Medieval Studies Commons^™

Clemence Of Barking And Valdes Of Lyon: Two Contemporaneous Examples Of Innovation In The Twelfth Century, Lisa Murray

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Twelfth Century in Western Europe was a remarkable time in history. Scholars have noted that Roman law was being revived, Aristotelian theory was being studied, Romanesque and Gothic art was being produced, scholasticism was being cultivated, and economic growth was being fostered by the rise of towns. These are just some of the developments that help give this era the well-known term “twelfth-century renaissance.” Despite the flourishing of creativity that this label suggests, there are few surviving, specific examples of innovation from this time that have been passed down to us. In AD 1175 the Benedictine nun Clemence of …

The Lay Of Aotrou And Itroun (2016), By J.R.R. Tolkien, Edited By Verlyn Flieger, Thomas Honegger

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review of The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun (2016) by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Verlyn Flieger, reviewed by Thomas Honegger

“To Write Of Him And Pardon Crave”: Negotiating Biblical Authority In Lanyer’S Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Andrew Fleck

Literatures and Cultural Studies Faculty Publications

Aemilia Lanyer refers extensively to the Gospels in writing her poem on the Passion, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Alluding to the events of Christ's final day, she incorporates details from each of the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion. Focusing on specific echoes of the translations available to her, it is possible to trace which bible Lanyer preferred. Surprisingly, despite Lanyer's preference for the Geneva translation, she also made use of the Bishops' Bible, suggesting that the poet carefully sifted through different English translations as she sought to generate biblical authority for her account of the Passion.

Bodies Of Resistance: On (Not) Naming Gender In The Medieval West, Alexander V. Baldassano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers the genres of historiography, romance, hagiography, Chaucerian poetry, and court transcripts. While there are no extant manuscripts depicting transgender-like people’s accounts of themselves, literature of the Middle Ages is replete with fictionalized depictions of ambiguously or transgressively gendered individuals who are meant to symbolize or represent something other than themselves. By investigating how a variety of genres depicts sensationalized and transgressively gendered embodiments, I examine the presentation of transgender-like subjectivity as a manipulation of rhetoric. Viviane Namaste critiques theory such as Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests, claiming that it reduces the transvestite figure to a rhetorical trope …

The Disperata, From Medieval Italy To Renaissance France, Gabriella Scarlatta

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Rich with morose invectives, the Italian lyric genre of the disperata builds toward a crescendo of despair, with the speakers damning and condemning their beloved, their enemy, their destiny, Fortune, Love, and often themselves. Although Petrarch and Petrarchism have been amply analyzed as fertile sources for late Renaissance poets in France, the influence of the Italian disperata in this context has yet to receive proper scholarly attention. This study explores how the language and themes of the disperata - including hopelessness, death, suicide, doomed love, collective trauma, and damnations - are creatively adopted by several generations of poets from its …

Liturgical Drama And The Reimagining Of Medieval Theater, Michael Norton

Early Drama, Art, and Music

The expression "liturgical drama" was formulated in 1834 as a metaphor and hardened into formal category only later in the nineteenth century. Prior to this invention, the medieval rites and representations that would forge the category were understood as distinct and unrelated classes: as liturgical rites no longer celebrated or as theatrical works of dubious quality. If this distinction between liturgical rites and non-liturgical representations holds, should we not examine the works called "liturgical drama" according to the contexts of their presentations within the manuscripts and books that preserve them? Given the ways that the words "liturgy" and "drama" have …

Riders, Chivalry, And Knighthood In Tolkien, Thomas Honegger

Journal of Tolkien Research

Abstract

This essay is a much extended version of the paper I gave at the IMC Leeds on 5 July 2017. It examines Tolkien’s complex attitude towards the concept(s) of chivalry and knighthood. A close reading analysis of relevant key passages from The Lord of the Rings is combined with an examination of his statements on chivalry in his scholarly works. Tolkien’s views are then related to the scholarly discourse on the key elements of chivalry, which allows the reader to gain a deeper understanding of why Tolkien depicts the representatives of chivalry/knighthood in The Lord of the Rings the …

The Wife's Lament, Christian Beck

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This is version of the poem The Wife's Lament is translated by Christian Beck.

Card Tricks: A Workflow For Scalability And Dynamic Content Creation Using Paper2d And Unreal Engine 4, Owen Gottlieb, Dakota Herold, Edward Amidon

Presentations and other scholarship

In this paper, we describe the design and technological methods of

our dynamic sprite system in Lost & Found, a table-top-to-mobile

card game designed to improve literacy regarding prosocial

aspects of religious legal systems, specifically, collaboration and

cooperation. Harnessing the capabilities of Unreal Engine’s

Paper2D system, we created a dynamic content creation pipeline

that empowered our game designers so that they could rapidly

iterate on the game’s systems and balance externally from the

engine. Utilizing the Unreal Blueprint component system we were

also able to modularize each actor during runtime as data may be

changed. The technological approach behind Lost …

Tolkien, Self And Other: "This Queer Creature" (2016) By Jane Chance, Kristine Larsen

Journal of Tolkien Research

Book review, by Kristine Larsen, of Tolkien, Self and Other: "This Queer Creature" (2016), by Jane Chance.

Hist 4654 Medieval London: Instructions For Object And Site Reports, 2017, Maryanne Kowaleski

Digital Pedagogy: Omeka Medieval London

Instructions for object and site reports including a bibliography to help students complete their reports for the 2017 offering of the course HIST 4654 Medieval London at Fordham University

Get Thee To A Nunnery: Unruly Women And Christianity In Medieval Europe, Sarah E. Wolfe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will argue that the Beowulf Manuscript, which includes the poem Judith, Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, and the Old-Norse-Icelandic Laxdæla saga highlight and examine the tension between the female pagan characters and their Christian authors. These texts also demonstrate that Queenship grew fragile after the spread of Christianity, and women’s power waned in the shift between pre-Christian and Christian Europe.

When We Were Monsters: Ethnogenesis In Medieval Ireland 800-1366, Dawn Adelaide Seymour Klos

Master's Theses

Ethnogenesis, or the process of identity construction occurred in medieval Ireland as a reaction to laws passed by the first centralized government on the island. This thesis tracks ethnogenesis through documents relating to change in language, custom, and law. This argument provides insight into how a new political identity was rendered necessary by the Anglo-Irish. Victor Turner’s model of Communitas structures the argument as each stage of liminality represents a turning point in the process of ethnogenesis.

1169 marked a watershed moment as it began the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland. English nobles brought with them ideas of centralized power. In …

Textile Terminologies From The Orient To The Mediterranean And Europe, 1000 Bc To 1000 Ad, Salvatore Gaspa, Cécile Michel, Marie-Louise Nosch

Zea E-Books Collection

The papers in this volume derive from the conference on textile terminology held in June 2014 at the University of Copenhagen. Around 50 experts from the fields of Ancient History, Indo-European Studies, Semitic Philology, Assyriology, Classical Archaeology, and Terminology from twelve different countries came together at the Centre for Textile Research, to discuss textile terminology, semantic fields of clothing and technology, loan words, and developments of textile terms in Antiquity. They exchanged ideas, research results, and presented various views and methods.

This volume contains 35 chapters, divided into five sections: • Textile terminologies across the ancient Near East and the …

Independent Crusaders Mapping Project, 1st. Edition, Nicholas Paul, James Doherty Phd, Laura Morreale Phd

Fordham Archived Digital Projects

The Independent Crusaders Mapping Project provides a database, map, documents and pedagogical tools to inform audiences about expeditions undertaken by western European knights to the Holy Land and more specifically Jerusalem in the years between the papally sanctioned Crusades.

The form of the project being archived here is the first iteration of the Independent Crusaders Mapping Project. It is the result of a number of decisions made in the course of the project's development. The project was always intended to include three parts, TEI encoded charters, a map visualizing data found in those charters, and a spreadsheet or database that …

Dante And The “Dead White Dude” Dilemma: Exploring The Complexities Of Diversity And Controversy In Medieval Literature, Grace Therrell

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Recently, one of the goals on the English discipline has been diversification. Students and scholars alike call for program requirements that are inclusive instead of imperialistic. They want to read texts written by non-white, non-male authors and to hear voices that are less represented in literature. In short, they want to eliminate the focus on literature written by the “dead white dude.” While literature programs should be more diversified, it is still possible to hear from marginalized voices and discuss current controversial issues through older canonical texts. Dante Alighieri does this exceptionally well in his Divine Comedy as he tends …

Contre L’Amour Courtois: 
Le Vrai Amour Chez Marie De France Et Chrétien De Troyes, Elizabeth Walley

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes were two of the most influential French writers of the twelfth century. Both of these poets use different devices and themes of l’amour courtois, a model of how love was portrayed in literature at that time, to warn against the folie and the dangers to which adhering to the doctrines of this model could lead. They use narrative voice and commentary from characters to directly explain to readers why l’amour courtois is not an ideal example to follow, and they rely on the outcomes of their stories to portray potential outcomes for …

Las Letras De Fernando De Pulgar, Nueva Edición, Estudio Preliminar Y Notas, Ana-Maria Zaharescu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis intends to be a new edition of a text widely read in its time judging by the number of manuscripts and editions that circulated between the last quarter of the 15th century and the next. They are epistles directed to historical personalities of the end of the 15th century who played an important role in the politics and in the society of Fernando de Pulgar’s time. Along with political and diplomatic matters, the Letters express author’s personal feelings and reactions to the political or social situation of the fifteenth century Castile.

A new edition of Fernando de Pulgar's …

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing And Reception Of Catherine Of Siena, Lisa Tagliaferri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lyrical Mysticism: The Writing and Reception of Catherine of Siena (https://caterina.io) affirms the 14th-century mystic Catherine of Siena as a writer through contextualizing her texts among the corpus of contemporary Italian literature, and studying her reception in the Renaissance period of Italy and England. Joining an increasing body of recent meaningful scholarship that has been making significant progress to recover many overlooked and peripheral female voices of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, this work serves to fully assert Catherine as a writer of work that is literarily significant and worthy of textual analysis alongside contemporary male Italian …

Mechanized Identity: The Blood-Mill Of Richard Coer De Lyon, Andrew S. Thomas

The Hilltop Review

The seven-thousand-line Middle English romance, Richard Coer de Lyon, is not often read as a text fascinated with machinery. The semi-historical, superlative, titular character and his various marvelous and deeply disturbing deeds usually claim most attention, and not without reason. There is much to examine in the heroically cannibalistic Richard, who presents a complex and often troubling vision of the ways both Englishness and the Saracen Other can be constructed within romance. Alongside these well-studied qualities, however, is a strange attention within the text to sieges and siege engines. Richard’s army is accompanied by a large, named siege tower …