Medieval Studies Commons^™

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 …

Flawed Knighthood And Kingship In The Medieval Literary Tradition, Leta Bressin

Theses & Honors Papers

Throughout the corpus of medieval literature, especially fourteenth-century romance, chivalry plays a significant role as a social construct for gauging both successful and disastrous kingship. For kings like Henry II, Richard I, Edward III, Richard II, Henry IV, and Edward IV, the literature of the time offers insights on the difficulties of chivalry and kingship in representation and practice. Production of vernacular chivalric romance literature evolved considerably in the thirteenth and fourteenth-centuries in England. Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Knight’s Tale, and the anonymous Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure offer a stinging critique of chivalry potentially aimed at Richard II, …

Chosen Champions: Medieval And Early Modern Heroes As Postcolonial Reactions To Tensions Between England And Europe, Jessica Trant Labossiere

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project explores connections between hero and history, text and context. By engaging Postcolonial theories about the roles that invasion and oppression, play in developing national identity and how colonized people respond to such encounters in literature, I examine how experiences of invasion and hostile interaction as represented in medieval and early modern English literature influenced the creation of specific heroic values.

In my first chapter, I analyze The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf as exemplars of the Anglo-Saxon culture, observing that Byrhtnoth and Beowulf work as fictional embodiments of a fantasy of power: men of super-human strength and exceptional …