sagas of Norwegian kings Morkinskinna to consider the wider implications of the relationship between Icelandic and Norwegian identities. Finally, the thesis concludes with an analysis of the role of Sturlunga saga within this intertextual narrative, and its function as a set of narratives mediating between an identity grounded in social autonomy and one grounded in literature. The Íslendingasögur or ‘family sagas’ constitute the core of the thesis’s primary sources, for their subject-matter is focussed on the literary depiction of the Icelandic society under scrutiny. In order to demonstrate a continuity of engagement with ideas of identity across genres, a sample of other Icelandic texts are examined which depict Iceland or Icelanders, especially when in interaction with non-Icelandic characters or polities.
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Sholty, Janet Poindexter. "Into the Woods: Wilderness Imagery as Representation of Spiritual and Emotional Transition in Medieval Literature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1997. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc501240/.
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Wilderness landscape, a setting common in Romantic literature and painting, is generally overlooked in the art of the Middle Ages. While the medieval garden and the city are well mapped, the medieval wilderness remains relatively trackless. Yet the use of setting to represent interior experience may be traced back to the Neo-Platonic use of space and movement to define spiritual development. Separating themselves as far as possible from the material world, such writers as Origen and Plotinus avoided use of representational detail in their spatial models; however, both the visual artists and the authors who adopted the Neo-Platonic paradigm, elaborated their emotional spaces with the details of the classical locus amoenus and of the exegetical desert, while retaining the philosophical concern with spiritual transition. Analysis of wilderness as an image for spiritual and emotional transition in medieval literature and art relates the texts to an iconographic tradition which, along with motifs of city and garden, provides a spatial representation of interior progress, as the medieval dialectic process provides a paradigm for intellectual resolution. Such an analysis relates the motif to the core of medieval intellectual experience, and further suggests significant connections between medieval and modern narratives in regard to the representation of interior experience. The Divine Comedy and related Continental texts employ both classical and exegetical sources in the representation of psychological transition and spiritual conversion. Similar techniques are also apparent in English texts such as Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon elegies, in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, and Troilus and Criseyde, and in the northern English The Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. These literary texts, further, include both ideas and techniques which are analogous to those of visual arts, where frescos and altarpieces show the wilderness as metaphor for transition, and where manuscript illuminations relate this visual concept to texts. Thus, the wilderness as a landscape of personal crisis becomes in the Middle Ages a significant part of the representation of interior experience in painting and in literature.
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Young-Studer, Noémie. "La chanson d'Yde et Olive: A Parable of a Medieval Self-Made Man." PDXScholar, 2003. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/4668.
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La chanson d'Yde et Olive, an early fourteenth-century epic poem from the Picard region, exemplifies the medieval custom of text renewal that seeks to adapt pagan materials to fit Christian doctrine. Largely based on the plot of the Ovidian fable Iphis and Ianthe from The Metamorphoses, its main character Yde undergoes a metaphorical transformation from a woman into a man. Moreover, much like the Ovide moralisé, a Christianized adaptation of the Latin original, Yde et Olive's message can be understood as a Christian parable for the purging of the sinful soul. To set up the poem's didactic message, the poet carefully infuses the story with contemporary social concerns, such as the theme of incest and gender disruption, both potentially offensive forces to the medieval social structure. In the backdrop of these threats to society, the heroine's overcoming of her struggles becomes all the more meaningful, leading to a clear moral message to the reader. While being a hybrid in genre and structure, the poem shows many borrowings from Christian hagiography, especially from the later, more romance-influenced versions of the Vitae of female transvestite saints. In these narratives, the heroine's spiritual development is typically portrayed in terms of "becoming male," which can also be understood as an erasure of sexual difference to approach God in a Neoplatonic sense. Moreover, the development of Yde's own hybrid state leading to the climax of revealing her new sex exemplifies medieval literary criticism, elaborating on the central theme of uncovering truth by exposing the hidden gem beneath the rough surface.
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Desrochers, Arnald. "Los cruces genéricos en las cantigas gallego-portuguesas medievales." Thesis, McGill University, 1990. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=59627.
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The cantigas de amor, de amigo, de escarnio, and de maldecir are poetic compositions written between 1200 and 1350 which form a literary school commonly referred to as Galician-Portuguese. The troubadours who refine these compositions do not limit themselves to composing cantigas of only one genre. They write cantigas of all types. For thematic and formal purposes, the common practice is to divide the cantigas into four genres. These divisions are not always very clear.Because they were in touch with all sorts of cantigas, the poets included in their poems characteristics which blended from one genre to another. This may or may not have been done intentionally. Critics later studied these cantigas. They found that cantigas of one genre shared peculiarities common to cantigas of other genres, but they did not explore further into this trait. This study analyzes characteristics found commonly in one genre of cantiga and, as well, by placing together those cantigas with related attributes, it establishes the overlapping that takes place between the cantigas of different genres.
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Ólafsson, Davíð. "Wordmongers : post-medieval scribal culture and the case of Sighvatur Grímsson." Thesis, St Andrews, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/770.
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Ogden, Jenna Noelle. "The Leprous Christ and the Christ-like Leper: The Leprous Body as an Intermediary to the Body of Christ in Late Medieval Art and Society." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1305075738.
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McNamara, Rebecca Fields. "Code-switching in medieval England : register variety in the literature of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk and Thomas Hoccleve." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669980.
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Tur, Alexandre. "Hora introitus solis in Arietem : Les prédictions astrologiques annuelles latines dans l’Europe du XVe siècle (1405–1484)." Thesis, Orléans, 2018. http://www.theses.fr/2018ORLE1163/document.
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Les prédictions astrologiques annuelles constituent un genre littéraire cohérent qui suscite deplus en plus d’intérêt de la part des historiens du Moyen Âge et de la première modernité. Cettethèse étudie plus particulièrement leur généralisation dans l’Europe latine entre 1405 et 1484,plusieurs siècles après les premières mentions dans les sources théoriques. Une première partieexplore la dialectique interne de ces « jugements », et en particulier les méthodes astrologiques qui,rigoureusement appliquées, soutiennent la prétention scientifique de leurs auteurs. Ceux-ci, leurmilieu social et plus généralement le contexte de production de ces prédictions font l’objet d’unedeuxième partie. Une troisième examine la réception contemporaine et la transmission jusqu’à nosjours de textes pourtant promis à une existence éphémère. Cette étude est complétée et étayée parun catalogue systématique de 111 prédictions manuscrites et 84 incunables rédigées en latin etconservées dans les collections publiques, et des 64 astrologues identifiés comme leurs auteurs.Enfin, les trois prédictions annuelles connues pour 1405, à la fois singulières et caractéristiques,font l’objet d’une édition critique commentée et traduite en françaisAstrological annual predictions form a consistent literary genre. In recent years, interest in thesematerials among Middle Ages and Early Modern Era historians has been increasing. This thesisspecially adresses the spreading of this kind of predictions in Latin-speaking Europe between1405 and 1484, several centuries after they are firstly mentioned in theoretical sources. Our firstpart explores the internal dialectics of these prognostications, and in particular the strictly-followedmethods of astrological calculation provided as support to the authors’ scientific pretensions. Thegeneral context of production, and the social background of these authors, form a second part ofthe thesis. The third part considers the contemporary reception of these astrological predictions,as well as their unlikely transmission until our days in spite of the genre’s ephemeral nature. Acomprehensive catalogue of the 111 handwritten and 84 incunable latin prognostications preservedin public collections, as well as the 64 astrologers potentially identified as their authors, completethis study. Finally, we offer a critical edition, with French translation and commentary, of the threeknown predictions for year 1405 which, in spite of their individual features, constitute model samplesof the genre
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Sido, Anna E. "Making History: How Art Museums in the French Revolution Crafted a National Identity, 1789-1799." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2015. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/663.
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This paper compares two art museums, both created during the French Revolution, that fostered national unity by promoting a cultural identity. By analyzing the use of preexisting architecture from the ancien régime, innovative displays of art and redefinitions of the museum visitor as an Enlightened citizen, this thesis explores the application of eighteenth-century philosophy to the formation of two museums. The first is the Musée Central des Arts in the Louvre and the second is the Musée des Monuments Français, both housed in buildings taken over by the Revolutionary government and present the seized property of the royal family and Catholic Church. Created in a violent and unstable political climate, these museums were an effective means of presenting the First Republic as a guardian of national property and protector of French identity.
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Murray, Kylie Marie. "Dream and vision in Scotland, c.1375-1500." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669934.
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Applauso, Nicolino. "Curses and laughter: The ethics of political invective in the comic poetry of high and late medieval Italy." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10874.
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xiv, 479 p. : ill. (some col.) A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.My dissertation examines the ethical engagement of political invective poetry in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy. Modern criticism tends to treat medieval invective as a playfully subversive but marginal poetic game with minimal ethical weight. Instead, I aim to restore these poetic productions to their original context: the history, law, and custom of Tuscan cities. This contexts allows me to explore how humor and fury, in the denunciation of political enemies, interact to establish not a game but an ethics of invective. I treat ethics as both theoretical and practical, referring to Aristotle, Cicero, and Brunetto Latini, and define ethics as the pursuit of the common good in a defined community. Chapter I introduces the corpus, its historical and cultural background, its critical reception, and my approach. Chapter II discusses medieval invective in Tuscany and surveys the cultural practice of invective writing. Chapter III approaches invectives written by Rustico Filippi during the Guelph and Ghibelline wars. Chapter IV explores invectives by Cecco Angiolieri set in Siena, which polemicize with the Sienese government and citizenry. Chapter V examines invectives in Dante's Commedia (Inf. 19, Purg. 6, and Par. 27), focusing on his unexpected humor and his critique of the papacy, the empire, and Italian city governments. My conclusion examines the ethical function of slanderous wit in wartime invective. These poems balance verbal aggression with humor, claiming a role for laughter in creating dialogue within conflict. Far from a stylistic or ludic exercise, each invective shows the poet's activism and ethical engagement. This dissertation includes previously published material.
Committee in Charge: Regina Psaki, Chairperson, Romance Languages; Massimo Lollini, Member, Romance Languages; David Wacks, Member, Romance Languages; Steven Shankman, Outside Member, English
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Pfeiffer, Kerstin. "Passionate encounters : emotion in early English Biblical drama." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/3575.
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This thesis seeks to investigate the ways in which late medieval English drama produces and theorises emotions, in order to engage with the complex nexus of ideas about the links between sensation, emotion, and cognition in contemporary philosophical and theologial thought. It contributes to broader considerations of the cultural work that religious drama performed in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England in the context of the ongoing debates concerning its theological and social relevance. Drawing on recent research in the cognitive sciences and the history of emotion, this thesis conceives of dramatic performances as passionate encounters between actors and audiences – encounters which do not only re-create biblical history as a sensual reality, but in which emotion becomes attached to signs and bodies through theatrical means. It suggests that the attention paid to the processes through which audiences become emotionally invested in a play challenges assumptions about biblical drama of the English towns as a negligible contribution to philosophical and theological thinking in the vernacular. The analysis is conducted against the background of medieval and modern conceptions of emotions as ethically and morally relevant phenomena at the intersection between body and reason, which is outlined in chapter one. Each of the four main chapters presents a detailed examination of a series of pageants or plays drawn mainly from the Chester and York cycles and the Towneley and N-Town collections. These are supplemented, on occasion, with analysis of individual plays from fragmentary cycles and collections. The examinations undertaken are placed against the devotional and intellectual backdrop of late medieval England, in order to demonstrate how dramatic performances of biblical subject matter engage with some of the central issues in the wider debate about the human body, soul, and intellect. The second chapter focuses on the creation of living images on the stage, and specifically on didactically relevant stage images, in the Towneley Processus Prophetarum, the Chester Moses and the Law, and the N-Town Moses. The third chapter shifts the focus to the performance of the Passion in the N-Town second Passion play and the York Crucifixio Christi, concentrating on the potential effects of the perception of physical violence on audience response. The subject of chapter four is the emotional behaviours and expressions accorded to the Virgin Mary in the Towneley and N-Town Crucifixion scenes, and those of her precursors, the mothers of the innocents, in the Digby and Coventry plays of the Massacre of the Inncocents. In chapter five, the analysis finally turns to dramatisations of the Resurrection, examining its realisation on stage in the Chester Skinners’ play, as well as staged responses to the event by the apostles and the Marys in the N-Town The Announcement to the Three Marys; Peter and John at the Sepulchre and the Towneley Thomas of India. These four central chapters pave the way for a summary, in the conclusion, of the central problematic underpinning this thesis: how the evocation of emotion in an audience is linked to embodiment in theatrical performance, and tied to a certain awareness, on the part of playwrights, of the popular biblical drama’s potential as a locus of philosophical-theological debate.
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Schubert, Layla A. Olin 1975. "Material literature in Anglo-Saxon poetry." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10909.
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x, 208 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.The scattered instances depicting material literature in Anglo-Saxon poetry should be regarded as a group. This phenomenon occurs in Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, and The Husband's Message. Comparative examples of material literature can be found on the Ruthwell Cross and the Franks Casket. This study examines material literature in these three poems, comparing their depictions of material literature to actual examples. Poems depicting material literature bring the relationship between man and object into dramatic play, using the object's point of view to bear witness to the truth of distant or intensely personal events. Material literature is depicted in a love poem, The Husband's Message, when a prosopopoeic runestick vouches for the sincerity of its master, in the heroic epic Beowulf when an ancient, inscribed sword is the impetus to give an account of the biblical flood, and is also implied in the devotional poem The Dream of the Rood, as two crosses both pre-and-post dating the poem bear texts similar to portions of the poem. The study concludes by examining the relationship between material anxiety and the character of Weland in Beowulf, Deor, Alfred's Consolation of Philosophy, and Waldere A & B. Concern with materiality in Anglo-Saxon poetry manifests in myriad ways: prosopopoeic riddles, both heroic and devotional passages directly assailing the value of the material, personification of objects, and in depictions of material literature. This concern manifests as a material anxiety. Weland tames the material and twists and shapes it, re-affirming the supremacy of mankind in a material world.
Committee in charge: Martha Bayless, Chairperson, English; James Earl, Member, English; Daniel Wojcik, Member, English; Aletta Biersack, Outside Member, Anthropology
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Hacksley, Timothy Christopher. "A critical edition of the poems of Henry Vaux (c. 1559-1587) in MS. Folger Bd with STC 22957." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2008. http://eprints.ru.ac.za/1704/.
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Whelan, Fiona Elizabeth. "Morals and manners in twelfth-century England : 'Urbanus Magnus' and courtesy literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4ccb50b9-7e0e-49c8-b9c5-104dfefa3fea.
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This thesis investigates the twelfth-century Latin poem entitled Urbanus magnus or 'The Book of the Civilised Man', attributed to Daniel of Beccles. This is a poem dedicated to the cultivation of a civilised life, aimed primarily at clerics although its use extends to nobility, and specifically the noble householder. This thesis focuses on the text as a primary source for an understanding of social life in medieval England, and uses the content of the text to explore issues such as the medieval household, social hierarchy, the body, and food and diet. Urbanus magnus is commonly referred to as a 'courtesy text'. This thesis seeks to understand Urbanus magnus outside of that attribution, and to situate the text in the context of twelfth and thirteenth-century England. Thus far, scholarship of courtesy literature has focused on later texts such as thirteenth-century vernacular 'courtesy texts' or humanist works as exemplified by Erasmus's De civilitate morum puerilium. This scholarship looks back to the twelfth century and sees texts such as Urbanus magnus as 'early Latin courtesy texts'. This teleological view relegates such earlier texts to positions at the genesis of the genre and blindly assumes that they belong to the corpus of 'courtesy literature'. This neglects both their individual importance and their respective origins. This thesis examines Urbanus magnus as a didactic text which contains elements of 'courtesy literature', but also displays moral and ethical concerns. At the heart of the thesis is the question: should Urbanus magnus be considered as part of the genre of courtesy literature? This question does not have a simple answer, but this thesis shows that some elements and sections of Urbanus magnus do conform to the characteristics of courtesy literature. However, there are further sections that reflect other literary traditions. In addition to morals and ethics, Urbanus magus reflects other genres such as satire, and also reveals social issues in twelfth-century England such as the rise of anti-curiale sentiment and resentment of upward social mobility. This thesis provides an examination of Urbanus magnus through the most prevalent themes in the text. Firstly, it explores the dynamics of the medieval household, along with issues such as social mobility and hierarchy. Secondly, it focuses on the depiction of the body and bodily restraint, covering topics such as speech, bodily emissions, and sexual activity. Thirdly, it discusses food and diet, including table manners, food consumption, and dietary effects of foodstuffs. The penultimate chapter looks at the manuscript dissemination of the text to investigate the different uses which Urbanus magnus found in subsequent centuries. The delineation of Urbanus magnus as part of the genre of courtesy literature ignores the social, cultural, and literary impact on the creation of the text. In response, this thesis has two aims. The first is to minimise the notion of genre, and treat Urbanus magnus as a text in its own right, and as a product of the twelfth century. The second shows that Urbanus magnus reflects both continuity and change in society in England following the Norman Conquest.
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Baker, Anastasia Christine. "Anna of Denmark: Expressions of Autonomy and Agency as a Royal Wife and Mother." PDXScholar, 2012. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/713.
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Anna of Denmark (12 December 1574 - 2 March 1619), the wife of King James VI/I of Scotland, England, and Ireland, was an intelligent and interesting woman who has, up until recently, been largely ignored by history. It has only been within the past two decades that any in-depth analysis of Anna has been done, and most of that analysis has focused on Anna's work with the Stuart court masque. The intent of this thesis has been to expand upon current scholarship regarding Anna, as well as to synthesize the various facets of Anna's life in order to put together a more comprehensive understanding of who Anna was and the various ways in which she expressed personal agency and autonomy as a queen consort as opposed to a queen regnant, and how she used the roles of royal wife and mother to further her own goals and interests. The work is divided into an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction offers a brief analysis of the primary and secondary sources, and details how these sources were used within the broader scope of the paper. This introductory section also examines Anna's early life in Denmark, her wedding, and her initial journey to Scotland. The second chapter focuses on Anna's relationships with her husband and children, and particularly how Anna established a niche for herself within first the Scottish, and later the English courts. By studying these relationships it is possible to study the ways in which Anna, as a queen consort, was able to create a court presence for herself. Chapter three analyzes Anna's relationships with other courtiers and, more specifically, what these relationships tell modern scholars about how Anna was able to exercise political influence and power both directly and indirectly. Anna's interactions with her courtiers illustrate how well she understood not only human nature, but the nature of court culture and politics. The fourth chapter presents an in-depth study of Anna's masquing career, and looks at how Anna used the court masque to not only establish a female presence on the stage, but also to fashion a public image for herself. Anna used the Stuart court masque in a way that no one had previously: she used it to express her social and political opinions, and through the court masque Anna was able to portray both who she was and how she wanted to be perceived. The final chapter covers Anna's final days and her lasting impact on English history. Anna of Denmark deserves to be brought out of the shadows of history, and this thesis has attempted to do just that. She was a bright, engaging young woman who, unfortunately, has largely been overshadowed by her husband and children. By studying Anna's various roles as wife, mother, friend, benefactor, and patron, it has been possible to bring forth a much more complete understanding of who this queen consort was and why she is important to a broader understanding of early modern English history.
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Livermore, Christian. "Revenants from the Church to literature." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/7914.
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Factual accounts of revenants – the risen dead – seized the medieval imagination in the early eleventh century, and were recorded by serious historians and ecclesiastics as true. They then began to appear in secular imaginative literature and art, growing progressively more elaborate and frightening throughout the Middle Ages whilst retaining many of the religious overtones expressed overtly in the ecclesiastic tales. By the early modern and modern period, the tales were removed from any overt religious context and were told as purely imaginative literature. The academic half of this thesis explores the influence on the tales of the Christian doctrine of resurrection and the cult of the body of Christ and of the saints, then traces the migration of those tales into imaginative literature from the Middle Ages to the present. It identifies key motifs from the medieval chronicles and imaginative literature that continue to appear in modern stories, and explores the extent to which Christian eschatology altered perceptions of the dead and why, in an increasingly secular context, fascination with such tales continued into modern literature, what part fear of death played throughout this period, and how that fear was expressed, first in an ecclesiastical context, then in imaginative literature through horror stories. The creative half of my thesis is a literary fiction novel updating a medieval revenant tale, the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, to twenty-first century New England.
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Regetz, Timothy. "Lollardy and Eschatology: English Literature c. 1380-1430." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2018. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1404582/.
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In this dissertation, I examine the various ways in which medieval authors used the term "lollard" to mean something other than "Wycliffite." In the case of William Langland's Piers Plowman, I trace the usage of the lollard-trope through the C-text and link it to Langland's dependence on the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. Regarding Chaucer's Parson's Tale, I establish the orthodoxy of the tale's speaker by comparing his tale to contemporaneous texts of varying orthodoxy, and I link the Parson's being referred to as a "lollard" to the eschatological message of his tale. In the chapter on The Book of Margery Kempe, I examine that the overemphasis on Margery's potential Wycliffism causes everyone in The Book to overlook her heretical views on universal salvation. Finally, in comparing some of John Lydgate's minor poems with the macaronic sermons of Oxford, MS Bodley 649, I establish the orthodox character of late-medieval English anti-Wycliffism that these disparate works share. In all, this dissertation points up the eschatological character of the lollard-trope and looks at the various ends to which medieval authors deployed it.
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Farley, Elizabeth Marie. "The development of Marian doctrine as reflected in the commentaries on the wedding at Cana (John 2:1-5) by the Latin fathers and pastoral theologians of the Church from the fourth to the seventeenth century." IMRI - Marian Library / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=udmarian1430385116.
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Colwell, Tania Michelle. "Reading Mélusine : romance manuscripts and their audiences c.1380-c.1530." Phd thesis, Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/109692.
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This thesis explores the historical reception of the prose Roman de Melusine and the poetic
Roman de Parthenay from the twin perspectives of the romance manuscripts and their
audiences. The Melusine romances attained wide popularity in manuscript form from their
composition in the late fourteenth century until the early sixteenth century. By investigating
the patronage, presentation, and ownership of the romance manuscripts, I ask how and why
the works appealed to and retained their hold on later medieval imaginations? What cultural
values did the romances express or reflect and what meanings did they attain which might
have facilitated their circulation far beyond the boundaries of Poitou? In exploring these
questions, my study offers a nuanced historical appraisal of the place of the Melusine
romances in the cultural lives of late medieval Francophone audiences.
The Melusine romances are located in over thirty surviving manuscripts. Employing an
interdisciplinary approach, my research analyses the relationships between the themes
expressed in these manuscripts, and the historical concerns of the French and Flemish nobility
who constituted the romances’ primary audience. In addition to exploring and revising
conventional explanations for the patronage of the romances, I examine the textual,
paratextual, and decorative mouvance to which the romances were subject, and the intertextual
relationships created by the inclusion of the romances within compilation manuscripts. From
this analysis, I identify a series of themes which demonstrably intersected with the interests
and anxieties of noble reading communities among whom the manuscripts circulated. This
thesis thus complements and extends existing studies of manuscript decoration and the
historical reception of early editions of the prose Melusine romance which were enjoyed by a
cross-section of social groups from the 1470s onwards.
My research suggests that the Melusine romances attained a significant position in late
medieval noble culture for two interrelated reasons. First, the medium of the manuscript itself
offered a flexible format which accommodated the changing preferences of patrons and
audiences of the romances. Second, and paradoxically, Melusine manuscripts persistently
expressed a range of concepts and attitudes of enduring relevance to their noble audiences
with respect to: issues of dynastic prestige and the legitimacy of territorial tenure;
metaphysical and spiritual concerns about fate and salvation; political propaganda;
government; and education.
The value of my study lies in the insights it offers into the mentalites of the later medieval
nobility, a numerically small but influential social group, and the relationships between elite
audiences and their preferred forms of literate culture. This thesis extends scholarly
understandings of, and offers fresh hypotheses for the patronage of the Roman de Melusine
and the Roman de Parthenay respectively. Further, it contextualises its analysis of the
Melusine manuscripts and compilation contents in the light of historical events and concerns
confronting late medieval noble audiences. It thus demonstrates the importance of combining
literary and historical approaches when exploring the values and meanings attached to
historical literature. While historical and literary approaches each offer unique insights into
medieval understandings of a work, it is only by contextualising each set of findings produced
by the two modes of analysis against each other that a nuanced appreciation of a literary
work’s historical role and importance can be produced.
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Mehrmand, Sonia M. "Canonizing the Colosseum: Remembering, Manipulating, and Codifying Memory in the Eternal City." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2013. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/241.
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The study of social memory is not purely a historical or anthropological endeavor. Archaeology can provide a considerable amount of evidence about how and why people remembered. In this case study, the Colosseum will be studied in the broader sense of being a monument of damnatio memoriae and commemorative memory; the very act of building it can be seen as a form of “recutting” the landscape to fit the image Vespasian wanted to convey of his predecessor. The Colosseum will also be studied in an even larger historical context. This will involve analyzing the manner in which it was memorialized during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and by British visitors during the Victorian era. I will end the case study with an analysis of Benito Mussolini’s use of antiquity and the Colosseum to propagate Fascism.
Lastly, the concept of cultural heritage and the institutions that uphold it, particularly UNESCO, will be put into question. In illustrating the fluidity of interpretations of the past, in this case through material culture, I argue that the endeavor to codify them by establishing World Heritage sites is problematic because of their subjectivity to modern agendas. However, in order to understand changing attitudes and memories associated with a single monument, one must first explore the nature of social memory.
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Marianacci, Caitlyn D. "Old Masterpieces, New Mistress-pieces: Cindy Sherman's Reinterpretations of Renaissance Portraits of Women." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2016. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/840.
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This thesis examines a selection of eight photographs in the History Portraits series by American photographer, Cindy Sherman, produced from 1989 to 1990. The photographs are based on Renaissance paintings of biblical and secular women painted by old master artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and Raphael. Sherman focused on the female types of Biblical mother and femme fatale, as well as wives and models. These types are defined in their relation to men and are depicted by men. In Sherman’s reinterpretations of their portraits, she retells the stories of these women in ways that reaffirm their independence and power that have been shrouded in a history told and controlled by men. With herself as her model, she altered aspects of the images, using the technique of caricature for humor as well as critique. Sherman subverts the idealization of the Renaissance portraits of women by exaggerating features and eliminating aspects of the original portraits to reassert the women’s individuality.
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Jolin, Paula. "Epilepsy in medieval Islamic history." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape10/PQDD_0025/MQ50527.pdf.
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