Medieval Studies Commons^™

"It Will Help Him Wonderfully": Placebo And Meaning Responses In Early Medieval English Medicine, Rebecca Brackmann

Faculty Peer-Reviewed Publications

Many early English medical remedies have been dismissed, even by sympathetic scholars, as “mere placebo,” with the implication that therapeutic benefits to the patient, if any, are thereby insignificant. My article challenges such dismissals of placebo responses in Old English medicine. I draw on current research demonstrating that in certain conditions, a placebo effect, or “meaning response” (to use Daniel Moerman’s term), can have striking success in bringing about healing. I describe contemporary clinical practices shown to enhance patient responses to pharmaceutical treatments both inert and active, and demonstrate that these strategies are also visible in early English medical practice. …

Writing Into Hope: Laughter, Sadness And Healing In John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Natalie S. Grinnell

Faculty Scholarship

This article uses the theory of the narrative creation of the self to contend that the Confessio Amantis creates a space for narrative healing within the acknowledgement of mortality. Rather than being traditionally funny or ending in amorous or military victory, Gower’s poem uses the encyclopedia knowledge of the interpolated tales to establish a healing narrative in the face of failure and loss.

Metaphors As Tools Of Translation In The Early Medieval English Pedagogical Tradition, Abigayil M. Wernsman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines three crucial texts written and translated from Latin into Old English between 800CE and 1010CE in medieval England by King Alfred, Bishop Æthelwold, and Abbot Ælfric. These texts are crafted to further political and educational power, reform, and change. It argues that the metaphors wielded within these pedagogical texts were essential to the cultivation of authority for kings and magisters, and the propagation of English as a written language. Utilizing the framework of conceptual metaphor with attention to the historicity surrounding each text, I examine the definitions of metaphor and of translation to argue that each text …

The Owl And The Nightingale And The English Poems Of Jesus College Ms 29 (Ii), Susanna Fein

TEAMS Middle English Texts

An edition of the early Middle English verse sequence contained in the thirteenth-century Oxford Jesus College MS 29 (II) with accompanying translations in Modern English and scholarly introduction and apparatus. The sequence is varied in subject, with poems of religious exhortation set beside others of secular pragmatism. Included are: The Owl and the Nightingale, Poema Morale, The Proverbs of Alfred, Thomas of Hales’s Love Rune, The Eleven Pains of Hell, the prose Shires and Hundreds of England, the lengthy Passion of Jesus Christ in English, and twenty-one additional lyrics, most of them uniquely …

British Literature I, Justin Shaw

Syllabus Share

What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to have an identity? This course serves as an entry point to the study of early British literature and its historical contexts. We examine texts written from the 7th to the 17th Centuries that comprise a portion of what we call British literature. This survey engages poetry, prose, and drama that reimagine the complexities of intersectional identity, render the nation as part of a global stage, and challenge conventions of sexuality and gender. It traces early texts written by and about people on the margins of “Britishness” and "Englishness" such …

Studying The Binding Of Portland State’S Codex To Localize Production, Allison Kirkpatrick

Extra-Textual Elements

This paper examines Portland State’s 1490 codex as a material object by studying the stamp designs on its covers to determine where and when it may have been bound.

Four stamp designs are discernible, and these were compared to rubbings of stamp designs from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century incunable bindings in the Einbanddatenbank and Scott Husby Database. The findings from this study point to Erfurt, Germany, and more specifically the workshop of Nicolaus von Havelberg (active 1477–1506), as the probable binding site.

Database Of Marginal Notation In The Psu 1490 Codex: Objectives, Organization, And Continuation, Andi Johnson

Extra-Textual Elements

Portland State University Library's combined 1490 editions of the Fasciculus temporum and Malleus maleficarum contain over 150 individual marginal markings and notations. These marks have been made by numerous readers throughout the monograph's five-century lifespan.

This report accounts for efforts to construct a tool that would allow future students and scholars to visually compare and organize marks was needed before any in-depth analysis of readership could be made, describing the objectives, processes and applications that have defined its development. The tool that was needed was a visual database that enables the visual comparison of markings within the two texts. This …

Review, Introduction, And Preliminary Documentation Of Marginalia In Portland State University’S Fasciculus Temporum/Malleus Maleficarum Sammelband, Samuel Barnack

Extra-Textual Elements

This paper presents an overview of the contents of the new database of written marginal notations in Portland State University’s fifteenth-century printed codex, and some of the research threads that can be taken up from a study of those notations.

The motive for this project was an interest in readership usage of the codex and the two books contained within it. It begins by discussing terms that Andi Johnson and I elected to use to tag and name different categories of features, then I discuss some of the findings and possible future research avenues that can expand on them.

Finally, …

Possible Methods For Incunabula Digitization For Preservation And Analysis, Steven Andrews

Provenance and Preservation

This paper explores different approaches that PSU’s Special Collections Department might take toward digitizing its 1490 incunable containing Werner Rolewinck’s Fasciculus temporum and second-edition Malleus Maleficarum. Digitization will reduce wear-and-tear of the volume and allow access to its contents by a wider range of users.

Literature, Pandemic, And The Insufficiency Of Survival: Boccaccio’S Decameron And Emily St. John Mandel’S Station Eleven, Anthony P. Russell

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

The question of literature’s utility in relation to the “real world” has been asked since at least the time of Plato. This essay examines an extreme instance of this problem by investigating two works, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1353) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2016), that argue for the value of art in the midst of catastrophe. Boccaccio’s collection of 100 tales, written in the context of the Black Plague, and Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel about a world devastated by a killer flu, overlap and diverge in instructive ways in making their cases for the important role of literature in …

How Tales Of Blood Libel Travel: Depictions Of Jews In Fifteenth-Century European World Chronicles, Rachel Bard

Fasciculus Temporum

This paper considers the correlation between the popularity of Werner Rolevinck’s Fasciculus Temporum and other world chronicles, and the antisemitic tropes and blood libel accusations directed against Jewish communities in later medieval Europe.

The Fasciculus repeats many stock tales of Jewish ritual murder, including a relatively little-known story from Bern, Switzerland, that Rolevinck may have adapted from the Berner Chronik. This paper also considers the connection the first Spanish printing of the Fasciculus Temporum, in Seville in 1480, with the only known Jewish ritual murder accusation in Spain, which dates to 1490, and which in turn may have been …

Robert Lenkiewicz: Witchcraft Collector, Ashley M. Hood

Provenance and Preservation

In 2018, Portland State University purchased a medieval codex containing a 1490 printing of Werner Rolewinck’s Fasciculus Temporum and a 1490 edition of the Malleus Maleficarum printed in Speier, Germany, by Peter Drach. Based on information from the bookseller in France, PSU has concluded that the codex most likely came from the collection of Robert Lenkiewicz (1941-2002), a twentieth-century English figurative painter who amassed a significant collection of rare books and incunables during his life.

Lenkiewicz’s artwork, interests, and book collection revolved around addiction and fanaticism, and one of the more noteworthy sections of his library focused on witchcraft and …

Sammelbände: The Many Anthologies Of Early Print, Michael Adair

Provenance and Preservation

This paper explores the meaning and context of Sammelbände incunabula, covering their place alongside other novel forms of information organization in a world of changing readership patterns, as well as their role as a response to the needs and challenges faced in the expanding and changing book trade of the early print period during the second half of the fifteenth century. It includes several appendices detailing Sammelbände known to contain early editions of the Malleus Maleficarum and Fasciculus temporum of Werner Rolewinck, and other, related works.

A Point Of Honor: Drengskapr In Þorsteins Þáttr Stangarhǫggs, Noah R. Mincheff

Schultz-Werth Award Papers

Þorsteins þáttr Stangarhǫggs, or “The Tale of Thorstein Staff-Struck” is an atypical piece of Norse short prose that likely originates from a mid-13th century oral tradition.1 Although the tale employs many of the common saga motifs, such as elaborate genealogies, and the plain prose of the genre, this perceived simplicity and objectivity is deceptive. Early 20th century scholars in particular, such as Vilhelm Grønbech, in their efforts to define the essence of the Icelandic Sagas, rightly identify numerous key themes in Icelandic literature but fail to acknowledge those themes as anything more than “aesthetic indulgence”.2 Such themes as honor, fate, …

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 …

Vernacular Print, Johann Prüss, And The Fasciculus Temporum, Julia Hines

Fasciculus Temporum

This research discusses biographical information on Strasbourg printer Johann Prüss and his vernacular German work, and offers a statistical and categorical comparison to other contemporary Strasbourg printers and their vernacular German works.

Using the British Library's Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) and other sources, I created a table in the appendix that lists all the known vernacular works of each printer and their date of publication. Lastly, this paper discusses the similarities and differences between the 1490 Latin edition of the Fasciculus Temporum and the following German edition printed by Prüss in 1492.

Preliminary Report 2021: Geophysics, Coring, And Excavations At Hólar; Geophysics At Kálfsstaðir, Guðný Zoëga, John M. Steinberg

Andrew Fiske Memorial Center for Archaeological Research Publications

This report outlines the 2021 work at Hólar in Hjaltadalur as part of the Hjaltadalur Archaeological Survey Project (HASP). The results of soil coring suggest that the farmstead of Hólar is the most extensive farmstead measured using this method in the area of Skagafjörður. After over 1200 cores and 17 excavations (6 of which were part of the 2021 research), there are still no confirmed pre-1104 cultural deposits at Hólar. This difficulty in identifying the pre-1104 domestic occupation implies that Viking Age Hólar was probably not large. The Hólar farmstead domestic space seems to be tightly defined and constrained rather …

Women, Writing, And Storytelling In Medieval England And The Canterbury Tales, Sadie O'Conor

The Criterion

For a woman to succeed in an academic sphere, it is never enough for her to be clever-- she must be brilliant. “The Second Nun’s Tale” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales explores the metaphorical brilliance (in sexual purity, intelligence, and faith) of St. Cecilia. The tale is also a mechanism for the Second Nun to advocate for her own vocation of “holy work,” for the sake of the learned religious women who preserved such writings. The themes of her tale are quite different from those espoused by the Wife of Bath, but the Wife also argues to have her voice …

Prominence Of Manicules Within Early Editions Of The Malleus Maleficarum, Matthew Jurkiewicz

Extra-Textual Elements

Marginal notation is extremely common in incunabula. The Portland State University Malleus Maleficarum (1490) is no exception to this trend, and contains various types of marginal notation throughout the text. Among them are three examples of manicules, a form of notation where readers draw a hand to note important sections of a text.

This paper examines the frequency of manicules in fifteen different early copies of the Malleus Maleficarum, along with the sections of the text in which the manicules are concentrated, in order to ascertain whether or not the usage of the PSU Malleus Maleficarum shares similarities with …

Watermarks Of Portland State University’S 1490 Codex, Duane Wiegardt

Extra-Textual Elements

This paper and its accompanying research endeavored to locate, catalog, and identify as fully as possible the watermarks observed throughout Portland State University’s (PSU) 1490 bound codex containing the Fasciculus temporum omnes antiquorum cronicas complectens (FT) and Malleus Maleficarum (MM).

Dozens of watermarks of several categories have been located and cataloged. A listing of the marks found on each leaf of the FT and MM has been constructed for continued use by future researchers. Study of the watermarks also sheds light on the codex’s binding.