Medieval Studies Commons^™

Sacred And Profane Loves: The Renaissance Influence In C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces, Kevin Corr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

C.S. Lewis’ last novel, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, has often been regarded as his greatest work, but just as often as his most enigmatic work. The purpose of this thesis is to unveil much of the novel’s mystery by considering the impact Renaissance literature had in shaping the novel, most notably Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Although it is well-known that Lewis was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, current scholarship on Lewis has overlooked the Renaissance influence in the author’s work, which particularly plays a vital role in Till We Have Faces. …

Listening To An/Other Voice: Gender, Creativity, And The Divine In The Works Of Female Christian Mystics And Women Surrealists, Stephanie Garboski

Honors Theses

This thesis will compare two groups, Christian women mystics and women surrealists, by analyzing select works by Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Leonora Carrington, and Dorothea Tanning. This analysis will involve a comparative, theoretical approach that draws connections between the way in which both groups utilize varying literary and artistic forms, symbols, and polyglottery. I will utilize Bourdieu’s terms of cultural production as a framework in which to better understand how women of both fields are used for their creativity and supposed connection to an/other, which is the source of inspiration native to each field, God and the unconscious. …

Finding Lost & Found: Designer’S Notes From The Process Of Creating A Jewish Game For Learning, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article provides context for and examines aspects of the design process of a game for learning. Lost & Found (2017a, 2017b) is a tabletop-to-mobile game series designed to teach medieval religious legal systems, beginning with Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (1180), a cornerstone work of Jewish legal rabbinic literature. Through design narratives, the article demonstrates the complex design decisions faced by the team as they balance the needs of player engagement with learning goals. In the process the designers confront challenges in developing winstates and in working with complex resource management. The article provides insight into the pathways the team …

Introduction: Jewish Gamevironments – Exploring Understanding With Playful Systems, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

The study of Judaism, Jewish civilizationi, and games is currently comprised of projects of a rather small set of game scholars. A sample of our work is included in this issue.

Gavin Douglas's Aeneados: Caxton's English And 'Our Scottis Langage', Jacquelyn Hendricks

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses the Scots poet Gavin Douglas's translation of Virgil's Aeneid into Scots, and Douglas's treatment of his predecessor William Caxton's translation of Virgil into English, arguing that Douglas associates Caxton's English with a barbaric world of monsters and beasts, in contrast to Scots which is seen as expressing civilized classical values, and that Douglas's translation, by enhancing and showcasing the literary power of Scots for a wider audience, successfully resisted for at least forty years the linguistic standardization initiated by the burgeoning print industry.

"Thou Art The Lorliest Lede That Ever I On Looked": Arthur And Kingship As Represented By The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, And The Awntyrs Off Arthur, Samuel Hardin Cox

Masters Theses

King Arthur is one of the most well known mythical figures in the English language, and throughout his 1500-year literary tradition, poets have built an intricate and multifaceted mythos around this legendary character. Integral to Arthur’s various depictions is how each poet chooses to illustrate his kingship. These characteristics often overlap across poems, poets, and time periods. Yet, upon closer examination, subtle differences between those kingly depictions produce telling insights into the period in which the story was written. For this study, I have examined three separate Arthurian romances: The Alliterative Morte Arthure, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight …

Anatomía Comparada De La Representación De La Muerte En La Literatura Española Transatlántica Durante El Ocaso De La Edad Media Y El Renacimiento, Miguel Ángel Albújar Escuredo

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The main goal of this project is to dissect how death is represented during the Late Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the beginning of the phenomenon of colonization of America carried out by the Spanish Empire, all of it by means of reviewing the representations in Spanish literary works of those times. This is accomplished by comparing works diachronically in order to reveal the main thematic variations between them. To that effect, representative models are taken from the literary canon in Spanish that involves texts since the Late Middle Ages until the first modernity, also known as the Renaissance. This …

Drama And Sermon In Late Medieval England: Performance, Authority, Devotion, Charlotte Steenbrugge

Early Drama, Art, and Music

This is the first full-length study of the interrelation between sermons and vernacular religious drama in late medieval England. It investigates how these genres worked as media for public learning, how they combined this didactic aim with literary exigencies, and how the plays in particular acquired and reflected a position of authority. The interrelation between sermons and vernacular drama, formerly assumed relatively uncritically to be a close one, is addressed from a variety of angles, including historical connections, performative aspects, and the portrayal of the sacrament of penance. The analysis challenges the common assumption that Middle English religious drama is …

The Jeu D'Adam: Ms Tours 927 And The Provenance Of The Play, Christophe Chaguinian

Early Drama, Art, and Music

The Jeu d'Adam is an Anglo-Norman mid-twelfth-century representation of several biblical stories, including the temptation of Adam and Eve and the subsequent fall, Cain and Abel, and the prophets Isaiah and Daniel. Its framework builds on the Latin responses of the mass during the liturgical season of Septuagesima, from before Lent to Easter. This collection of essays explores whether this early play was monastic or secular, its Anglo-Norman character, and the text's musical provenance.

Medieval London: Collected Papers Of Caroline M. Barron, Caroline Barron, Martha Carlin, Joel T. Rosenthal

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Caroline M. Barron is the world's leading authority on the history of medieval London. For half a century she has investigated London's role as medieval England's political, cultural, and commercial capital, together with the urban landscape and the social, occupational, and religious cultures that shaped the lives of its inhabitants. This collection of eighteen papers focuses on four themes: crown and city; parish, church, and religious culture; the people of medieval London; and the city's intellectual and cultural world. They represent essential reading on the history of one of the world's greatest cities by its foremost scholar.

Study And Edition Of La Dama Presidente By Francisco De Leiva Ramírez De Arellano, Diana Valdés

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Entre los grandes autores de teatro del siglo XVII se puede encontrar a Francisco de Leiva Ramírez de Arellano. El siglo en el que vivió es uno de suma importancia en el mundo del teatro, ya que los escritores del momento crearon cánones estilísticos que cambiaron la forma de escribir estas obras para siempre. De Leiva, que fue seguidor de la escuela de Calderón, se conocen unas catorce obras de teatro y un entremés, y se sabe que sus obras no tuvieron mayor éxito hasta el siglo XVIII. En la modernidad su nombre es poco conocido y sus trabajos han …

Clemence Of Barking And Valdes Of Lyon: Two Contemporaneous Examples Of Innovation In The Twelfth Century, Lisa Murray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Twelfth Century in Western Europe was a remarkable time in history. Scholars have noted that Roman law was being revived, Aristotelian theory was being studied, Romanesque and Gothic art was being produced, scholasticism was being cultivated, and economic growth was being fostered by the rise of towns. These are just some of the developments that help give this era the well-known term “twelfth-century renaissance.” Despite the flourishing of creativity that this label suggests, there are few surviving, specific examples of innovation from this time that have been passed down to us. In AD 1175 the Benedictine nun Clemence of …

The Lay Of Aotrou And Itroun (2016), By J.R.R. Tolkien, Edited By Verlyn Flieger, Thomas Honegger

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review of The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun (2016) by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Verlyn Flieger, reviewed by Thomas Honegger

Better, As In The Geneva: The Role Of The Geneva Bible In Drafting The King James Version, Jeffrey Miller

Department of English Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The part played by the Geneva Bible in the composition of the King James Version (1611) has been a vexed issue from the very commissioning of the King James translation in 1604. This essay sheds new light on the issue by focusing in detail on two extant drafts of the King James translation, one that has only recently come to light. Both drafts not only reflect the translators' frequent recourse to the Geneva Bible but also show them taking care explicitly to signal this recourse in a distinctive, even surprising fashion. Detailed consideration of this crucial feature of the drafts …

Bodies Of Resistance: On (Not) Naming Gender In The Medieval West, Alexander V. Baldassano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers the genres of historiography, romance, hagiography, Chaucerian poetry, and court transcripts. While there are no extant manuscripts depicting transgender-like people’s accounts of themselves, literature of the Middle Ages is replete with fictionalized depictions of ambiguously or transgressively gendered individuals who are meant to symbolize or represent something other than themselves. By investigating how a variety of genres depicts sensationalized and transgressively gendered embodiments, I examine the presentation of transgender-like subjectivity as a manipulation of rhetoric. Viviane Namaste critiques theory such as Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests, claiming that it reduces the transvestite figure to a rhetorical trope …

The Disperata, From Medieval Italy To Renaissance France, Gabriella Scarlatta

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Rich with morose invectives, the Italian lyric genre of the disperata builds toward a crescendo of despair, with the speakers damning and condemning their beloved, their enemy, their destiny, Fortune, Love, and often themselves. Although Petrarch and Petrarchism have been amply analyzed as fertile sources for late Renaissance poets in France, the influence of the Italian disperata in this context has yet to receive proper scholarly attention. This study explores how the language and themes of the disperata - including hopelessness, death, suicide, doomed love, collective trauma, and damnations - are creatively adopted by several generations of poets from its …

Liturgical Drama And The Reimagining Of Medieval Theater, Michael Norton

Early Drama, Art, and Music

The expression "liturgical drama" was formulated in 1834 as a metaphor and hardened into formal category only later in the nineteenth century. Prior to this invention, the medieval rites and representations that would forge the category were understood as distinct and unrelated classes: as liturgical rites no longer celebrated or as theatrical works of dubious quality. If this distinction between liturgical rites and non-liturgical representations holds, should we not examine the works called "liturgical drama" according to the contexts of their presentations within the manuscripts and books that preserve them? Given the ways that the words "liturgy" and "drama" have …

Riders, Chivalry, And Knighthood In Tolkien, Thomas Honegger

Journal of Tolkien Research

Abstract

This essay is a much extended version of the paper I gave at the IMC Leeds on 5 July 2017. It examines Tolkien’s complex attitude towards the concept(s) of chivalry and knighthood. A close reading analysis of relevant key passages from The Lord of the Rings is combined with an examination of his statements on chivalry in his scholarly works. Tolkien’s views are then related to the scholarly discourse on the key elements of chivalry, which allows the reader to gain a deeper understanding of why Tolkien depicts the representatives of chivalry/knighthood in The Lord of the Rings the …

The Wife's Lament, Christian Beck

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This is version of the poem The Wife's Lament is translated by Christian Beck.

Troubling Truth In The Auchinleck Manuscript, Amy Elizabeth Reynolds

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Troubling Truth in the Auchinleck Manuscript” argues that many of the romances contained in this famous volume (c. 1330-40) respond in complex ways to the intensely unstable reign of Edward II (1307-27), and to that reign’s cataclysmic end and aftermath. These romances engage with these crises’ varied and negative impact on the foundational medieval value of “truth”—i.e. loyalty, trustworthiness, honor. Richard Firth Green’s A Crisis of Truth examines many the late fourteenth century results of this destabilization of truth, and my work expands and adjusts his not only by examining the early fourteenth-century roots of such changes, but also by …