History Commons^™

Outlaws And Traitors: Justifying Rebellion In The Old French Epic Of Revolt, Klayton Tietjen

Doctoral Dissertations

The plot of many chansons de geste hinges on acts that would have been considered treasonable by medieval legal custom. Yet despite conspicuously treasonous behavior, rebel characters remain the heroes of the tales. Coming to an understanding of the esoteric way that medieval poets and their audiences would have perceived the difference between rebel characters and traitor characters is the pursuit of this study. Through an investigation of the narrative logic and poetic details of epic poems like Girart de Vienne and other chansons de geste, the divergence between treachery and rebellion can be shown to reside in narrative …

Troya Victa : Empire, Identity, And Apocalypse In The Frankish Chronicles Of The Fourth Crusade, Jordan Amspacher

Doctoral Dissertations

Histories of the Fourth Crusade have long revolved around the so-called “Diversion Question,” or the process by which a crusading army sworn to liberate the Levant from Muslim control ultimately found itself laying siege, not once but twice, to the largest city in Christian Europe. Competing answers to the Diversion Question have have tended to focus on the economic and diplomatic motivations of the crusade leadership. Scant attention, however, has been paid to the religious and intellectual motivations at play within the minds of these thirteenth-century Latin Christians. This dissertation examines intellectual trends in twelfth-century Latin Europe and the ways …

A Performance Of Disease And Its Cures: Lovesickness In Medieval Iberia, Lillian B. Sanders

Masters Theses

In the context of late medieval Iberia, lovesickness as a real disease was both treatable and threatening to one’s lived experience. Different forms of lovesick cures, from both learned and vernacular healers, arose from the Galenic regime of the humoral body. Cures such as charms, mixtures, and verbal expressions helped heal lovesick patients, as is shown in the archive through sources like remedy books and literary texts depicting lovesick affliction. Much of the current scholarship on lovesickness focuses on medieval medicine through the archive. Through the lens of performance studies, I argue that medieval Iberians enacted cures on lovesick patients …

Asturleonés Medieval; Una Aproximación Sincrónica Y Diacrónica A Sus Rasgos Fonéticos Diferenciales Y Su Dominio Lingüístico, Alfonso Hernanz

Doctoral Dissertations

Unlike other romance varieties in the Iberian Peninsula Middle Ages, the Asturleonese dialect didn’t get to evolve into a fully differentiated language system due to several historical and sociocultural issues that thwarted its historical development. However, the distinctive features of the dialect survived until present time featuring a complex dialectal system along the geography of the ancient Kingdom of León. This research focuses on the building of the Asturleonese Linguistic Domain and the phonetic characterization of its distinctive phonetic features from a synchronic and diachronic perspective with the purpose of identifying in medieval documents, from IX to XIV centuries, the …

Lords Of Retinue: Middle English Romance And Noblemen In Need, James Trevor Stewart

Doctoral Dissertations

This study shows how medieval poets adapted the romance genre to address contemporary concerns about the regulation and exercise of noble power. Analyzing romances alongside chivalric chronicles, medieval didactic texts, and modern historical studies of the English nobility, this dissertation explores the ideals and practices of chivalry in medieval England from the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) through the deposition of Richard II (1399). Chapters on Guy of Warwick (c. 1300), Ywain and Gawain (mid-fourteenth century), and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale (c. 1388) argue that Middle English poets promote ideals of both prowess and lordship in their narratives of chivalric heroism.

Notker’S Demons: Entertaining And Edifying Charles The Fat Through The Gesta Karoli Magni, Klayton Amos Tietjen

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the curious depictions of demons found in the biography of Charlemagne written by Notker the Stammerer in the late ninth-century. The demons appeared in tales that were unrelated to the biography’s subject matter. Historians of earlier generations dismissed the biography altogether as uninformative to a historical understanding of the late Carolingian empire. More recent historians, however, have revived Notker’s text to show that it has much to offer modern readers in understanding the ninth-century. This study shows that the demon stories are informative for a historical understanding of the period as well. They illustrate a special relationship …

Re-Writing English Identity: Medieval Historians Of Anglo-Norman Britain, Teresa Marie Lopez

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation uses post-colonial and narrative theories to examine the historiographic tradition of twelfth-century England. This investigation explores the idea of nationhood in pre-modern England and the relationship between history and romance in post-Conquest historical writings. I analyze how Geoffrey of Monmouth, Henry of Huntingdon Geffrei Gaimar, and Laʒamon imagine and narrate the explicit changes to the ruling elite in twelfth-century England, and how this process constructs their idea of “Englishness.”

Old English Manuscripts In The Early Age Of Print: Matthew Parker And His Scribes, Robert Scott Bevill

Doctoral Dissertations

Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern …

Mozarab Readers Of The Bible, From The Córdoban Martyrs To The Glossa Ordinaria, Geoffrey Kyle Martin

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I offer four case studies in how medieval Iberia’s Arabic-speaking Christians (Mozarabs) appropriated Latin, Arabic, and Islamic culture. I have focused upon the Mozarabs’ reading of the Bible: (1) how they translated it from Latin to Arabic, (2) how they thought about the Last Days, (3) how they read it with a foremost interest in the meaning of individual words and phrases, and (4) how they employed biblical commentaries to understand scripture better. As the reader will see, the Mozarabs’ translations of the Bible into Arabic and the Latin manuscripts which they annotated in that language have …

Identité, Genre, Et Proto-Nationalisme Chez Christine De Pizan Et Alain Chartier, Matthew Lee Blair

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Economy, Representation, And Revolt: Social Unrest In Florence In The Wake Of The Black Death, Jacob David Brannum

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Constructing Marianismo In Colonial Mexico, Kathryn A. Buchanan

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Count Of Saint-Gilles And The Saints Of The Apocalypse: Occitanian Piety And Culture In The Time Of The First Crusade, Thomas Whitney Lecaque

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines Raymond of Saint-Gilles’ regional affiliation in Occitania (modern southern France) and the effect of that identity on his conduct of the First Crusade. Crusade historiography has not paid much attention to regional difference, but Raymond’s case shows that Occitanians approached crusading in a fundamentally different manner from other crusaders. They placed apocalyptic eschatology in the forefront of the First Crusade and portraying the First Crusade as bringing about the New Jerusalem. To be Occitanian was not merely to be a speaker of Occitan. It was to be part of a Mediterranean culture, halfway between classical Roman and …

The Matter Of Jerusalem: The Holy Land In Angevin Court Culture And Identity, C. 1154-1216, Katherine Lee Hodges-Kluck

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation reshapes our understanding of the mechanics of nation-building and the construction of national identities in the Middle Ages, placing medieval England in a wider European and Mediterranean context. I argue that a coherent English national identity, transcending the social and linguistic differences of the post-Norman Conquest period, took shape at the end of the twelfth century. A vital component of this process was the development of an ideology that intimately connected the geography, peoples, and mythical histories of England and the Holy Land. Proponents of this ideology envisioned England as an allegorical new Jerusalem inhabited by a chosen …

Going Gothic: Spanish Unity And Blame In The Legend Of Rodrigo And Florinda, Sara A. Gottardi

Doctoral Dissertations

The Legend of Rodrigo and Florinda is used to explain the causes for the successful Muslim invasion of Spain. My dissertation discusses six medieval versions of this legend, three Muslim and three Christian. I trace variations in blame to identify the different strata of society that are described as the corrosive catalysts for the Visigoths' divine punishment. I also analyze each source's presentation of the Visigothic prior to the invasion and examine how they assess the fracture of Spain into smaller kingdoms after the invasion. Identifying the Muslim invasion as a form of divine chastisement inherently includes the idea that …

The Latin Readers Of Algazel, 1150-1600, Anthony H. Minnema

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines how Arabic works found an audience in medieval Europe and became a part of the Latin canon of philosophy. It focuses on a Latin translation of an Arabic philosophical work, Maqasid al-falasifa, by the Muslim theologian al-Ghazali, known as Algazel in Latin. This work became popular because it served as a primer for Arab philosophy and helped Latins understand a tradition that had built upon Greek scholarship for centuries. To find the translation’s audience, this project looks at two sets of evidence. It studies the works of Latin scholars who drew from Algazel’s arguments and illustrates …

The Battle Of Las Navas De Tolosa: The Culture And Practice Of Crusading In Medieval Iberia, Miguel Dolan Gomez

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the phenomenon of crusading in the Iberian Peninsula through the lens of the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212). This battle was both a major Christian victory over the Almohad Empire of Morocco and its Andalusian allies, and the most successful crusade of the papacy of Innocent III. As such, it serves as an ideal case study for the practice and culture of crusading in the early thirteenth century.

The examination of the battle helps to expand our understanding of crusading in a number of ways. First, by examining the institutional aspects of the battle, against …