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Sacred Mnemonics In Late Medieval England: Ars Memoria In The Hagiography Of Osbern Bokenham, Erica C. Leighton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis examines the practice and understanding of the ancient ars memoria (art of memory) tradition in late medieval England. Using the work of fifteenth-century Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham, I argue that his hagiography demonstrates a pronounced engagement with both ancient ars memoria techniques and original medieval adaptations and expansions of these narrative mnemonic strategies. The late medieval ars memoria, therefore, speaks to the education and training that allowed for complex and fluid approaches to mnemonic narration.

Bokenham’s surviving body of work includes a set of commissioned female saints’ lives entitled Legendys of Hooly Wummen, and a sizeable …

Material Witness: Occult Affects In The Mystery Fiction Of The Fin De Siècle, Thomas Matthew Stuart

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

As the nineteenth century progressed, Spiritualism blossomed from a religious movement to a cultural moment. While it remained an object of faith or ancillary faith, Spiritualism became as well a voice for radical reform, parlour entertainment, means of negotiating an increasingly mediated world, and so forth. Combined with enthusiasm for occult knowledge, Spiritualism offered intricately interrelated modes of narrating our relation to a consistently present past, in light of a rapidly approaching future. My project reads this fin-de-siècle fascination as a sensibility. Occult figures and spiritualist impulses, I argue, provide a vocabulary of feelings evoked in encounters with the mysterious. …

Malory, Chivalric Medievalism, And New Imperialist Masculinity, Andrew Livecchi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Over the course of the nineteenth century, Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century work of Arthurian romance, Le Morte Darthur, underwent significant reevaluation, from being warily considered a trivial, morally problematic text to being hailed as a national epic with a central place in the English canon. This shift in Malory’s status coincided with the rise of an increasingly competitive and unabashedly aggressive model of imperialism in the 1870s, which historians conventionally term New Imperialism. At the same time, a new model of masculinity emerged, one that bemoaned the “decadence” of the modernized, leisurely man and that celebrated the hypermasculine ideal …