History Commons^™

Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.56, No.1, Summer 2020

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Christine De Pizan's Passive Heroines: Recoding Feminine Identities In Le Livre De La Cité Des Dames And Le Ditié De Jehanne D'Arc, Evelyn Ives Mills

Dissertations and Theses

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Christine de Pizan has resurfaced in the academic and literary spheres as a paragon of proto-feminist thought. This modern fascination with the fifteenth-century writer is largely grounded in her surprisingly progressive views on a woman's right to receive an education, to govern and achieve financial freedom. More recently, scholars have lauded Christine's later works for their reinterpretation of what it meant to be a woman in fifteenth-century Europe. The present study examines this latter goal of Christine de Pizan's writing specifically in the context of the heroic feminine identity she constructs …

The Aftermath Of The Black Death In England: Edward Iii's Economic Policies To Repress The Peasantry, Leah Diciesare

Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals

The Black Death caused a mass mortality in England, drastically affecting society. However, it was the aftermath of the plague that had the greatest impacts. The loss of life removed pressure on the economy due to population density, which gave the peasants opportunities to improve their lives. But that was a short-lived phenomenon; the peasantry ultimately remained repressed, as they had been prior to the plague. Edward III meddled in the English economy in the wake of the Black Death by introducing price and wage regulations. These efforts were to maintain the status quo in English society so that the …

Talking Back: Sodomy Laws And Transgressive Subjectivity In Medieval Venice, Alex Baldassano

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Urban Italian law, by the fifteenth-century, would become particularly aggressive in comparison to the rest of Europe not only in prosecuting sodomy, but also in implementing the threatened capital punishment. The 1354 Venetian court case of Rolandinus/a Ronchaia, in the century leading up to the officialization of the law, both exemplifies this trend and yet also stands out as unique because of the subject’s gender presentation; the case seeks to resolve whether or not this person, perceived either as ambiguously gendered or as a man dressed as a woman, can be convicted of committing sodomy or prostitution. Ronchaia, however, is …

Late Medieval Sexual Badges As Sexual Signifiers: A Material Culture Reappraisal, Sarah Hinds

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.55, No.2, Winter 2019

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Mechthild Of Magdeburg, Hadewijch Of Brabant, And Marguerite Of Porete: The Annihilation Of The Soul And The Challenge To Church Authority, Ashley Odebiyi

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Back Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.55, No.2, Winter 2019

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Performing Mystical Union In Mechthild Of Magdeburg’S The Flowing Light Of The Godhead, Jessi C. Piggott

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Thirteenth-century mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg characterizes her revelations not as visions but as greetings, a term she uses to encompass gestures, verbal exchanges, and experiences perceived through multiple senses. Mechthild’s mysticism is thus best understood as a series of scenarios, the embodied nature of which cannot be fully contained by text. Using a performance studies approach, this paper identifies the traces of performance—textual prompts inextricable from their (explicit or implied, real or imagined) completion in physical and vocal acts—that can be found throughout Mechthild’s Flowing Light of the Godhead. How does Mechthild’s use of performance repertoires convey the mystical …

Disordered Women? The Hospital Sisters Of Mainz And Their Late Medieval Identities, Lucy C. Barnhouse

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Debates over the identity of women’s religious communities have exercised historians no less than late medieval canonists and officials. Even as the legal regulation of such communities increased, so, paradoxically, did the diversity of forms that such communities took. Although these trends have been the subject of much historical attention, the division of mixed-gender hospital communities which occurred across Europe in the thirteenth century has not hitherto been integrated into such studies. I attempt to redress this lacuna by examining the contested religious identity of the hospital sisters of Mainz. Forced to leave the mixed-gender staff of the city’s Heilig …

Experiencing Authority: The Wife Of Bath's Deaf Ear And The Flawed Exegesis Of St. Jerome, David Pedersen

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Although Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is among English literature’s most analyzed characters, scholars have been remarkably uninterested in one of her most unique traits: her deaf ear. Despite the fact that this disability is mentioned more often than any of her other physical characteristics, more even than the regularly discussed gap in her teeth, scholars have rarely spent more than a paragraph addressing the deafness, if they do so at all. This is no doubt due in part to the fact that scholars have assumed a symbolic link between the Wife’s inability to hear and her problematic scriptural exegesis, and …

Sexual And Erotic Transgression Through Aesthetic History: A Study Of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ronny F. Ford

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

This article examines the relationship between Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetic writing and history, especially in regards to how he explores sexual transgressions. The article begins with how aestheticism works in tangent with history to further these transgressions within a historical context and especially within the realm of Victorian Christianity. Next, Swinburne’s medieval aesthetics in “The Leper” will be analyzed in regards specifically necrophilia and the taking care of a leper, and how the writing of this poem was both a condemnation of Christianity and an accidental upholding of it. The violent homoeroticism and monstrous femininity of “Anactoria” are also looked …

Knights Of The Middle Ages, David Sikes

History Class Publications

As humans began to grow in numbers, they began to create civilizations for themselves in order to better survive, and as those civilizations grew, there came to be a divergence of roles for people to perform. The most universal of all these was the Warrior Elite, a class of people who were part of the lesser nobility and would function as officers and generals in times of conflict. For Japan it was the Samurai, for Iran it was the Persian Immortals, and for Europe in the 9^th to late 15^th century, there were the Knights. Let us look …

The Participation Of Women Believers And The Family In Later Languedocian Catharism, 1300-1308, William Grant Edmundson

Theses and Dissertations

This master’s thesis means to contribute to scholarship on the nature of lived Catharism in later medieval Languedoc. The study uses depositions from the inquisition registers of Jacques Fournier and Geoffroy d’Ablis, as well as Bernard Gui’s Liber sententiarum (book of sentences) to examine and compare how men, women, and families who were friends, relatives, accomplices, believers, and defenders of Cathar perfecti (the Cathar spiritual elite) participated in and supported the sect during the “Authié revival” from 1300 to 1308 by means of a case study on the Benet family from Montaillou and Ax.

The study argues that although the …

Conduct Becoming: Good Wives And Husbands In The Later Middle Ages, Tovah Bender

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Non-Muslim Integration Into The Early Islamic Caliphate Through The Use Of Surrender Agreements, Rachel Hutchings

History Undergraduate Honors Theses

In this honors thesis, I discuss the role of surrender agreements in the early Islamic caliphate and their evolution through the ninth century. Seen as a window into the developing relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, surrender agreements shed considerable light on the evolving conceptualization of non-Muslims’ place in dar al-Islam from the point of view of Islamic legal tradition and political theory. By defining the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in a framework that was agreed on by all parties and one that preserved the basic rights of non-Muslims, these agreements were remarkably effective in facilitating the incorporation of …

The Medieval British Legacy Of The Founding Myth Of Britain, Timothy J. Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Medieval British Legacy of the Founding Myth of Britain” examines the historiographical development of the founding myth of Britain between the 9th and 14th centuries. This study begins with an overview of the Latin, Anglo-Norman French, Middle English, and Middle Welsh texts that transmit this founding myth across medieval Britain. The stylistic features and the motivations of the authors who are adapting this myth are addressed but the main objective of this overview is to introduce the texts in question and to start establishing the intertextual relationships between these works. The textual examination of the historiographical development of the …

Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, And Religion In The Early Spanish Kingdoms, Jessica A. Boon

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The Witchcraft Sourcebook, Holle Canatella

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The French Of Medieval England: Essays In Honour Of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, S. C. Kaplan

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Imagined Communities: Constructing Collective Identities In Medieval Europe, Charles-Louis Morand-Metivier

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

"Le Bone Florence Of Rome": A Critical Edition And Facing Translation Of A Middle English Romance Analogous To Chaucer's "Man Of Law's Tale", Brendan O'Connell

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Peace And Penance In Late Medieval Italy, Janine Larmon Peterson

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The Sight Of Semiramis: Medieval And Early Modern Narratives Of The Babylonian Queen, Victoria E. H. Walker

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The Aesthetics Of Storytelling And Literary Criticism As Mythological Ritual: The Myth Of The Human Tragic Hero, Intertextual Comparisons Between The Heroes And Monsters Of Beowulf And The Anglo-Saxon Exodus, Daniel Stoll

Undergraduate Honors Theses

For thousands of years, people have been hearing, reading, and interpreting stories and myths in light of their own experience. To read a work by a different author living in a different era and setting, people tend to imagine works of literature to be something they are not. To avoid this fateful tendency, I hope to elucidate what it means to read a work of literature and interpret it: love it to the point of wanting to foremost discuss its excellence of being a piece of art. Rather than this being a defense, I would rather call it a musing, …

Imperial Ladies Of The Ottonian Dynasty: Women And Rule In Tenth-Century Germany, Janna Bianchini

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Fragments For A History Of Vanishing Humanism, Heather Blatt

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Royal And Elite Households In Medieval And Early Modern Europe: More Than Just A Castle, Elena Woodacre

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Chivalry And The Knight, Kyle Burrow

History Class Publications

What does it mean to have honor? Cultures from across the world have asked this question for millennia, and most of them have come up with very violent answers. Probably the most recognizable form of honorable conduct that we see in history is the idea of chivalry. Born in the Middle Ages, this idea bloomed in a troubled time, when wars were a pretty common occurrence, and the upper class was starting to need to justify their existence-- or distract the population with another shiny crusade. This is where chivalry comes in. At first, it was little more than a …

Between The Judean Desert And Gaza: Asceticism And The Monastic Communities Of Palestine In The Sixth Century, Austin Mccray

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The dissertation focuses on the religious culture of Christian monasticism in sixth-century Palestine. Rather than see the monastic communities of the Judean Desert, just to the east of Jerusalem, and those around Gaza as two independent monastic regions, as much scholarship has done, the dissertation focuses on the common threads that can be seen in the monastic teachings and idealized ascetic practices in the literature of the area. This dissertation reveals ways to redefine the boundaries between the monastic communities of Palestine during the sixth century as well as emphasizes the continuities between the monks of the Judean Desert and …