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Articles 1 - 30 of 88
Full-Text Articles in Medieval History
Recognizing Traps And Frightening Wolves: Foxes And Lions As A Representative Of Machiavellian Political Ideology In Shakespeare’S Comedies, Grace A. Powell
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 …
Remix The Manuscript: Transcription Tools Dataset 2.0, Michelle Warren, Arielle Feuerstein
Remix The Manuscript: Transcription Tools Dataset 2.0, Michelle Warren, Arielle Feuerstein
Other Faculty Materials
The document posted here is an annotated dataset of digital tools for transcribing handwritten manuscripts. Release 2.0 was created in 2022-23 by Arielle Feuerstein as part of the ongoing project "Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of Digital Experiments.” The file attached here contains the dataset as completed on June 28, 2023 along with credits for prior contributors.
Legends Of Light: Crafting Middle Grade Fantasy In The Tradition Of Catholic Philosophy And Medieval Visual Culture, Bernadette Lamb
Legends Of Light: Crafting Middle Grade Fantasy In The Tradition Of Catholic Philosophy And Medieval Visual Culture, Bernadette Lamb
MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture
This essay promotes the writing and illustrating of middle grade literature that mirrors the wonder-inducing experiences of leafing through an illuminated manuscript and stepping into a Gothic cathedral. An examination of Catholic medieval visual culture moves into a discussion on its underlying philosophy and theology, which are profoundly centered on relational healing and the dignity of the human person. Christian writers including St. Pope John Paul II, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Josef Pieper, Madeline L’Engle, Dr. Bob Schuchts, Makoto Fujimura, and Andrew Peterson inform an exploration of mercy, forgiveness, and love as self-gift in the context of illustration and storytelling …
Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building, Amanda Greene
Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building, Amanda Greene
MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture
This critical essay accompanies and describes my thesis project, Medievalia Miscellany, a magazine for middle-grade readers which explores the world of medieval fantasy through art, comics, stories, and activities. Throughout the essay, I use my own term “archaeological upcycling” to discuss and explore a variety of relationships between ideas of parts and a whole. I then use it to characterize the way stories are created out of many different parts and how these parts help a reader to relate to both the world of the story and the world in which they live. I describe the genre of medieval fantasy …
'Geomorlic' Or 'Eorlic?' Uncovering Early English Emotional Communities In "The Wanderer," "Deor," And "The Wife’S Lament", Hunter Phillips
'Geomorlic' Or 'Eorlic?' Uncovering Early English Emotional Communities In "The Wanderer," "Deor," And "The Wife’S Lament", Hunter Phillips
Undergraduate Honors Theses
In my honors thesis, I uncover what I consider to be a poetic trope governing emotional expression in three of the Old English 'elegies.' Narrators in these poems engage the emotional values of the Old English "Heroic Tradition"-namely the value of keeping silent in the face of adversity-through abstracted and idealized figures like the 'eorl' (warrior/man). The invocation in these poems of the eorl and eorl-like figures such as a hlaford (lord) or geong mon (young man) functions as a poetic trope that signals the speakers engagement with the heroic emotional community represented by that figure. I name this …
Reimagining History Dataset 3.0, Michelle R. Warren, Neil Weijer
Reimagining History Dataset 3.0, Michelle R. Warren, Neil Weijer
Other Faculty Materials
The Middle English prose Brut chronicle survives in nearly two hundred manuscripts. This corpus has been the subject of extensive study for more than a hundred years. The most recent research, however, has turned out to be the most fragile. In 2017, the multiyear digital humanities project “Imaging History: Perspectives on Late Medieval Vernacular Historiography” disappeared from the live Internet, only a decade after its publication. Shortly afterwards, we began a project called "Re-Imagining History"--to create a new dataset of information about the Brut manuscript corpus and learn how digital infrastructure might shape the production and preservation of historical data. …
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 …
The Gaelic Background Of Old English Poetry Before Bede, Colin A. Ireland
The Gaelic Background Of Old English Poetry Before Bede, Colin A. Ireland
Richard Rawlinson Center Series
Seventh-century Gaelic law-tracts delineate professional poets (filid) who earned high social status through formal training. These poets cooperated with the Church to create an innovative bilingual intellectual culture in Old Gaelic and Latin. Bede described Anglo-Saxon students who availed themselves of free education in Ireland at this culturally dynamic time. Gaelic scholars called sapientes (“wise ones”) produced texts in Old Gaelic and Latin that demonstrate how Anglo-Saxon students were influenced by contact with Gaelic ecclesiastical and secular scholarship. Seventh-century Northumbria was ruled for over 50 years by Gaelic-speaking kings who could access Gaelic traditions. Gaelic literary traditions provide …
Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat
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 …
Guþcwen And Ides Ellenrof – The Old English Warrior Woman As Role Model For Female Characters In Tolkien’S Works, Flora Sophie Lemburg
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, …
“Writing History, Writing Trauma” : The Rape Of Igerna In The Medieval Brut Narratives, Gillian Adler
“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.
Insistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics Of Patient Griselda, Susan Signe Morrison
Insistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics Of Patient Griselda, Susan Signe Morrison
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This essay argues for silence as a dynamic actant and vibrant rhetoric. While Walter commits slow violence against her, Griselda in Chaucer's Clerk's Tale resists the predatory practice of exploiting nonhuman objects, which, within misogyny, women embody. Ultimately framed within an ecocritical paradigm, this essay is grounded in lessons from trauma studies concerning silence, as well as new materialist and ecocritical approaches. Whether focusing on emotional distress, environmental devastation, or the agency of materiality, these critical approaches cohere by making manifest and heard what has been repressed, silenced, or overlooked. Griselda writes her own narrative, patiently and resiliently enacting agency …
Remix The Manuscript: A Chronicle Of Digital Experiments (2015-2020), Michelle R. Warren
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?
Barnacle Geese And Sky Burials: Relativism In The Travels Of Sir John Mandeville, Akasha L. Khalsa
Barnacle Geese And Sky Burials: Relativism In The Travels Of Sir John Mandeville, Akasha L. Khalsa
Conspectus Borealis
As a medieval travel narrative, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was immensely popular for everyone from bookworms to world travelers in 14th and 15th century Europe. Given its popularity, and the period in which it was produced, one might expect the fictitious travelogue to display an incredible level of intolerance towards the various peoples and cultures it depicts. However, the Travels frequently surprises modern readers with its message of tolerance towards greater humanity, and its recognition of the universality of human experience as it is mirrored in the lives of people of different ethnic and cultural groups. In order …
Fabricated Muslim Identity, Female Agency, And Cultural Complicity: The Imperial Project Of Emaré, Amy Burge, Lydia Kertz
Fabricated Muslim Identity, Female Agency, And Cultural Complicity: The Imperial Project Of Emaré, Amy Burge, Lydia Kertz
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Extant in only one mid-fifteenth-century manuscript, the Middle English romance Emaré has nevertheless captivated modern scholars and readers. The majority of studies have focused on the text’s material culture, centred on the description of a luxurious cloth that takes up 10% of the poem. A recent global turn in medieval studies has consistently highlighted the role of medieval Europe in defining and supporting imperial projects, simultaneously challenging the Eurocentrism of medieval studies and the supposed neutrality of medieval European culture. This article brings Emaré into conversation with material culture and postcolonial critique to investigate the imperial politics of the text. …
The Wisdom Of Exeter: Anglo-Saxon Studies In Honor Of Patrick W. Conner, Edward J. Christie
The Wisdom Of Exeter: Anglo-Saxon Studies In Honor Of Patrick W. Conner, Edward J. Christie
Richard Rawlinson Center Series
This interdisciplinary volume collects original essays in literary criticism and literary theory, philology, codicology, metrics, and art history. Composed by prominent scholars in Anglo-Saxon studies, these essays honor the depth and breadth of Patrick W. Conner’s influence in our discipline. As a scholar, teacher, editor, administrator and innovator, Pat has contributed to Anglo-Saxon studies for four decades. It is hard to say which of his legacies is most profound.
‘Written In A Fair Hand’: The Living Tradition Of Medieval Scripts In J.R.R. Tolkien’S Calligraphy, Eduardo B. Kumamoto
‘Written In A Fair Hand’: The Living Tradition Of Medieval Scripts In J.R.R. Tolkien’S Calligraphy, Eduardo B. Kumamoto
Journal of Tolkien Research
This paper examines J.R.R. Tolkien’s calligraphic work in the light of the medieval scripts that possibly or certainly inspired him, aiming to demonstrate how his art was informed by the philological and paleographical dimensions. At first, we explore the context in which Tolkien’s calligraphic skills flourished. After that, the influence of the Anglo-Saxon Square Minuscule, the Insular Half-uncial, and the Uncial scripts is investigated by means of examples taken from Tolkien’s illustrations and manuscripts. The impact of the English Carolingian Minuscule, via Edward Johnston’s Foundational Hand, is also discussed. In the last section, the lettering in the maps prepared for …
The Magic Of Love: Love Magic In Medieval Romance, Dalicia Raymond
The Magic Of Love: Love Magic In Medieval Romance, Dalicia Raymond
English Language and Literature ETDs
This project examines authorial representations of the morality of three functions of love magic: to induce, to disrupt, and to facilitate love in twelfth- through fifteenth-century Middle High German, Old French, and Middle English romances. Using a cultural studies approach with close textual analysis and informed by gender studies, it investigates medieval romance authors’ discomfort with love inducing magic and asserts that this discomfort is a response to the magic’s violation of free will, a central tenet of medieval theology. I find that authors condemn love inducing magic but mark specific instances acceptable through explicit clarification of divine approval. Love …
Sexual And Erotic Transgression Through Aesthetic History: A Study Of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ronny F. Ford
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 …
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, …
Hell Hath No Appetite Like A Woman: Food Imagery In The Lives Of The Wife Of Bath And Margery Kempe, Rhone O'Hara
Hell Hath No Appetite Like A Woman: Food Imagery In The Lives Of The Wife Of Bath And Margery Kempe, Rhone O'Hara
Senior Theses and Projects
This thesis focuses on the medieval texts of Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” and The Book of Margery Kempe. Specifically it analyzes The Wife of Bath, as one of Chaucer’s most famous literary characters in The Canterbury Tales written in 1387 and Margery Kempe, a medieval mystic whose story is known as the first autobiography written in English in the 1432. Furthermore, this thesis explores how the Wife of Bath and Margery Kempe's relationships with literal and figurative food define their experiences as middle-class medieval wives. It is through food that the Wife of Bath and Margery …
A Space Of Her Own: Genderfluidity And Negotiation In The Life Of Christina Of Markyate, Meghan L. Nestel
A Space Of Her Own: Genderfluidity And Negotiation In The Life Of Christina Of Markyate, Meghan L. Nestel
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This paper draws on transgender studies and theories of gender performativity and genderfluidity to consider how twelfth-century holy woman Christina of Markyate resists traditional and third-gender binary policing. It argues that Christina is genderfluid, and that as a secular, masculinized, and religious virgin, she co-exists within and moves among multiple gender spaces that allow her to establish her own authority.
Imperatrix, Domina, Rex: Conceptualizing The Female King In Twelfth-Century England, Coral Lumbley
Imperatrix, Domina, Rex: Conceptualizing The Female King In Twelfth-Century England, Coral Lumbley
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This article draws on methods from transgender theory, historicist literary studies, and visual analysis of medieval sealing practices to show that Empress Matilda of England was controversially styled as a female king during her career in the early to mid twelfth century. While the chronicle Gesta Stephani castigates Matilda’s failure to engage in sanctioned gendered behaviors as she waged civil war to claim her inherited throne, Matilda’s seal harnesses both masculine and feminine signifiers in order to proclaim herself both king and queen. While Matilda’s transgressive gender position was targeted by her detractors during her lifetime, the obstinately transgender object …
"We Are Strangers In This Life": Theology, Liminality, And The Exiled In Anglo-Saxon Literature, Nathan John Haydon
"We Are Strangers In This Life": Theology, Liminality, And The Exiled In Anglo-Saxon Literature, Nathan John Haydon
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
In “‘We Are Strangers in this Life’: Theology, Liminality, and the Exiled in Anglo-Saxon Literature,” I analyze the theme of exile in the theological literature of the Anglo-Saxon era as a way of conveying the spiritual condition of eschatological separation. The anthropological theory of liminality will be applied in this dissertation as a way of contextualizing the existence of the exiled, and the multiple ways in which exile is enacted. The intervention of the theory of liminality in this dissertation offers a methodology and vocabulary for assessing what exile means in terms of a spiritual identity, how it operates in …
Demonic Pedagogy And The Teaching Saint: Voice, Body, And Place In Cynewulf's Juliana, Christina M. Heckman
Demonic Pedagogy And The Teaching Saint: Voice, Body, And Place In Cynewulf's Juliana, Christina M. Heckman
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
In Cynewulf’s Old English poem Juliana, the saint frames her encounters with her adversaries as pedagogical confrontations, refusing the lessons they attempt to “teach” her and ultimately adopting the identity of a teacher herself. These confrontations depend on three key tropes in the poem: Juliana’s voice, as a material manifestation of language deployed by the saint; her body, both as living body and as relic; and place, especially the place of the saint’s martyrdom and/or burial. Viewed through theories of material feminism, these tropes reveal diverse forms of agency in the poem, as both human and non-human agents make …
Chaucer's Pardoner: The Medieval Culture Of Cross-Dressing And Problems Of Religious Authority, Larissa Tracy
Chaucer's Pardoner: The Medieval Culture Of Cross-Dressing And Problems Of Religious Authority, Larissa Tracy
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
One of the most ambiguous and contentious characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales is the Pardoner, the last (and arguably worst) of the pilgrims described in the General Prologue. The Pardoner accused of being a gelding or a mare endowed with several effeminate traits, plays on multiple gendered associations—including that of a cross-dressing woman. Throughout the Canterbury Tales Chaucer manipulates gender expectations and assumptions in the figure of the Pardoner without fully clarifying the Pardoner’s sex, sexuality or gender, leaving the text open to potentially subversive interpretations. By the fourteenth century, cross-dressing was a relatively common literary motif, …
“A Drunken Cunt Hath No Porter”: Medieval Histories Of Intoxication And Consent, Carissa M. Harris
“A Drunken Cunt Hath No Porter”: Medieval Histories Of Intoxication And Consent, Carissa M. Harris
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This essay traces medieval representations of intoxication and consent and links them to contemporary cases, including Brock Turner’s 2016 rape trial and the 2017 slew of lawsuits filed against Baylor University. Through an examination of medieval texts from a range of genres, including the Biblical stories of Lot and Noah, the Digby Mary Magdalene play, proverbs, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue, the 1292 legal case of Isabella Plomet, and Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, this essay explores past views of gender, perpetrators, culpability, alcohol, and consent. It argues that victim-blaming those who have been assaulted while intoxicated has …
Englands Happie Queene: Female Rulers In Early English History, Emily Benes
Englands Happie Queene: Female Rulers In Early English History, Emily Benes
Honors Theses
This paper examines the historical records and later literature surrounding three early mythic and historical British queens: Albina, mythic founder of Albion; Cordelia, pre-Roman queen regnant in British legend; and Boudica, the British leader of a first-century CE rebellion against the Romans. My work focuses on who these queens were, what powers they were given, and the mythos around them. I examine when they appear in the historical record and when their stories are expanded upon, and how those stories were influenced by the political culture of England through the early seventeenth century. In particular, I examine English attitudes toward …
Passion Through Slander: Saintliness, Deviance, And Suffering By Speech In The Book Of Margery Kempe, Connor Yeck
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 …