History Commons^™

Divine Or Demonic? A Social Approach To Epilepsy From Greco-Roman Antiquity To The Early Middle Ages, James Nicholas Sumrall

Honors Theses

This thesis seeks to evaluate how epilepsy was defined, perceived and understood in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as how these ideas were adapted and changed during the early centuries of Christianity. To this end, the thesis is divided into six parts. The Introduction briefly explains epilepsy and discusses how the social approach method can be applied to the disease. Chapter I introduces the Hippocratic understanding of epilepsy and outlines the Greco-Roman religious concepts of pollution and purification, which frequently informed ancient perceptions of epilepsy. The first chapter also analyzes the general relationship between disability, disease and divine selection …

Ms-218: Edward (Ted) J. Baskerville Scholarly Papers, G. Ronald Couchman

All Finding Aids

The collection highlights Baskerville’s interest in Medieval and Renaissance literature. It includes offprints of some of his published works, fragments and drafts of other scholarly research, and notes that he may have used for some of his lectures. Of special note are copies of his M.A. and PhD. theses from Columbia and a three-page handout created by Baskerville for his Dante course (ca 1960-1969) with drawings by friend and colleague Ralph Donald Lindeman.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include historical and biographical information about …

Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …

Chinese Porcelain And The Material Taxonomies Of Medieval Rabbinic Law: Encounters With Disruptive Substances In Twelfth-Century Yemen, Elizabeth Lambourn, Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman

The Medieval Globe

This article focuses on a set of legal questions about ṣīnī vessels (literally, “Chinese” vessels) sent from the Jewish community in Aden to Fustat (Old Cairo) in the mid-1130s CE and now preserved among the Cairo Geniza holdings in Cambridge University Library. This is the earliest dated and localized query about the status of ṣīnī vessels with respect to the Jewish law of vessels used for food consumption. Our analysis of these queries suggests that their phrasing and timing can be linked to the contemporaneous appearance in the Yemen of a new type of Chinese ceramic ware, qingbai, which confounded …

Introducing The Medieval Globe, Carol Symes

The Medieval Globe

The concept of “the medieval” has long been essential to global imperial ventures, national ideologies, and the discourse of modernity. And yet the projects enabled by this powerful construct have essentially hindered investigation of the world’s interconnected territories during a millennium of movement and exchange. The mission of The Medieval Globe is to reclaim this “middle age” and to place it at the center of global studies.

The Chimerae Of Their Age:Twelfth Century Cistercian Engagement Beyond Monastic Walls, Daniel J. Martin

Pomona Senior Theses

One of the great paradoxes of the medieval period is the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1225), in which monks of the Cistercian Order took an active and violent role in campaigning against the heretics of the Languedoc. Why, and how, did this order officially devoted to prayer and contemplation become one of the prime orchestrators of one of medieval Europe’s most gruesome affairs? This thesis seeks to answer that question, not by looking at the crusading Cistercians themselves, but at their predecessor Bernard of Clairvaux, who—I will argue—made the Albigensian Crusade possible by making it permissible for monks to intervene in the …

Cornelius Aurelius: The Upcycling Humanist - A Study Of The Libellus De Patientia, Samantha James

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Cornelius Aurelius’ Libellus de Patientia (MS Leiden, UB, Vulcanius 66 f.45r-f.57v. [1524]), in terms of the author’s reception of the Manipulus florum, reveals much about the development of Northern Humanism, in the context of late medieval scholasticism and the Reformation. By thoroughly examining Libellus de Patientia, this paper will discuss Aurelius’ use of numerous quotations derived from the Manipulus florum as evidence of how this text should be situated in terms of intellectual continuity vs. change during this turbulent period with regards to the intellectual context of medieval scholasticism and renaissance humanism.

Phantastes Chapter 5: Romance Of Sir Launfal, Thomas Chestre

German Romantic and Other Influences

A medieval poem of 1045 lines telling of a knight who loses status and wealth and who meets a beautiful woman who gives him love and wealth as long as he keeps her existence a secret. The motif of the lover’s prohibition appears in several medieval texts, and MacDonald makes use of this motif in this chapter.