Medieval Studies Commons^™

The Burgos Tapestry: Medieval Theatre And Visual Experience, Nathalie Rochel Frch '11

The Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal

In the field of art history, the medium of tapestry has only recently begun to gain attention as its own significant art form. This paper examines the possible relationship between the Burgos Tapestry, recently on view at The Cloisters after a thirty-year conservation, and medieval theatre. The compositional and stylistic forms of the tapestry may have been influenced by productions of medieval mystery plays, which through analysis can help provide a greater understanding of the medieval cultural mindset, the possible artistic decisions behind maintaining medieval pictorial traditions into the early sixteenth century, and the medieval viewer’s experience when looking at …

Civility And Gower's "Visio Anglie", Lynn Arner

Accessus

Deploying conventions from medieval courtesy manuals, Gower’s Visio Anglie assigned varied degrees of authority to Englishmen and women at the bodily level, a system of signification in which food, physical appearances, and overall comportment were key elements. Echoing courtesy manuals, the Visio constructed corporal marks of distinction, interpreted physical signifiers as indices of people’s inner character and value, and classified bodies into social groups accordingly. Offering understandings of civility that began with codes of bodily conduct and that expanded to claims about the cosmos, the Visio’s corporal regulatory system promoted particular understandings of citizenship and governance that sought to …

The Trentham Manuscript As Broken Prosthesis: Wholeness And Disability In Lancastrian England, Candace Barrington

Accessus

Gower’s Trentham manuscript allows us to think about pre-modern disabilities in three ways. First, because it encourages Henry IV to restore the body politic disabled by Richard II, we can see the manuscript as presenting itself as a prosthesis able to compensate, even cure, Henry’s illegitimate claims to the throne. Here, disability is a condition that needs to be eradicated at best, repaired at least.

Second, because the Trentham manuscript reports Gower’s blindness, we can examine how it registers that disability. As “Henrici quarti primus” makes clear, Gower’s disability allows him to assert his own legitimacy as king’s advisor. Here, …

Blindness, Confession, And Re-Membering In Gower's Confessio, Tory Vandeventer Pearman

Accessus

Much scholarship on Gower’s Confessio Amantis has focused on the poem’s assertion that poetic narration, represented by Amans’ ongoing confession, has the ability to restore the fragmentary natures of social and spiritual bodies. Surprisingly, the role that the (dis)abled body plays in the poem’s struggle with fragmentation and integration has been ignored. By focusing on the poem’s representation of blindness in the tales of Medusa and Constance, I will demonstrate that the formal structure and thematic explorations of the Confessio, in fact, rely upon the (dis)abled body and its inextricable relationship to narration. Indeed, it is Amans’ disabling illness …

Blind Advocacy: Blind Readers, Disability Theory, And Accessing John Gower, Jonathan Hsy

Accessus

Toward the end of his life, medieval poet John Gower (d. 1408) composed Latin poetry about his own progressive blindness, and later nineteenth-century Blind readers appropriated Gower’s work as part of a platform to advocate for changed perceptions and opportunities for the blind and other people with disabilities. In this essay, I approach nineteenth-century narrative compilations of blind lives (which include Gower’s) as transformative acts of literary historiography. These compilers not only appropriate the medieval blind poet to advance their own social and political ends, but they also create a new disability-centered approach to the entire Western artistic tradition. I …

Introduction, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

This Introduction by co-editors Georgiana Donavin and Eve Salisbury celebrates the publication of the first issue of Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media, a biannual publication of The Gower Project. The Introduction provides a short history of The Gower Project and explains the scope of Accessus: an e-journal dedicated to articles composed in electronic formats on Western European literature written before 1660. This first issue is dedicated to scholarship on the fourteenth-century English poet John Gower, who inspired the Project and this journal. For a decade The Gower Project has supported exciting new interpretations of …

Old English Ecologies: Environmental Readings Of Anglo-Saxon Texts And Culture, Ilse Schweitzer Vandonkelaar

Dissertations

Conventionally, scholars have viewed representations of the natural world in Anglo-Saxon (Old English) literature as peripheral, static, or largely symbolic: a “backdrop” before which the events of human and divine history unfold. In “Old English Ecologies,” I apply the relatively new critical perspectives of ecocriticism and placebased study to the Anglo-Saxon canon to reveal the depth and changeability in these literary landscapes. Overall, this interdisciplinary study of Anglo-Saxon texts brings together literary and environmental sources and modes of inquiry to explore the place of humans (and non-humans) within the natural environments of Anglo-Saxon England, as well as the ways in …

Recovering The Saumurois: Lay Patronage To Saint-Florent Of Saumur, Ca. 950-1150, Adam C. Matthews

Masters Theses

In the mid-tenth century, the lay powers of the Loire valley established the abbey of Saint-Florent at Saumur with the local aristocracy welcoming the monks and forming spiritual and economic relationships through acts of patronage. The brothers remembered gifts of property, grants of rights, and exemptions in charters which were ultimately collected into the abbey's first cartulary, the Livre Noir. Despite this wealth of sources, historians have paid only cursory attention to Saint-Florent in recent scholarship. The present study incorporates the abbey's charter sources into broader debates concerning society in eleventh-century France. The use of case studies provides insight …

The Hearts Of Ovid's Heroines In Trojumanna Saga, Luke J. Chambers

Masters Theses

In western civilization no story has been retold more times than the Trojan War. Homer's works were known only by repute in western Europe after the fall of Rome. As such, the Middle Ages saw the blossoming of a new Troy tradition based on Dares Phrygius's De Excidio Troiae Historia (The History of the Destruction of Troy). Most countries of medieval Europe used this laconic work to retell the Troy story in each country's particular idiom.

The settlers of Iceland developed a sophisticated literary culture in the thirteenth century. No other people wrote narrative prose works on such a …

Appendix A To Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings After Wyclif, Fiona Somerset

Supplementary Material for Published Books

Appendix A: Brief Descriptions of Frequently Cited Manuscripts

These descriptions provide a list of contents for selected manuscripts frequently cited in Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif (Cornell U. P., 2014). I have worked extensively with each of these manuscripts, but I also rely on previous descriptions as cited within. Abbreviations used are those listed in the table of abbreviations in the published book.

Appendix B To Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings After Wyclif, Fiona Somerset

Supplementary Material for Published Books

Appendix B: The Pastoral Syllabus of SS74 and a Detailed Summary of the Sermons

This appendix summarizes the contents of each sermon in the sermon cycle that occupies the bulk of Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College MS 74. Details are given of the epistle lection, the sermon from the English Wycliffite Sermons included as a protheme, the content of the epistle sermon, and the pastoral teaching provided. Abbreviations used are those in the table of abbreviations in Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif (Cornell, 2014).

The Tacuinum Sanitatis: A Medieval Health Manual, Loren D. Mendelsohn

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Witnesses, Neighbors, And Community In Late Medieval Marseille, Sara M. Butler

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Front Matter, Medieval Feminist Forum, V.49 No.1 2013

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse And Nationalist Literary History, Christine E. Kozikowski

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

The King's Other Body: Maria Of Castile And The Crown Of Aragon, Laura Gathagan

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Eleanor De Montfort: A Rebel Countess In Medieval England, Katrin E. Sjursen

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Daughters Of London: Inheriting Opportunity In The Late Middle Ages, Lizabeth Johnson

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Stolen Women In Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, And Adultery, 1100-1500, Michelle Armstrong-Partida

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

Sartorial Strategies: Outfitting Aristocrats And Fashioning Conduct In Late Medieval Literature, Wendy A. Matlock

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.