Medieval Studies Commons^™

Reading The Readers : Analyses Of Shakespearean And Cervantine Characters As (Dys)Functional Readers., Erin Shannon O'Reilly

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes how the protagonists of Don Quixote and The Tempest perform the act of reading. It explores how the authors create interpretive communities within their works and bring them into conflict in order to foreground the dysfunctionality of particular types of reading. While functional readers are capable of reading among and beyond diverse interpretive communities, dysfunctional readers operate within a single community to the exclusion of other possible interpretations. Chapter One examines Cervantes’s creation of multiple interpretive communities within the first six chapters of Don Quixote, and how Don Quixote acts as dysfunctional reader through his inability …

A Sample Of Understudied Works In Aberdeen Ms 123, Bailey Ludwig

English Honors Papers

This project examines and transcribes various understudied texts from the University of Aberdeen’s MS 123 in order to create a more complete picture of this manuscript. Chapter one looks at the “Sultan Letters” and “List of Kings,” two fictional texts discussing politics, and their evocation of crusades and travel romance genre conventions. The second chapter looks at the intersection of poetic form, vernacularity, gender, and religion in the poem “Modyr of Maries III” and excerpts from the Golden Legend. Finally, the third chapter examines two medical texts, “Diet & Bloodletting” and “32 Perilous Days,” for their conventionality, vernacularity, and …

A Pilgrim’S Progress For The Digital, Post-Human(Ist) Age?: Social And Religious Allegory In Russell Banks’S Lost Memory Of Skin, David J. Buehrer Dr.

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

In Lost Memory of Skin (2011), his twelfth novel, Russell Banks continues his exploration of the dark underbelly of American society—in this instance, the moral wilderness of a group of convicted sex offenders exiled to living beneath a concrete causeway in the south Florida city of Calusa, a fictionalized Miami. Banks, who has long been “our premier chronicler of the doomed and forgotten American male” (Schulman 8), focuses in Lost on a twenty-two-year-old parolee referred to throughout only as “The Kid.” While guilty and duly convicted of propositioning an underage girl online for sex, The Kid is still presented in …

Realismo Y Exasperación: Un Estudio De Los Personajes Femeninos En La Pata De La Sota Y La Nona De Roberto Cossa, Mariana Pensa

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

En esta presentación analizamos las obras teatrales La pata de la sota (1967) y La Nona (1977), del dramaturgo argentino Roberto Cossa. Estos textos se constituyen en textos-faro del subsistema teatral del realismo reflexivo. El primero, uno que define la ortodoxia del universo realista, mientras que el segundo la supera, incorporando un universo muy cercano al absurdo y el sin sentido. Trabajando, entonces, desde las coordenadas del realismo y su evolución, nos focalizamos aquí en la relación madre-hija, para señalar cuáles y cómo son los cambios en la construcción de los personajes femeninos en el pasaje de una fase a …

Seccll Conference Program 2019, Seccll Conference

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

Conference Program 2019

“Glossing” The Text: Gendered Biblical Interpretation In Chaucer’S Canterbury Tales, Karen Knudson

Scholar Week 2016 - present

Not available.

Lesser-Known Virtues: How The Ordo Virtutum Reflects Hildegard Of Bingen’S Monastic Worldview, Nathan Dowell

Kansas State University Undergraduate Research Conference

The Ordo Virtutum, a twelfth-century musical drama by abbess Hildegard of Bingen, details a now-familiar theme: the spiritual battle between personified Virtues and the Devil over a human soul. Because this theme formed the basis for the later morality play genre, Hildegard is now considered to have written the first morality play—even though she lived three centuries before the genre became popular.

Like her work, Hildegard is also experiencing newfound prominence for predicting future trends. As a medieval musician, scientist, and abbess, Hildegard’s contributions to numerous fields are gaining increased attention. However, one consequence of this attention is that Hildegard’s …

Interview Of Kevin J. Harty, Ph.D., Kevin J. Harty Ph.D., Meghan Skiles

All Oral Histories

Dr. Kevin J. Harty was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1948. He grew up in Brooklyn until his family moved to Chicago when he was about twelve years old. His father worked for the telephone company, which spurred the family’s move to Chicago, and his mother stayed home and cared for the family. Dr. Harty attended high school in the suburbs of Chicago, graduating when he was fifteen and a half years old. Between high school and college, he worked for a year in a department store, and briefly considered going into the fashion industry. He attended Marquette University …

The Shapes Of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History, Eric Weiskott, Irina Dumitrescu

Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring newer ones such as object-oriented ontology and sound studies, these essays demonstrate how poetry responds to its intellectual, literary, and material contexts. The contributors propose to connect the small (syllables, words, and phrases) to the large (histories, emotions, faiths, secrets). In doing so, they attempt to work magic on the texts they …

Ballads Of The North, Medieval To Modern: Essays Inspired By Larry Syndergaard, Sandra Ballif Straubhaar, Richard Firth Green

Festschriften, Occasional Papers, and Lectures

This volume is intended as a belated but heartfelt thank-you and Gedenkschrift to the late Larry Syndergaard (1936-2015), long-time professor of English at Western Michigan University and Fellow of the Kommission für Volksdichtung (International Ballad Commission). Larry’s contributions down the decades to ballad studies--particularly Scandinavian and Anglophone--included dozens of papers and articles, as well as his supremely useful book, English Translations of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballads. As David Atkinson and Thomas A. McKean of the Kommission have written (May 2015): “Larry... was a sound scholar with a penetrating mind which he used to support, encourage and befriend others, rather …

Englands Happie Queene: Female Rulers In Early English History, Emily Benes

Honors Theses

This paper examines the historical records and later literature surrounding three early mythic and historical British queens: Albina, mythic founder of Albion; Cordelia, pre-Roman queen regnant in British legend; and Boudica, the British leader of a first-century CE rebellion against the Romans. My work focuses on who these queens were, what powers they were given, and the mythos around them. I examine when they appear in the historical record and when their stories are expanded upon, and how those stories were influenced by the political culture of England through the early seventeenth century. In particular, I examine English attitudes toward …

Weaponizing Ordinary Objects: Women, Masculine Performance, And The Anxieties Of Men In Medieval Iceland, Steven T. Dunn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis unravels the deeper meanings attributed to ordinary objects, such as clothing and food, in thirteenth-century Icelandic literature and legal records. I argue that women weaponized these ordinary objects to circumvent their social and legal disadvantages by performing acts that medieval Icelandic society deemed masculine. By comparing various literary sources, however, I show that medieval Icelandic society gradually redefined and questioned the acceptability of that behavior, especially during the thirteenth-century. This is particularly evident in the late thirteenth-century Njal’s Saga, wherein a woman named Hallgerd has been villainized for stealing cheese from a troublesome neighbor. If Hallgerd were a …

Bartered Bodies: Medieval Pilgrims And The Tissue Of Faith, George Greenia

George Greenia

In ‘The Bartered Body,’ George Greenia disentangles the complex desires and experiences of religious travellers of the High Middle Ages who knew the spiritual usefulness of their vulnerable flesh. The bodily remains of the saints housed in pilgrim shrines were not just remnants of a redeemed past, but open portals for spiritual exchange with the living body of the visiting pilgrim.

Foreword, George Greenia

George Greenia

The Spanish Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage rooted in the Medieval period and increasingly active today, has attracted a growing amount of both scholarly and popular attention. With its multiple points of departure in Spain and other European countries, its simultaneously secular and religious nature, and its international and transhistorical population of pilgrims, this particular pilgrimage naturally invites a wide range of intellectual inquiry and scholarly perspectives. This volume fills a gap in current pilgrimage studies, focusing on contemporary representations of the Camino de Santiago. Complementing existing studies of the Camino’s medieval origins, it situates the Camino as a modern …

Introduction, George Greenia

George Greenia

Georgiana Goddard King's seminal study, The Way of Saint James, is finally reissued. Completed in 1917, this three-volume masterpiece is a wide-ranging exploration of the history, literature, legends, and architecture of the Camino de Santiago. It is based on Professor King's "three years wanderings" on foot and by cart, mule, and other conveyance on the Spanish pilgrimage road, and on extensive academic research with particular emphasis on medieval art and architecture. Professor King was both a well-respected scholar and a keen observer of her surroundings. As a result, she has given us a fascinating, detailed description of both life and …

Bartered Bodies: Medieval Pilgrims And The Tissue Of Faith, George D. Greenia

George Greenia

In ‘The Bartered Body,’ George Greenia disentangles the complex desires and experiences of religious travellers of the High Middle Ages who knew the spiritual usefulness of their vulnerable flesh. The bodily remains of the saints housed in pilgrim shrines were not just remnants of a redeemed past, but open portals for spiritual exchange with the living body of the visiting pilgrim.

Pilgrimage And The American Myth, George Greenia

George Greenia

Exploring what does and what does not constitute pilgrimage, Redefining Pilgrimage draws together a wide variety of disciplines including politics, anthropology, history, religion and sociology. Leading contributors offer a broad range of case studies from a wide geographical area, exploring new ways of approaching pilgrimage beyond the classical religious model. Re-thinking the global phenomenon of pilgrimages in the 21st century, this book offers new perspectives to redefine pilgrimage.

The Tragicomedia As A Canonical Work, George Greenia

George Greenia

No abstract provided.

Santiago De Compostela, George Greenia

George Greenia

This collaborative literary history of Europe, the first yet attempted, unfolds through ten sequences of places linked by trade, travel, topography, language, pilgrimage, alliance, disease, and artistic exchange. The period covered, 1348-1418, provides deep context for understanding current developments in Europe, particularly as initiated by the destruction and disasters of World War II. We begin with the greatest of all European catastrophes: the 1348 bubonic plague, which killed one person in three. Literary cultures helped speed recovery from this unprecedented "ground zero" experience, providing solace, distraction, and new ideals to live by. Questions of where Europe begins and ends, then …

Bartered Bodies: Medieval Pilgrims And The Tissue Of Faith, George D. Greenia

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

In ‘The Bartered Body,’ George Greenia disentangles the complex desires and experiences of religious travellers of the High Middle Ages who knew the spiritual usefulness of their vulnerable flesh. The bodily remains of the saints housed in pilgrim shrines were not just remnants of a redeemed past, but open portals for spiritual exchange with the living body of the visiting pilgrim.