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Full-Text Articles in Medieval History

Outlaws And Traitors: Justifying Rebellion In The Old French Epic Of Revolt, Klayton Tietjen Aug 2022

Outlaws And Traitors: Justifying Rebellion In The Old French Epic Of Revolt, Klayton Tietjen

Doctoral Dissertations

The plot of many chansons de geste hinges on acts that would have been considered treasonable by medieval legal custom. Yet despite conspicuously treasonous behavior, rebel characters remain the heroes of the tales. Coming to an understanding of the esoteric way that medieval poets and their audiences would have perceived the difference between rebel characters and traitor characters is the pursuit of this study. Through an investigation of the narrative logic and poetic details of epic poems like Girart de Vienne and other chansons de geste, the divergence between treachery and rebellion can be shown to reside in narrative …


Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building, Amanda Greene May 2022

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 …


The Siege Of Calais During The Hundred Years War: An English Perspective, 1344-1347, Jordan J. Bruso May 2022

The Siege Of Calais During The Hundred Years War: An English Perspective, 1344-1347, Jordan J. Bruso

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the siege and capture of the port city of Calais in 1347 by King Edward III of England (1312-1377) during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). The capture of Calais was the culminating event of King Edward III’s 1346-7 military campaign in Normandy and France. This victory provided the English military with a strategically strong foothold on the European continent to conduct future military and economic operations. This thesis blends the methodological approach of “old military history” from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries with “new military history” beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century in an …


The Long Investiture Controversy: Western Europe's Power Struggle Between Church And State (494-1598), Kieran Vrklan May 2022

The Long Investiture Controversy: Western Europe's Power Struggle Between Church And State (494-1598), Kieran Vrklan

History | Senior Theses

Conflicts between the Catholic Church and European monarchs are nothing new. Foremost among this timeless conflict is the Investiture Controversy, beginning in 1076 due to a feud between Pope Gregory VII and King Henry IV of Germany and ending in 1122 with the Concordat of Worms. Monarchs were appointing bishops and abbots, a job meant to be for the Pope. The Concordat sought to alleviate the conflict by stating the Church had the sole ability to select the bishops and appoint abbots of monasteries. However, this crisis continued centuries after as monarchs sought to appoint, or publicly support, clergy to …


The Effects Of Regional Separatism On Late Roman Identity In Fourteenth-Century Byzantium, Evangelos Zarkadas May 2022

The Effects Of Regional Separatism On Late Roman Identity In Fourteenth-Century Byzantium, Evangelos Zarkadas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how tendencies of regional separatism affected the political and ethnic contexts of late Roman identity during the course of the fourteenth century in the Byzantine Roman Empire. Fourteenth-century Byzantium was characterized by political fragmentation, significant sociopolitical changes and alterations, and subsequently a crisis of the Roman identity. The major question that the research will answer is: who was considered to be a Roman during the fourteenth century, and what did it mean for someone to hold that identity? The thesis will focus on two major and important geographical areas in the fourteenth century: the Principality of Achaia …


'Geomorlic' Or 'Eorlic?' Uncovering Early English Emotional Communities In "The Wanderer," "Deor," And "The Wife’S Lament", Hunter Phillips May 2022

'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 …


Unearthing The Witch: Reckoning With Gender, Magic, And The Unusual Dead Within Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burials, Samantha Melvin Apr 2022

Unearthing The Witch: Reckoning With Gender, Magic, And The Unusual Dead Within Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burials, Samantha Melvin

Student Research Submissions

The fifth to seventh centuries CE, or the Migration Period, marked the development of Anglo-Saxon culture and society in England. The early Anglo-Saxons are known largely through their material culture and mortuary practices, left behind in medieval cemeteries that twist their way across the English landscape. The remains of early Anglo-Saxons tell rich and interesting histories about past peoples, but within the broader landscapes of these cemeteries are deviant burials. These are burials that are specifically typified as ones that ‘deviate’ from the norm, usually indicating that the inhumed individual was punished in death for actions committed in life. These …


Silver, Ships And Soil: Gift-Giving In Medieval Icelandic Sagas, Emma Eubank Apr 2022

Silver, Ships And Soil: Gift-Giving In Medieval Icelandic Sagas, Emma Eubank

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through applying anthropological theory to gift exchange in medieval Icelandic sagas, we can uncover a wealth of information about the construction and reinforcement of gender, power, and value. This study incorporates Mauss, Sahlins, and Graeber alongside other theorists to analyze how the narrators of Egil's Saga, The Saga of Grettir the Strong, and Gisli Sursson's Saga perceived a past Iceland.


Barbarians & Heretics: Anti-Greek And Anti-Latin Sentiments In Crusade-Era Chronicles, 1096-1204, Ryan Saputo Jan 2022

Barbarians & Heretics: Anti-Greek And Anti-Latin Sentiments In Crusade-Era Chronicles, 1096-1204, Ryan Saputo

Honors Theses and Capstones

Historians have debated the role of stereotypes and hostile language in the diversion of the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople mostly through the outdated "Clash of Civilizations" lens. This work investigates the role of hostile stereotypes in both Western and Byzantine narrative histories discussing the first four crusades through a deep textual and literary analysis. This work argues that contemporary narrative histories from the first four crusades demonstrate that virulently hostile attitudes abounded in both Byzantine and Western sources, and that these attitudes greatly affected diplomatic and political decision making during Byzantine-Crusader interactions from 1096-1204. This work's close textual examination of …


Accommodation And Coping In Medieval Catholic England: A Historical Dramaturgy Casebook For The Chester Mystery Cycle’S Play 14: Christ At The House Of Simon The Leper, Christ And The Moneylenders, And Judas’ Plot, Andrew J. Roberge Jan 2022

Accommodation And Coping In Medieval Catholic England: A Historical Dramaturgy Casebook For The Chester Mystery Cycle’S Play 14: Christ At The House Of Simon The Leper, Christ And The Moneylenders, And Judas’ Plot, Andrew J. Roberge

Senior Projects Spring 2022

In this historically focused dramaturgy casebook for the medieval Catholic Chester Mystery Cycle's Play 14, Christ at the House of Simon the Leper, Christ and the Moneylenders, and Judas’ Plot, I offer suggestions for Play 14's production as it might have appeared in the cycle's final year of performance, 1575. I contextualize and grapple with the play's antisemitisms, and also offer a brief history of antisemitism in medieval Europe. I also analyze Play 14 and the Chester Mystery Cycle for their rhetorical appeals to the medieval vernacular language, contexts, and events, as well as their anachronistic temporal and geographic …


The Reformist Exemplum Of The Monastic Bishop In Bede's Ecclesiastical History Of The English People, Christopher Kelm Jan 2022

The Reformist Exemplum Of The Monastic Bishop In Bede's Ecclesiastical History Of The English People, Christopher Kelm

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Throughout his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, Bede displays a recurring interest in and admiration for the lives of bishops who also live as monks. The reason for this is better understood in the context of Bede’s Letter to Egbert, written a few years after the completion of the Historia, and a few months before Bede’s death. In the Letter, Bede complains of contemporary Northumbrian bishops who lack any personal discipline and who fail to adequately provide pastoral care for their oversized dioceses, while they yet demand excessive tributes from the laity; he also laments the presence of “false monasteries,” which …