History Commons^™

Mentalités And The Search For Total History In The Works Of Annalistes, Foucault, And Microhistory, Jason U. Rose

The Hilltop Review

In this brief essay, the links between the Annales, the works of Michael Foucault, and microhistory are analyzed through the theoretical lens of histoire des mentalités (mentalités). Common threads that link these approaches include the willingness of using outside fields of analysis as well as the willingness to work with vagueness in search of those who Foucault calls, “lost people.” Relatedly, each of these groups and individuals are willing to analyze all aspects of the historical record to fully understand the minds, cultures, and histories of past people. The key to recognizing the relationship of these approaches involve knowing and …

The Literary Controversies Of Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, Victoria Duehring

The Forum: Journal of History

This literary review will focus on Michelangelo’s most significant work of color: the Sistine ceiling. Michelangelo’s work has spawned a plethora of literature, but this paper will focus on three main controversial topics: assistants (or lack thereof), the ignudi’s purpose, and restoration. I will also apply a psycho-historical approach to these controversies and identify potential avenues for future research.

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Codex Exoniensis, Fols. 123b-124b: An Old English Poetic Romano-British Arts Encomium, Liam O. Purdon

Quidditas

Codex Exoniensis, fols. 123b-124b, commonly called The Ruin, is an Old English poem that has suffered both from physical damage, and from a kind of interpretive “damage,” the result of critical resignation in response to the work’s physical condition, revealing itself as much in continued critical acceptance of the work’s title as in continued acceptance of the critical assumption that the work’s total effect is forever lost to us. Enough of the poem’s whole and fragmentary lines exist, however, to confirm the purpose of two distinct emphases that draw attention to a yearning for restoration of the cultural traditions once …

Contemporary History In Early Tudor English Chronicles: 1485-1553, Barrett L. Beer

Quidditas

English chronicles published between 1485 and 1547 are studied here to determine how they dealt with contemporary history. These chronicles obviously covered the distant past, but many end well before the date of publication. Today contemporary history is of great importance to the public as evidenced by a variety of published works, periodicals, and most recently the internet. An analysis of early Tudor chronicles reveals that while many were indifferent to the recent past, others clearly laid the foundation for a focus on the contemporary era. The recognized authors of the chronicles included in this study are Richard Arnold, John …

The Birthplace Of Saint Wulfthryth: An Unexamined Reference In Cambridge University Library Additional 2604, Jessica C. Brown

Quidditas

Cambridge University Library Additional 2604 is a fifteenth-century miscellany that is largely comprised of East Anglian and Kentish saints’ lives. It also includes a vita of Saint Edith-the patron saint of the convent at Wilton in Wessex. This vita names the birthplace of Edith’s mother, St. Wulfthryth, as ‘Lesing’ in Kent. I suggest that this unique reference may come from a desire to firmly connect Edith’s mother as well as Edith herself to a Kentish heritage.

Premodern Pedagogies: Queer Medieval Materiality, Hilary Rhodes

Quidditas

In this paper, I address some of the challenges facing medieval queer history in the classroom, in academic scholarship, and in public-facing work. My intentions are to dynamically integrate some common pedagogical questions with supporting literature to explore them, and argue that any comprehensive study of premodern men, women, and gender must take queer history into account. The subject may feel intimidating, but I encourage all historians to familiarize themselves with the material, gain confidence in teaching it, and integrate it even outside of dedicated courses on the history of gender and sexuality. The below is offered as a brief …

Delno C. West Award Winner

Quidditas

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

Recipient of the West Award for 2021

Catherine Loomis

Rochester Institute of Technology

Allen D. Breck Award Winner

Quidditas

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

Recipient of the Breck Award for 2021

Jessie Bonafede

University of New Mexico

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

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

Quidditas

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

Quidditas

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

Quidditas

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

Quidditas

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

Quidditas

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

Quidditas

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

Quidditas

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

Quidditas

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 …