History Commons^™

The Valiant Woman, Ann Louise Cole

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 1600, Hosokawa Tama Gracia perished under mysterious circumstances. She was a noblewoman married to a powerful daimyo, the daughter of a traitor, and a Kirishitan convert during the “Christian Century” in Japan. In life, she was both dutifully subservient and tenaciously bold. In death, she was fodder for propaganda, and in the hands of European writers her life story was re-written for specific narrative purposes. The most striking of these artistic transformations is her depiction as a Christian martyr in the late seventeenth-century Latin Jesuit drama Mulier fortis. The music for this drama was composed by Johann Bernhard Staudt …

Visionary "Staycations": Meeting God At Home In Medieval Women’S Vision Literature, Jessica Barr

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Medieval vision literature frequently features descriptions of supernatural travel: to Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory, or to locations that allow the visionary to receive knowledge to which she would not normally be privy. A less explored trope of this literature, however, is the travel-without-travel that occurs when the visionary’s physical location is overlaid with a transcendent mode of perception. This essay will analyze such moments of spatial transformation in late medieval visionary and hagiographic narratives. In the vitae of many medieval holy women, visions that transform the domestic sphere figure as evidence of their sanctity; in first-person visionary accounts, on the …

Review Essay: John Kitchen. Saints’ Lives And The Rhetoric Of Gender: Male And Female In Merovingian Hagiography, Isabel Moreira

Quidditas

John Kitchen. Saints’ Lives and the Rhetoric of Gender: Male and Female in Merovingian Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 255 pp. ISBN 0195117220.

Review Essay: Confident Readings: Medieval And Early Modern (Christian) Spirituality And Its Recent Interpreters, Steven F. Kruger

Quidditas

Catherine M. Mooney, ed. Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. xiii + 277 pp.

Richard Rambuss. Closet Devotions. Durham and London: Duke Univer- sity Press, 1998. xiii + 193 pp.

Hagiographical Parody In The Ysengrimus, Dennis J. Billy

Quidditas

Considered the first great expression of medieval Latin beast epic, the Ysengrimus, a mid-twelfth-century poem of 6,574 verses, has been hailed as a masterpiece of lampooning monastic parody and wit. Composed by an anonymous author (probably a monk of St. Peter's, Blandigny) in the environs of the then burgeoning Flemish city of Ghent, the poem follows the exploits of Ysengrimus, a ravenous wolf-monk of dubious intelligence whose unruly gastric and sexual appetites make him more often the prey than predator in his sundry endeavors. Until now, one area that has successfully eluded the attention of most Ysengrimus scholars is …