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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Early Medieval Rhetoric: Epideictic Underpinnings In Old English Homilies, Jennifer M. Randall
Early Medieval Rhetoric: Epideictic Underpinnings In Old English Homilies, Jennifer M. Randall
English Dissertations
Medieval rhetoric, as a field and as a subject, has largely been under-developed and under-emphasized within medieval and rhetorical studies for several reasons: the disconnect between Germanic, Anglo-Saxon society and the Greco-Roman tradition that defined rhetoric as an art; the problems associated with translating the Old and Middle English vernacular in light of rhetorical and, thereby, Greco-Latin precepts; and the complexities of the medieval period itself with the lack of surviving manuscripts, often indistinct and inconsistent political and legal structure, and widespread interspersion and interpolation of Christian doctrine. However, it was Christianity and its governance of medieval culture that preserved …
Reading Holiness: Agnes Grey, Ælfric, And The Augustinian Hermeneutic, Jessica Caroline Brown
Reading Holiness: Agnes Grey, Ælfric, And The Augustinian Hermeneutic, Jessica Caroline Brown
Theses and Dissertations
Although Anne Brontë's first novel, Agnes Grey, presents itself as a didactic treatise, Brontë's work departs from many accepted Evangelical tropes in the portrayal of its moral protagonist. These departures create an exemplary figure whose flaws potentially subvert the novel's didactic purposes. The character of Agnes is not necessarily meant to be directly emulated, yet Brontë's governess is presented as a tool of moral instruction. The conflict between the novel's self-proclaimed didactic purpose and the form in which it presents that purpose raises a number of interpretive questions. I argue that many of these questions can be answered through …
Ælfric And The Orient, Jacqueline Geaney Elkouz
Ælfric And The Orient, Jacqueline Geaney Elkouz
UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones
This dissertation examines why Ælfric's choice of texts included in his Lives of Saints differs so radically from contemporaneous lists of saints venerated by Anglo-Saxons. Writing between 992 and 1002, while England faced a second wave of invasions from the North, Ælfric selected saints predominantly from the Orient.
A close analysis of several of these lives reveals four major agents of persecution: Paganism, Judaism, Heresy, and Satan. Faced with such trials, most of the saints included in Ælfric's Lives commonly suffer a violent death and always stand firm in their faith in the face of persecution. For Ælfric, the orthodox …