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Full-Text Articles in History

Recognizing Traps And Frightening Wolves: Foxes And Lions As A Representative Of Machiavellian Political Ideology In Shakespeare’S Comedies, Grace A. Powell Apr 2024

Recognizing Traps And Frightening Wolves: Foxes And Lions As A Representative Of Machiavellian Political Ideology In Shakespeare’S Comedies, Grace A. Powell

Student Scholar Showcase

While William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets have been discussed time and time again over the past few centuries, one topic that has been less traversed is the connection between his Comedies and Niccolò Machiavelli’s political ideologies. This project will explore references of lions and foxes in Shakespeare’s Comedies and the leaders and monarchs within them to determine how beliefs about Machiavelli’s political ideology influenced Shakespeare’s literature and became symbols for leadership and power. This project will be important for gaining historical context on Machiavellian political discourse and how it was represented in the contemporary dramatic literature of William Shakespeare. I …


Homoerotic Medievalism: Looking At Queer Desire In The Homosocial Relationships Of Chaucer’S “The Knight’S Tale” And Fletcher And Shakespeare’S The Two Noble Kinsmen, Juan P. Espinosa Mar 2022

Homoerotic Medievalism: Looking At Queer Desire In The Homosocial Relationships Of Chaucer’S “The Knight’S Tale” And Fletcher And Shakespeare’S The Two Noble Kinsmen, Juan P. Espinosa

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to explore queer interiority within the heteronormative social constructions of late medieval England. Queer interiority is not an occurrence of modernity, but rather a response to social constructions that date back to the Middle Ages. It is essential to account for queerness in the Middle Ages because authors like Chaucer promote the successive resurfacing of queer characters within heteronormative social constructions. Writing during the queer reign of Richard II, Chaucer constructs the interior identities of Palamon and Arcite as a reflection of the king and the political norms of England. Inspired by Chaucer, authors …


Richard's Bones: Inside The Body Of Richard Iii And The Twenty-First Century Discovery Of A Medieval King, Isabel M.R. Long May 2021

Richard's Bones: Inside The Body Of Richard Iii And The Twenty-First Century Discovery Of A Medieval King, Isabel M.R. Long

History Honors Theses

One does not simply find the long-lost bones of a fifteenth century monarch on the very first day in the very first trench of an archeological excavation, unless those bones belong to England's Richard III. Richard III, a monarch with a much-debated legacy, remains an enigma in part due to a scarcity of contemporary sources on his life. With the discovery of his remains in a parking lot in Leicester, England, scientific analysis of Richard's bones and the location of their burial provides new insights into his life and death, such as providing new information on the manner of his …


The Downfall Of Chivalry: Tudor Disregard For Medieval Courtly Literature, Jessica G. Downie Jan 2019

The Downfall Of Chivalry: Tudor Disregard For Medieval Courtly Literature, Jessica G. Downie

Honors Theses

In this thesis, I have examined the notion of the gradual demise of chivalric ideals throughout the late-Middle Ages and culminating in the sixteenth century, analyzing how and why the developments of the sixteenth century both enabled and required the English monarchy and the aristocracy to redefine social identities and values, public responsibilities, political duties, and national and religious power. This thesis addresses why the Tudor monarchs appear to have disregarded the examples of chivalric behavior championed by late-medieval writers like Sir Thomas Malory and Jean Froissart, and instead, relied on new works of literature that were more relevant forms …


Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse Jun 2017

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 …


Renaissance Retrospections: Tudor Views Of The Middle Ages, Sarah A. Kelen May 2013

Renaissance Retrospections: Tudor Views Of The Middle Ages, Sarah A. Kelen

Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

The Middle Ages provided an important, if complex, set of literary and historiographic models for early modern authors, although the early modern authors responded to the alien political, religious, and cultural landscape of medieval England through their more present ideological concerns. From Shakespeare's manipulation of his medieval source material to Protestant responses to medieval Catholicism, this collection of essays explores the ways that early modern English writers responded to the medieval English literary and historical record, dealing with topics such as historiographic bias, print history, intertextuality, and cultural history.