Digital Commons Network^™

The Magic Of Love: Love Magic In Medieval Romance, Dalicia Raymond

English Language and Literature ETDs

This project examines authorial representations of the morality of three functions of love magic: to induce, to disrupt, and to facilitate love in twelfth- through fifteenth-century Middle High German, Old French, and Middle English romances. Using a cultural studies approach with close textual analysis and informed by gender studies, it investigates medieval romance authors’ discomfort with love inducing magic and asserts that this discomfort is a response to the magic’s violation of free will, a central tenet of medieval theology. I find that authors condemn love inducing magic but mark specific instances acceptable through explicit clarification of divine approval. Love …

Religion In George R.R. Martin's "A Song Of Ice And Fire" Franchise, Sydney A. Craven

Honors Theses

This thesis is a study of religion in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire franchise. Specifically, George R.R. Martin's use of medievalisms, his interpretation of the Middle Ages, when creating the religions in A Song of Ice and Fire.

Chosen Champions: Medieval And Early Modern Heroes As Postcolonial Reactions To Tensions Between England And Europe, Jessica Trant Labossiere

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project explores connections between hero and history, text and context. By engaging Postcolonial theories about the roles that invasion and oppression, play in developing national identity and how colonized people respond to such encounters in literature, I examine how experiences of invasion and hostile interaction as represented in medieval and early modern English literature influenced the creation of specific heroic values.

In my first chapter, I analyze The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf as exemplars of the Anglo-Saxon culture, observing that Byrhtnoth and Beowulf work as fictional embodiments of a fantasy of power: men of super-human strength and exceptional …

‘Misticall Unions’: Clandestine Communications From Tristan To Twelfth Night, George W. Eggers

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation argues that important modes of self-definition in the Renaissance draw on the linguistic uncertainty in medieval literary constructions of lovers. Just as in Renaissance texts, medieval lovers such as Tristan and Isolde fashion themselves as a “misticall union”: a conglomerate self that shares one mind and erases all distinctions between sender and receiver as well as grammatical subject and object. This unity expresses itself in the lovers’ inexplicable ability to interpret correctly the most arbitrary of messages from one another while misleading those around them. Considering Shakespearean lovers in this context suggests how deeply this model of self-definition …

Unsettling: Transgression And Travel In The Literature Of The Medieval North Atlantic, Jeremy P. Deangelo

Doctoral Dissertations

This project examines the significance of travel, both as practice and metaphor, in Anglo-Saxon literature, placed in the context of the neighboring traditions of the Irish and the Icelanders. It identifies in early Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse literature a metaphor wherein one’s literal movement (“conduct”) in the story represents their behavior (“conduct”) in life. Using the poem The Whale as its test case, it describes the Christian concept of discretio spirituum (“the Discernment of Spirits”) as a tool for distinguishing good conduct from bad. With these terms established, the project examines actual travelers in Anglo-Saxon literature for lessons in conduct. …

“The Future Is Medieval”: Orality And Musical Borrowing In The Middle Ages And Online Remix Culture, Claire E. Mcleish

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis re-situates sampling and the mashup in a broader tradition of musical borrowing and oral practice. Musical creators in the West borrowed throughout history; the variety and quantity of this borrowing remains dependent on the proprietary status of music. Copyright was first applied to music to protect printed scores, and is thus ill equipped to accommodate works that borrow recorded elements. Taking Ong’s concept of “secondary orality” as applied to hip hop by Tricia Rose, this thesis connects techniques of musical borrowing in the Middle Ages with those in the late-20^th and 21^st centuries through several close …

Queenship, Intrigue And Blood-Feud: Deciphering The Causes Of The Merovingian Civil Wars, 561-613, Brandon Taylor Craft

LSU Master's Theses

The Frankish civil wars of AD 561-613 were a series of devastating encounters involving the four sons of Chlothar I and their descendants. While no party was guiltless during this period, modern scholars have tended to focus on two prominent Queens, Brunhild of Austrasia and Fredegund of Neustria, and the possibility of a blood-feud between their two families. King Sigibert of Austrasia married Brunhild because he believed she was worthy of a king, unlike many of the wives his brothers were taking. One of these women was Fredegund, who was married to King Chilperic of Neustria. Fredegund is often blamed …

Mandeville's Intolerance: The Contest For Souls And Sacred Sites In The Travels Of Sir John Mandeville, Robert Patterson

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

As the first medieval text to combine the matter of the East with the matter of the Holy Land, The Travels circulated widely in over 300 manuscripts, making it an important text when studying medieval Christian attitudes toward non-Christians. Although many scholars point to The Travels as a tolerant text ahead of its time, a historicized approach reveals that Mandeville's project is better understood in terms of his intolerant universalism. I argue that in casting non-Christians as proto-Christians who stand as evidence of Christianity's global spiritual hegemony, the author appropriates and consumes them in service of his universalist agenda. I …

The Study Of The Bible In The Middle Ages, E George Krause

Bachelor of Divinity

There is quite a difference of opinion as to the extent of the Middle Ages. We will take the middle ground and roughly limit this era to the years between 500 A. D. and 1500 A. D. This procedure is to be preferred above others which begin or end an era with a certain person or event, because an era is not ushered in overnight, but is rather a gradual and often barely perceptible process. There will be a few instances in the course of this thesis where material extending a number of years either way beyond the above chronological …