Philosophy Commons^™

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The Good, The Bad, And The Violent: Analyzing Beowulf’S Heroic Displacement And Transgressive Violence During The Grendel Quest, Jessie Bonafede

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Heroic actions are often associated with altruistic feats of humanitarianism, but in Beowulf, the connection between heroism and performative acts of violence reveal significant complications concerning how the poem codifies violence for social honor. A central conflict arises with the poem’s contrasting presentation of Beowulf’s dominance and physical power before and during the Grendel quest with the relatively low social status he incurs amongst his maternal kin group, the Geats. In this paper, I use anthropological and sociological theories of collective violence and dominance versus prestige hierarchies to rethink how violence interplays with the poem’s treatment of lineage and other …

Hellish Indigestion: Consumption As Knowledge In Medieval Descensus Christi Accounts, Harley Joyce Campbell

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Present throughout medieval iconography and drama, the hellmouth relays a frightening glimpse of what awaits sinners after death. However, our perception of the hellmouth becomes complicated when we study these images in conjunction with Hell’s portrayal as a speaking character. Ascribing anthropomorphic qualities to Hell makes its theological implications more approachable for a non-clerical audience, effectively forming connections between human sinners and a figure of unimaginable monstrosity. This essay examines the medieval Latin Gospel of Nicodemus and its first Middle English descendant, the verse Digby Harrowing of Hell, in terms of how these texts describe the physiology of Hell …

The Fable As A Global Genre: Marie De France, Ulrich Bonerius, Don Juan Manuel, And Kalila And Dimna, Albrecht Classen

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As much as recent scholarship has tried to develop a new approach toward world or global literature, the essential problem continues that in those efforts simply writers and poets from the various countries and continents are placed side by side without any consideration of inter- and transdisciplinarity, if not shared meaning and critical exchange. Drawing from the tradition of medieval fable literature, however, we face a truly productive approach in recognizing what global literature could really entail since the various writers across the continents addressed, broadly speaking, the same issues and fundamentally agreed on the critical values in all of …

Humorous Spaces And Serious Magic In William Baldwin’S Beware The Cat, Ashley Jeanette Ecklund

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When spaces transform in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, the transition is marked with humor, consistently signaling magic to follow. As an amalgamation of folklore, including magic that manifests around, for, and through cats, Baldwin’s work offers adventure, laughter, and danger alike. Some cats are diabolical, worshiping or holding the soul of a witch; however, their wit constitutes a jocular contrast to that of our interior narrator, Maister Streamer, whose quotation above demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of St. Augustine’s beliefs. Though Beware The Cat was published at the start of the early modern period, the folklore it contains speaks …

Sir John Cheke, Chamberlain Of The Exchequer, 1552-53, James D. Alsop

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The most obscure aspect of Sir John Cheke’s public career is his tenure as a Chamberlain of the English Exchequer. This study confirms that Cheke’s chamberlainship was a sinecure, albeit one of prestige and profit. Attention is also paid to the three rising gentlemen who held office under Cheke: Robert Creswell, Roger Higham, and William Hunwyke.

Teaching Premodern Women And Gender, Lucy C. Barnhouse

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In her influential History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, Judith Bennett asked “Who’s afraid of the distant past?” Fifteen years after this book’s publication, the question remains relevant. Teaching the history of women and gender in the premodern world presents linked pedagogical challenges. Most students enter college with little to no background in premodern history. Many find premodern primary sources, when taught with the same pedagogical scaffolding as modern sources, inaccessible due to real or perceived strangeness. These challenges can be compounded by the challenges of teaching women’s and/or gender history. This roundtable addresses strategies for productive …

Visualizing Women: Teaching Modern Images And Medieval Texts About Pre-Modern Women, Esther Liberman Cuenca

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This paper examines two visual texts for teaching a course called “Saints, Wives and Witches” at the University of Houston-Victoria: Jennifer A. Rea’s graphic novel Perpetua’s Journey (Oxford, 2018), which illustrates the eponymous North African martyr’s third-century prison diary, and the film Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen (2009), directed by Margarethe von Trotta, who drew on feminist readings of Hildegard of Bingen’s writings for the purposes of dramatization. The course itself followed a chronology that took students from antiquity to the early modern period and was divided into thematic units that highlighted women’s intersecting identities with regards …

What She Said: Recovering Early Modern Women’S Experiences Through Court Records, Jennifer Mcnabb

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Much of the fame of early modern England’s church courts today is based on their reputation as “women’s courts.” Because ecclesiastical law allowed women to initiate suit and to be sued in their own names, the courts’ records are full of women’s words. But the task of discovering women’s experiences through these records is a methodologically complex one. Words attributed to women, for example, come to us courtesy of the male church court clerk, whose education and legal experience shaped the written record of legal oral proceedings. And while women filing suit gives the appearance of female agency, it was …

The Vanishing Lady: Mélusine, Emblems, And Jacques Yver’S Le Printemps D’Yver (1572), Joshua M. Blaylock

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In the opening pages of Le Printemps d’Yver (1572), the narrator evokes Mélusine, the cursed half-snake fairy queen, as the architect of the idyllic castle that serves as the locus amoenus of the novella collection. And yet, as suddenly as she appears, Mélusine vanishes from the text with only one other explicit reference to her at the transition point between the third and fourth novellas. While literary scholars have analyzed the two explicit references to Mélusine in Le Printemps as well as Yver’s emblematic prose, none has systematically explored the possibility that her presence pervades the novella collection in ways …

The Sparrow Hawk Castle - A Mostly Ignored Literary Motif Across The Cultures And The Centuries, Albrecht Classen

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Johann Schiltberger included a curious episode about the ‘Sparrow Hawk Mountain’ in his famous travelogue Reisebericht from 1427. This episode can be traced back to John Mandeville’s Travels in the German translation by Michel Velser. This study examines the similarities between Mandeville’s text and Schiltberger’s account, but then also the use of this motif in the tradition of the Melusine novel (Jean d’Arras and Thüring von Ringoltingen). Further attempts are made to identify sources for this episode Mandeville might have drawn from, including an Armenian chronicle and even the love treatise De amore by Andreas Capellanus.

St. Roch Military Marches In Wallonia: Memory, Commemoration, And Identity, 1866-1940, Erik Hadley

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Ritualized public processionals known as military saint marches thrive in popular memory and define local identity in Francophone Belgium (Wallonia). The annual processionals involve thousands of marchers dressed in Napoleonic-era military uniforms, carrying authentic muskets and escorting a statue of St. Roch, the patron saint of disease protection. Many of these marchers trace family participation through multiple generations and two St. Roch marches received UNESCO recognition as examples of “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” in 2012. While participants claim there is no historical rupture between the modern marches and the processionals celebrated prior to the French Revolution, there is a …

Explanations And Justifications Of War In The British Kingdoms In The Seventeenth Century, Roger B. Manning

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The influence of Machiavelli on English and Scottish political discourse can be detected not just on politicians and military men, but also among clerics and the well educated elite– even when they do not cite him directly. In England and Scotland, as in mainland European countries, Machiavellian discourse placed war at the center of discussion. Some justified their bellicosity in the secularized language of Roman historians and Italian humanists and thought that since war was the main theme of history and could be regarded as an inevitable phenomenon, England might as well profit by it. This necessarily brought England into …

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Allusive Fontaines, Sicamors, And Pins: Figurative Prophecies Of Grail Piety In The Prose Lancelot, David S. King

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At the conclusion of Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century verse Chevalier de la charrete, a spring and sycamore allude to concupiscence and betrayal in Scripture, evoking the hero’s and the queen’s adulterous liaison. The author of the thirteenth-century French Prose Lancelot translates this allusion from a moment of joy for the queen to one of terror, foreshadowing a change in fortune for the hero and his prowess. Every subsequent adventure where the hero encounters a spring and sycamore points to his love for the queen as a source of corruption. Springs shaded by a pine tree hint at the sanctity of …

“That Kingdom Is Mine”: On Spain’S Early Modern Polemics Of Possession Over Jerusalem, Circa 1605, Chad Leahy

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Spanish claims to the throne of Jerusalem in the early modern period have often been viewed in light either of royal mythologies connecting the Habsburgh monarchy to the biblical kings David and Solomon or to prophetic discourses of imperial Messianism relating to universal monarchy. This paper broadens our understanding of Spanish claims to Jerusalem through close reading of two archival documents produced in 1605. In defending Spanish preeminence and sovereignty in Jerusalem, I argue that these documents participate in a “polemics of possession” that crucially informed cultural production related to the Holy City in the period more broadly. These documents …

The Saint And The Swan: Animal Interactions In The Hagiography Of Hugh Of Avalon, Emma Grover

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Animals in medieval hagiography typically appear in conjunction with saints who practice withdrawal from normal human society or are otherwise socially marginalized, such as hermits, outcasts, or mendicant friars. The association of these figures with animals emphasizes the saints’ status on the social margins; for these saints, interaction with animals is a substitute for participation in human society. An exception to this pattern is Hugh of Avalon, bishop of Lincoln in the late twelfth century. An animal companion, the swan of Stow, appears prominently in all three hagiographical accounts of Hugh’s life and is the most recognizable characteristic of his …

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Allen D. Breck Award

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The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

Recipient of the Allen D. Breck Award for 2019

BRETTON RODRIGUEZ

Delno C. West Award

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The West Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a senior scholar at the annual conference.

Recipient of the Delno C. West Award for 2019

Corinne Wieben

Eroticism As A Metaphor For The Human-Divine Relationhip In Attar’S Conference Of The Birds, Or Mantiqu’T-Tair, Marisa Sikes

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Farídu’d-Dín Ἁṭṭār’s The Speech of the Birds employs transgressive erotic imagery in multiple sub-tales in ways that both enhance the frame tale’s significance and suggest that persistent, discrete categories of love poetry and religious poetry are untenable as far as Ἁṭṭār’s works are concerned. Eroticism in Ἁṭṭār’s work paradoxically elicits shock and supports orthodoxy, sometimes simultaneously. In the narrative of Shaikh-i Sam’ān religious taboos are broken by a Muslim shaikh devoted to a Christian beloved who spurns him continuously. In “The Princess and the Beautiful Slave-Boy” eroticism is overtly presented as a metaphor for temporary, ecstatic union with the divine. …

The World Of Miracles: Science, And Healing In Caesarius Of Heisterbach’S Dialogus Miraculorum (Ca.1240) In Competition With Magic, Albrecht Classen

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This paper offers a close reading of some of the miracle tales dedicated to the Virgin Mary as contained in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum (ca. 1240) in order to shed light on the fundamental narrative structures of this genre, the association between the narratives and their material background, and to build a case to argue that medieval miracle narratives actually shared much in common with the discourse on magic. After a critical examination of magic itself and its properties as imagined or realized in the Middle Ages, the analysis highlights the ‘miraculous’ or maybe even ‘magical’ features of Caesarius’s …

The Fiscal Policy Of Richard Iii Of England, Alex Brayson

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Influenced by the “new” fiscal historiographical agenda of the 1990s, this article pioneers a radical reconstruction of the Yorkist-era royal budget. This demonstrates that the increased role of demesne revenues managed by the royal chamber in financing total expenditures under Edward IV, which was famously applauded by B. P. Wolffe, signally failed to provide for long-term fiscal stability. The removal of Edward’s French pension in 1483 led to a substantial deficit which compelled Richard III to contravene his brother’s pledge to “live of his own”. Richard’s sustained attempts, during 1483-4, to resurrect and revise controversial late Lancastrian attempts to secure …

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Stricken By Terror: Seeing And Knowing In Late Medieval Criminal Case Records, Corinne Wieben

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Medieval legal records frequently feature parties and lawyers willing to stretch the truth and weave tales that fulfill statutory requirements and promote their cases, but what happens when defendants testify against themselves? When Giambono of Matraia, a monk from the monastery of San Ponziano in Lucca, appeared before Lucca’s episcopal court in 1356, he found himself facing charges of adultery, robbery, and murder. After four witnesses testified against him, Giambono confessed. When all seemed lost, Ser Giovanni Folchini, a well-known Lucchese notary, appeared as Giambono’s legal representative and claimed his client’s confession was false, since “he said these things while …

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In Memoriam: Richard L. Harp

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This volume is dedicated to Professor Richard L. Harp who died at the age of 73 on 7 March 2019. Richard and his spouse Margaret Harp, Professor of French at UNLV have been active members of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association. Richard served on the Association’s Executive Board, presented papers and chaired sessions at several conferences, and Margaret served as Treasurer, and organized RMMRA’s 2018 Las Vegas conference.

Embellishing The Past: Fernando Del Pulgar And History At The Court Of The Catholic Monarchs, Bretton Rodriguez

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Composed in the late fifteenth century, Fernando del Pulgar’s Crónica de los Reyes Católicos was the official account of – and therefore one of the best sources for – some of the most significant events in late medieval Spanish history. Within his narrative, Pulgar described the marriage of Isabel and Fernando (better known today as the Catholic Monarchs), the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition, and the buildup to the conquest of Granada. Despite the importance of the events that he described, as well as his own role as official historian, Pulgar revealed a radical understanding of history and history writing …

“Sapere Videre” How A Spreadsheet Helps “Knowing How To See” Royal Power On Display In England’S Counties, 1277 To 1642, James H. Forse

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Using a spreadsheet tracking touring in England’s counties by entertainers attached to members of England’s royal families suggests that such activity was wide-spread dating from the time of Edward III, and that those entertainers may have served to “advertise” royal power.

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