History Commons^™

The Dark And Middle Ages, Edward Jayne

English Faculty Publications

For the most part only Plato's teachings supported by a limited version of Aristotelian cosmology supportive of Platonism survived the decline of ancient Greek philosophy during the Roman Empire. Christianity later prevailed, and toward the end of the Middle Ages Aristotle’s secular perspective was only taken into account by Arab philosophers such as Averroes and Avicenna. After the collapse of Arab civilization during the twelfth century, the secular concept of a double truth between belief and reason put philosophy on equal footing with religion in such universities as Cordoba and the University of Paris. After a large assortment of ancient …

Magis Brugge: Visualizing Marcus Gerards’ 16th-Century Map Through Its 21st-Century Digitization, Elien Vernackt

Artl@s Bulletin

Marcus Gerards delivered his town plan of Bruges in 1562 and managed to capture the imagination of viewers ever since. The 21^st century digitization project MAGIS Brugge, supported by the Flemish government, has helped to treat this map as a primary source worthy of examination itself, rather than as a decorative illustration for local history. A historical database was built on top of it, with the analytic method called ‘Digital Thematic Deconstruction.’ This enabled scholars to study formally overlooked details, like how it was that Gerards was able to balance the requirements of his patrons against his own …

After Faith, Hope, And Love: The Unique Divergence Of Asceticism By Gregory The Great And Maximus The Confessor, Caleb N. Zuiderveen

Theses and Dissertations

In the late sixth and early seventh centuries, asceticism continued as a frequent expression of Christian devotion. Despite communications between the Eastern and Western Churches and a common patristic foundation, theology in the East and West during this time diverged on the results of asceticism. This paper explores this divergence by examining two theologians, Gregory the Great and Maximus the Confessor. Current scholarship has examined Gregory the Great and Maximus the Confessor on their own, yet the dialogue between each tradition and its implications remains understudied. Thus, this study contextualizes Gregory the Great’s On the Song of Songs and Maximus …

Literary Culture In Early Christian Ireland: Hiberno-Latin Saints’ Lives As A Source For Seventh-Century Irish History, John Higgins

Doctoral Dissertations

The writers of seventh-century Irish saints’ Lives created the Irish past. Their accounts of the fifth-and-sixth century saints framed the narrative of early Irish Christianity for their contemporary and later audience. Cogitosus’s Life of Brigit, Muirchú’s and Tírechán’s accounts of Saint Patrick, and Adomnán’s Life of Columba have guided the understanding of early Irish history from then until now. Unlike other early texts these Lives are securely dated. Composed as tools in the discourse regarding authority in seventh-century Irish ecclesiastical and secular politics, they provide historical insights not available from other sources. In the seventh century Armagh and Kildare …

Re-Playing Maimonides’ Codes: Designing Games To Teach Religious Legal Systems, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Lost & Found is a game series, created at the Initiative for

Religion, Culture, and Policy at the Rochester Institute of

Technology MAGIC Center.1 The series teaches medieval

religious legal systems. This article uses the first two games

of the series as a case study to explore a particular set of

processes to conceive, design, and develop games for learning.

It includes the background leading to the author's work

in games and teaching religion, and the specific context for

the Lost & Found series. It discusses the rationale behind

working to teach religious legal systems more broadly, then

discuss the …

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.54, No.1, Summer 2018

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.54, No.1, Summer 2018

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Passion Through Slander: Saintliness, Deviance, And Suffering By Speech In The Book Of Margery Kempe, Connor Yeck

The Hilltop Review

A late medieval mystic prone to violent bouts of sobbing, Margery Kempe suffers a range of verbal abuse in her titular text, ranging from simple rumors, to outright accusations of heresy and possession. While we might accept such accusatory speech as indicative of the era and Margery’s controversial role as a public “holy woman,” further investigation reveals a narrative strongly driven by the notion of “suffering by slander,” and the weight attributed to the spoken word. The Book of Margery Kempe shows us an oral culture filled with “deviant speech,” and within its own rhetorical construction as a text, elevates …

Memorializing The Middle Classes In Medieval And Renaissance Europe, Anne C. Leader

Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Memorializing the Middle Classes in Medieval and Renaissance Europe investigates commemorative practices in Cyprus, Flanders, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. Offering a broad overview of memorialization practices across Europe and the Mediterranean, individual chapters examine local customs through particular case studies. These essays explore complementary themes through the lens of commemorative art, including social status; personal and corporate identities; the intersections of mercantile, intellectual, and religious attitudes; upward (and downward) mobility; and the cross-cultural exchange of memorialization strategies.

The Corporate Guild Order Control Of The Florentine Republic In The 13th And 14th Century, Milad D. Mohammadi

Grand Valley Journal of History

This paper discusses how professional guilds in the 13^th and 14^th century Florentine Republic rose to power and how they maintained the structure and mechanisms of their power. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates how the Florentine Republic during this period was completely dominated by these guilds through their cultural, economic, and political influence. This paper explains how the rise of aristocratic families as the new power structure ended this guild based society in the late 14^th century.

Thietmar Of Merseburg's Views On Clerical Warfare, Benjamin Joseph Wand

Dissertations and Theses

The tenth-century German bishop was more than just a spiritual leader, he was also a territorial lord with secular power. These bishops also lived in an environment where violence was sometimes a way of life. His culture contained a social dynamic that saw violence as a tool for defending and maintaining honor and as a mechanism for dispute resolution. Therefore, some bishops behaved violently, either to defend their diocese from threats or to serve their own political intrigues. In some instances bishops were said to be more skilled in warfare than secular lords. However, while some clergy participated in warfare …

The Lost & Found Game Series: Teaching Medieval Religious Law In Context, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context. The Lost & Found project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy. The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & Found …

Not A Conclusion To Gender And Species, Ecofeminist Intersections, Lesley Kordecki

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Does It Have To Be About Women?, Carolynn Van Dyke

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The six essays on medieval texts in the "Gender and Species" cluster (or Special Issue) demonstrate the power of combining feminist analysis with critical animal studies.

La Femme Bisclavret: The Female Of The Species?, Alison Langdon

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Conventional humanist readings of Bisclavret approach the lai from an anthropocentric perspective, in which animal nature is merely an allegory for human nature. In such a reading, the werewolf protagonist is a foil for his much more beastly if wholly human wife, with the underlying assumption being that animal nature is something to be rejected. That the marker of Lady Bisclavret's bestial nature—her noselessness—is transmitted through the generations of only female descendants seems to echo medieval antifeminist truisms about female perfidy. However, approaching the lai from a critical animal studies perspective can help dismantle conventional assumptions about the privileged status …

Questioning Gynocentric Utopia: Nature As Addict In “Description Of Cookeham”, Liberty S. Stanavage

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In her 1610 “The Description of Cookeham,” Amelia Lanyer presents Cookeham as a space in which women and nature exist in poetry-inducing harmony until the intervention of man. Lanyer’s poem highlights the deference of both the animals (who “sport . . . in her eye” and “attend”), and the landscape to Clifford: the hills “descend” to meet her footstep and then raise themselves again at her whim. This alignment frequently leads critics to describe Cookeham as a utopian feminist landscape that aligns women and nature against an antagonistic masculine influence.

However, this utopian vision dramatizes a landscape that is not …

Belligerent Mothers And The Power Of Feminine Speech In _The Owl And The Nightingale_, Wendy A. Matlock

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale famously records the dispute between a hostile Nightingale and a bellicose Owl. Within that dialogue the birds reproduce themselves in word and egg, in rhetoric and body. Their digressions on bodies and scatology and on childbearing and childrearing become fertilizer that expands maternal authority into public, intellectual discourse. In addition to calling forth their own communicative powers, both characters aggressively recount narratives best known from the work of Marie de France, a voice feminist scholars have successfully restored to the canon, to condemn their foe. In this light, I argue, The …

Women And Other Beasts: A Feminist Perspective On Medieval Bestiaries, Carolynn Van Dyke

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Gender and species intersect in the subject-matter, readership, and authorship of medieval beast-books. First, androcentric norms result in inconsistent gender references to species: the grammatically feminine eagle (Aquila) is represented as a stern father, the masculine turtledove (Turtura) as a clinging wife. More broadly, male exemplars represent nearly all species regardless of grammatical gender.

Second, both discursive norms and bibliographic practice presumed an exclusively male readership for the bestiary, but external and internal evidence suggest that bourgeois mothers used bestiaries in educating their children.

Third, a more radical intervention in androcentric bestiary norms is an instance …

Of Queens, Incubi, And Whispers From Hell: Joan Of Arc And The Battle Between Orthopraxy And Theoretical Doctrine In Fifteenth Century France, Helen W. Tschurr

Honors Program Theses

This project focuses on examining the nuances of fifteenth century religious gender theory through an exploration of the Trial of Condemnation (unduly maligned in the historiography) against Joan of Arc. Employing a lens of the theological concept of the “Bride of Christ,” (as defined by Dylan Elliot, Johanne Chamberlyne, Gilbert of Hoyland, and Peter Abelard) in studying this text, as well as the contemporary pro-Joan propaganda texts of Christine de Pizan, Jacques Gelu, and Jean Gerson,suggest a departure from current historiographical positions on medieval perceptions of gender and sex identity. Both Joan (in the trial) and her popular supporters understood …

Skbd-Kml, Mark Polczynski, Michael Polczynski

SKBD - Sawran Kodyma Border Dispute

No abstract provided.

Skbd-Shp, Mark Polczynski, Michael Polczynski

SKBD - Sawran Kodyma Border Dispute

No abstract provided.

Witches And Pagans: Women In European Folk Religion, 700-1100, Melissa Ridley Elmes

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Joan, The Fair Maid Of Kent, Samantha Katz Seal

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The Pleasant Nights, Sally A. Livingston

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.53, No.2 2018

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Population Change In Times Of War: Biodistance Analysis Of Medieval And Early Modern Skeletal Populations From Adriatic Croatia, Lindsey Jo Helms Thorson

Theses and Dissertations

Research by doctoral candidate Lindsey Jo Helms Thorson, under the supervision of Dr. Patricia Richards, investigated population during the Ottoman expansion into Croatian territories to determine whether migration contributed significantly to changes in the biological make-up of the population. The study focused on phenotypic trait variation, using cranial and dental metric and nonmetric data, in two skeletal samples from the Medieval (pre-Ottoman) period and two skeletal samples from the Early Modern (Ottoman) period in the central Dalmatian region of Croatia, curated at the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts – Anthropology Center. Historical narratives suggest that as the Ottoman Empire …

Becoming A Knight: The Social Transformation Of Common Mounted Soldiers Into Noble Warriors, Jared Dane Johns

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Between the years of 1066 and 1119 CE, knights and their families in Western Europe rose from the highest stratification of the common folk to be included as the lowest incarnation of the nobility. This occurred primarily due to an emerging collective warrior identity among the nobility, the Catholic Church’s attempts to contain and sanction violence, and the implementation of the Three Estates political philosophy. This timeline challenges the dominant historical narrative on when knighthood transformed from a military rank into a social rank of nobility, which is usually placed sometime around the end of the 13^th Century.

To …

“Ubi Et Est Habitatio Sororum Et Mansio Fratrum”: Doppelklöster Und Ähnliche Klostergemeinschaften Im Mittelalterichen Österreich (Diözese Passau In Den Ausdehnungen Des 13. Jahrhunderts), Lucy Barnhouse

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Clare Of Assisi And The Thirteenth-Century Church: Religious Women, Rules, And Resistance, Mary Anne Gonzales

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.53, No.2 2018

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.