History Commons^™

Medieval Weathers: An Introduction, Michael J. Warren

Medieval Ecocriticisms

Introduction to the first volume of Medieval Ecocriticisms.

Everyday Arts: Craft, Labor, Performance, Irina Dumitrescu, Emma O. Bérat

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Introductory essay to volume 57, issue 1 of Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality.

Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …

Nineteenth- And Twentieth-Century Readings Of The Medieval Orient: Other Encounters, Liliana Sikorska

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the Victorian and post-Victorian periods. Analyzing the discourses on Muslims which originated in the European Middle Ages, the first part of this book discusses the troubled legacy of the encounters between the East and the West and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and fiction.

Drawing on the nineteenth-century models, the second part of the book looks at fictional and non-fictional works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century which re-established the “Oriental obsession,” stimulating …

Beauty, Real Or Apparent: Christian Kings, Muslim Artisans, And The Development Of An Imperial Image Through The Silk And Horticulture Industries In Sicily. (Ca. 1090-1190), Casey K. Brown

History ETDs

In the wake of the Norman conquest of Sicily in the second half of the eleventh century, the Mediterranean island housed a diverse collection of Greek, Latin, and Muslim communities. Norman kings chose Palermo to become the seat of Latin-Christian Sicilian government for its productivity and strategic location and included the island into the complex world of self-fashioning politics and exchange. For Sicilian and ‘foreign’ Muslims alike, the imperious pose Roger II and his successors held created a precarious balancing act between the real and imagined worlds of Sicily. The content of this thesis is primarily concerned with the impact …

Space, Image, And Reform In Early Modern Art: The Influence Of Marcia Hall, Arthur J. Difuria, Ian Verstegen

Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

The essays in Space, Image and Reform in Early Modern Art build on Marcia Hall's seminal contributions in several categories crucial for Renaissance studies, especially the spatiality of the church interior, the altarpiece's facture and affectivity, the notion of artistic style, and the controversy over images in the era of Counter Reform. Accruing the advantage of critical engagement with a single paradigm, this volume better assesses its applicability and range. The book works cumulatively to provide blocks of theoretical and empirical research on issues spanning the function and role of images in their contexts over two centuries. Relating Hall's investigations …

Guþcwen And Ides Ellenrof – The Old English Warrior Woman As Role Model For Female Characters In Tolkien’S Works, Flora Sophie Lemburg

Journal of Tolkien Research

This paper examines the connection between the motif of the Old English warrior woman and Tolkien’s female characters. It provides a critique of Leslie Donovan’s paper “The valkyrie reflex in J. R. R. Tolkien´s The Lord of the Rings: Galadriel, Shelob, Éowyn and Arwen” and contrasts previous research on Tolkien’s female characters focussed either on gender-studies or on a “Germanic” influence with a more direct and specific connection between Medieval English and his works. The motif of the Old English warrior woman is established by investigating the female characters Judith, Elene, and Juliana from the Old English poems Judith, …

Mes 160: Classical Islamic Literature & Civilization, Kirsten Beck

Open Educational Resources

This open resource includes a syllabus, class schedule, grading rubrics, and guidelines/examples for digital poetry annotation.

The course website can be found here: http://mes160.social.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/

In this course, we will take a journey through history, literature, and ideas, traveling through Islamic civilization from 600-1250 CE. We will learn about and contemplate the major events and concerns of Islamic civilization, from the dawn of Islam through the expansions, transformations, and fragmentations of Islamic empires, up until the end of the 13th century. Works of Islamic literature from a variety of genres will fuel our journey. Along the way, we will learn how …

Medieval Infertility: Treatments, Cures, And Consequences, Zia Simpson

The Forum: Journal of History

Since the first civilizations emerged, reproductive ability has been one of the most prominent elements in assessing a woman’s value to society. Other characteristics such as beauty, intelligence, and wealth may have been granted comparable consequence, but those are arbitrary and improvable. Fertility is genetic, and for centuries it was beyond human control. Among the medieval European nobility, fertility held even greater power. The absence of an heir could, either directly or indirectly, bring about war, economic depression, and social disorder. Catholicism provided a refuge by allowing barren women to retain their hopes, while simultaneously enriching Rome’s coffers. Other women …

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Thinking Queerly: Medievalism, Wizardry, And Neurodiversity In Young Adult Texts, Jes Battis

Premodern Transgressive Literatures

Why do we love wizards? Where do these magical figures come from? Thinking Queerly traces the wizard from medieval Arthurian literature to contemporary YA adaptations. By exploring the link between Merlin and Harry Potter, or Morgan la Fey and Sabrina, readers will see how the wizard offers spaces of hope and transformation for young readers. In particular, this book examines how wizards think differently, and how this difference can resonate with both LGBTQ and neurodivergent readers, who’ve been told they don’t fit in.

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 …

The Wilderness Experience: Imitatio Christi And The Demonic Encounters Of Italian Holy Women Of The Quattrocento, Amy Huesman

Doctoral Dissertations

During the fifteenth century, when Christian spirituality had become increasingly feminized, a number of women in the northern and central regions of the Italian peninsula chose to embrace fully the vita apostolica, and certain of them led lives of such austere piety in imitatio Christi that they were later deemed worthy of beatification or canonization. They were sante vive—living saints—revered for their miraculous powers and regarded as agents of the divine. These women took vows as nuns or associated themselves with a religious order as tertiaries, and they dedicated themselves to strict lives of prayer, extreme fasting, and …

The Failure Of Chivalry, Courtesy, And Knighthood Post-Wwi As Represented In David Jones’S In Parenthesis, Taylor L. Hubbard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes David Jones’s In Parenthesis to demonstrate the failed notion of chivalry, courtesy, and knighthood in modernity during and after the war. Jones’s semi-autobiographical prose poem recounting his experiences of WWI was published in 1937, nineteen years after the war ended. Jones applied the concepts of chivalry, courtesy, and knighthood to his experiences during WWI through In Parenthesis. Jones used these concepts, which originated in the classical period and the Middle Ages, to demonstrate how they have changed over time, especially given the events of WWI. The best way for Jones to demonstrate the impact of WWI …

Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Building And Using A Linked Open Data Environment For Medieval And Renaissance Manuscript Studies, Lynn Ransom, Toby Burrows

Digital Initiatives Symposium

“Mapping Manuscript Migrations” is a digital humanities project that brings together three distinct data sets about the histories of more than 215,000 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts for browsing, searching, and visualization. Four leading institutions from Great Britain, France, Finland, and the United States collaborated on this project, pooling their expertise in Semantic Web technologies and medieval manuscript curation and research, as well as contributing their own data from the three contrasting datasets. The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, the Medieval Manuscripts Catalogue at the University of Oxford, and the Bibale database from the Institut de recherche …

As Above, So Below: Italian Amuletic Practices Following The Black Death, Danielle Pigeon

Art History Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the production of amuletic rings in the Italian peninsula following the arrival of Yersinia pestis during the mid-fourteenth century. By examining patterns of ornamentation on a selection of Italian rings, I establish connections to the trauma experienced by individuals left in the wake of the plague and argue that these objects offered a sacralized model of protective adornment to counteract the threat of a fatal and seemingly unstoppable illness. Italian amuletic rings can thereby be read as a material response to the anxieties of mass death and bodily horrors that accompanied outbreaks of the Black Death.

The …

Uprooting Medievalism: Ya And The Future Of Fantasy, Zoe Phillips

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

This thesis looks at the development of the young adult neo-medieval fantasy genre, measuring famous works from the Medieval period against works such as Tolkien's, to examine the impact of female protagonists and female authors on the genre and readers alike as neo-medieval fantasy continues to gain in popularity. Works examined include: Beowulf, Lanval, Le Roman de Silence, The Hobbit, Uprooted, and The Hero and the Crown.

“Writing History, Writing Trauma” : The Rape Of Igerna In The Medieval Brut Narratives, Gillian Adler

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

In the Brut narratives of medieval historiography, male heroic success and specifically the birth of Arthur are predicated upon the rape of Igerna. A comparative approach to the Tintagel episode across several of these narratives reveals how the emphasis on romance, magic, and nation-building function to validate sexual assault and elide Igerna’s experience. Ultimately, the repetition entailed in translatio studii, specifically the transfer that takes place within history-writing, reinforces the silencing of the survivor’s voice. This repetition lends trauma to the reading experience or creates the risk that readers become inured to the rape.

Remix The Manuscript: A Chronicle Of Digital Experiments (2015-2020), Michelle R. Warren

Other Faculty Materials

Remix the Manuscript is a digital humanities research project centered around a single medieval manuscript, the Dartmouth Brut Chronicle (Rauner Codex MS 003183). This ongoing experiment with digital tools uses this one example to explore one broad question: How are the digital tools available today determining what we will know 100 years from now about things that happened 1000 years ago?

The Development Of Education In Medieval Iceland, Ryder Patzuk-Russell

Northern Medieval World

This book investigates the institutions and practices of education which lay behind medieval Icelandic literature, as well as behind many other aspects of medieval Icelandic culture and society. By bringing together a broad spectrum of sources, including sagas, law codes, and grammatical treatises, it addresses the history of education in medieval Iceland from multiple perspectives.

Reading The Old Norse-Icelandic Maríu Saga In Its Manuscript Contexts, Daniel Najork

Northern Medieval World

Maríu saga, the Old Norse-Icelandic life of the Virgin Mary, survives in nineteen manuscripts. In the extant manuscripts Maríu saga rarely exists in the codex by itself. This study restores the saga to its manuscript contexts in order to better understand the meaning of the text within its manuscript matrix, why it was copied in the specific manuscripts it was, and how it was read and used by the different communities that preserved the manuscripts.

A Guide For Instructors And Students: Mld Mapping Project, Maryanne Kowaleski

Digital Pedagogy: Medieval Londoners Mapping Project

This site contains instructions and other materials for a linked data digital project developed by Dr Maryanne Kowaleski and Ms Camila Marcone for two Fordham University courses in Fall 2020. The assignment required students to structure information found in medieval London property records into a spreadsheet that had columns corresponding to fields in the Medieval Londoners Database (MLD), an online searchable database of people who lived in London from c. 1190 to to c. 1520. Each person in the deed was noted in a separate row or record in the spreadsheet. Students next summarized the data about each property into …

A. Part I Mld Mapping Assignment And Instructions, Maryanne Kowaleski, Camila Marcone

Digital Pedagogy: Medieval Londoners Mapping Project

Notes the aims of the assignment, lists resources to help students do research on the deeds, and gives detailed instructions for A) structuring the data about people in the deed into the MLD Mapping Sheet and B) preparing the data about the property for entry into the online mapping platform, Layers of London, using the Layers of London Grid.

2020 Medieval Object Assignment And Instructions, Maryanne Kowaleski

Digital Pedagogy: Omeka Medieval London

Assignment with instructions on researching the medieval object and loading metadata and images into the Omeka digital platform for each item and exhibition.

F. Layers Of London Grid Template, Maryanne Kowaleski

Digital Pedagogy: Medieval Londoners Mapping Project

Empty grid form to be filled out with data on each deed; the data entered are then transferred to an online Layers of London record.

B. Part Ii Mld Mapping Instructions, Maryanne Kowaleski, Camila Marcone

Digital Pedagogy: Medieval Londoners Mapping Project

Instructions for accessing and creating a record in the Layers of London digital mapping platform.

Playing At The Crossroads Of Religion And Law: Historical Milieu, Context And Curriculum Hooks In Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter presents the use of Lost & Found – a purpose-built tabletop to mobile game series – to teach medieval religious legal systems. The series aims to broaden the discourse around religious legal systems and to counter popular depiction of these systems which often promote prejudice and misnomers. A central element is the importance of contextualizing religion in period and locale. The Lost & Found series uses period accurate depictions of material culture to set the stage for play around relevant topics – specifically how the law promoted collaboration and sustainable governance practices in Fustat (Old Cairo) in twelfth-century …

Icelandic Folklore And The Cultural Memory Of Religious Change, Eric Shane Bryan

English and Technical Communication Faculty Research & Creative Works

This book attempts to understand the origins and development of religious belief in Iceland and greater Scandinavia through the lenses of five carefully selected Icelandic folktales collected in Iceland during the nineteenth century. Each of these five stories has a story of its own: a historical and cultural context, a literary legacy, influences from beliefs of all kinds (orthodox and heterodox, elite or lay), and modalities (oral or written) by which the story was told. These factors leave an imprint -- sometimes discernible, sometimes not -- upon the story, and when that imprint is readable, the legacies and influences upon …

Wild Wales: How Cultural Discrimination Transformed Merlin From Brittonic Legends To French Arthurian Romances, Viveca Calista Lawrie

Senior Projects Spring 2021

The legend of King Arthur and his knights of the round table is one of the best-known stories in the Western world. Generally people tend to associate Arthurian legend with fifteenth-century English writing or French romances, but in reality, Arthurian legend has its origins in Brittonic oral tradition. Merlin, specifically, represents the concepts of Brittonic paganism and wildness more than any other Arthurian character. The changes made in the character and the narrative of Merlin, from Brittonic legend to Latin writing and then to French romances, reflect a political and cultural shift in Britain and France. An examination of Merlin …