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Full-Text Articles in Medieval History
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 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 …
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 …
"A Meruelous Thinge!": Elizabeth Of Spalbeek, Christina The Astonishing, And Performative Self-Abjection In Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Douce 114, Murrielle Michaud
"A Meruelous Thinge!": Elizabeth Of Spalbeek, Christina The Astonishing, And Performative Self-Abjection In Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms Douce 114, Murrielle Michaud
Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)
Contributing to the spirited discussion regarding feminist and pro-feminine readings of Middle English hagiography, this dissertation challenges the tradition of grouping accounts of medieval holy women into a single genre that relies on stereotypes of meekness and obedience. I argue that fifteenth-century England saw a pro-feminine literary movement extolling the virtues of women who engaged in what I term “performative self-abjection,” a form of vicious self-renunciation and grotesque asceticism based on Julia Kristeva's model of the abject. The corollary of women's performative self-abjection is ex-gratia spiritual authority, public recognition, and independence, emphasized in the English corpus of fifteenth-century women’s hagiography. …
Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse
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 …
Re-Writing English Identity: Medieval Historians Of Anglo-Norman Britain, Teresa Marie Lopez
Re-Writing English Identity: Medieval Historians Of Anglo-Norman Britain, Teresa Marie Lopez
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation uses post-colonial and narrative theories to examine the historiographic tradition of twelfth-century England. This investigation explores the idea of nationhood in pre-modern England and the relationship between history and romance in post-Conquest historical writings. I analyze how Geoffrey of Monmouth, Henry of Huntingdon Geffrei Gaimar, and Laʒamon imagine and narrate the explicit changes to the ruling elite in twelfth-century England, and how this process constructs their idea of “Englishness.”
Old English Manuscripts In The Early Age Of Print: Matthew Parker And His Scribes, Robert Scott Bevill
Old English Manuscripts In The Early Age Of Print: Matthew Parker And His Scribes, Robert Scott Bevill
Doctoral Dissertations
Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern …
“The Bedroom And The Barnyard: Zoomorphic Lust Through Territory, Procedure, And Shelter In ‘The Miller’S Tale’” & Haunchebones, Danielle N. Byington
“The Bedroom And The Barnyard: Zoomorphic Lust Through Territory, Procedure, And Shelter In ‘The Miller’S Tale’” & Haunchebones, Danielle N. Byington
Undergraduate Honors Theses
“The Bedroom and the Barnyard: Zoomorphic Lust Through Territory, Procedure, and Shelter in ‘The Miller’s Tale’” is an academic endeavor that takes Chaucer’s zoomorphic metaphors and similes and analyzes them in a sense that reveals the chaos of what is human and what is animal tendency. The academic work is expressed in the adjunct creative project, Haunchebones, a 10-minute drama that echoes the tale and its zoomorphic influences, while presenting the content in a stylized play influenced by Theatre of the Absurd and artwork from the medieval and early renaissance period.
The Ethics Of Mourning: The Role Of Material Culture And Public Politics In The 'Book Of The Duchess' And The 'Pearl' Poem, Tarren Andrews
The Ethics Of Mourning: The Role Of Material Culture And Public Politics In The 'Book Of The Duchess' And The 'Pearl' Poem, Tarren Andrews
Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers
This project is a socio-historic analysis of two late 14th century dream visions: Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and the Pearl poem. Utilizing Robert Pogue Harrison’s concept of objectifying grief through ritualized communal mourning, this thesis examines the ways in which mourning literature functioned as consolatory device, and a form of public performance for the powerful patrons who commissioned the pieces. By engaging with pre-existing communities of grief, material culture, and courtly discourse these poems perform the work of mourning while simultaneously enacting modes of public performativity that stress the ethics of grieving, and suggest that, for royal patrons, …
Welsh Manipulations Of The Matter Of Britain, Timothy J. Nelson
Welsh Manipulations Of The Matter Of Britain, Timothy J. Nelson
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
"Welsh Manipulations of the Matter of Britain" examines the textual relationships between Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae and the Welsh Brut y Brenhinedd in the Cotton Cleopatra manuscript. This thesis initially provides an overview of the existing scholarship surrounding the Welsh translations of Geoffrey's Historia with a specific focus on the Cotton Cleopatra Brut. The textual examination of the two histories begins with an extended commentary on the general textual variations between the two texts before concentrating on the specific changes that were made in the Cotton Cleopatra to reflect the adapter's pro-Welsh nationalistic and political biases. The general …