Medieval History Commons^™

Food For The Soul: Feasting And Fasting In The Spanish Middle Ages, Martha Daas

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

This article examines the concept of "Christian" eating that can be found in a variety of texts from the 13th and 14th centuries. “Christian” eating can be defined as consumption that follows the precepts of the Christian calendar and also the recommendations of the Church. As both fasting and feasting are integral elements of the medieval calendar, this article looks at the depiction of food, its consumption, and its role in religious ritual in texts as varied as the Milagros de Nuestra Señora, the Vidas of Santa Maria Egipciaca and Santa Marta, and the more doctrinally liberal Libro de buen …

Cornelius Aurelius: The Upcycling Humanist - A Study Of The Libellus De Patientia, Samantha James

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Cornelius Aurelius’ Libellus de Patientia (MS Leiden, UB, Vulcanius 66 f.45r-f.57v. [1524]), in terms of the author’s reception of the Manipulus florum, reveals much about the development of Northern Humanism, in the context of late medieval scholasticism and the Reformation. By thoroughly examining Libellus de Patientia, this paper will discuss Aurelius’ use of numerous quotations derived from the Manipulus florum as evidence of how this text should be situated in terms of intellectual continuity vs. change during this turbulent period with regards to the intellectual context of medieval scholasticism and renaissance humanism.

Zoomorphic Penannular Brooches In 6th And 7th Century Ireland, Esther G. Ward

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

In this thesis the author examines the evolution, manufacture, and societal significance of zoomorphic penannular brooches, a type of metal dress fastener used in early medieval Ireland that is often decorated. The brooches examined are dated to the 6^th and 7^th centuries, during which the Irish underwent a process of religious conversion from Celtic paganism to Christianity, and social rank was paramount. It is in this social context that the brooches are examined. Despite the significance of this time of social change, brooches from this period tend to be overlooked by scholarship in favor of the more ornate …

A Spectacle Of Great Beauty: The Changing Faces Of Hagia Sophia, Victoria M. Villano

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Comparative Perspectives On History And Historians: Essays In Memory Of Bryce Lyon (1920-2007), David Nicholas, James M. Murray, Bernard S. Bachrach

Festschriften, Occasional Papers, and Lectures

Comparative Perspectives on History and Historians: Essays in Memory of Bryce Lyon (1920-2007) features a section of appreciations of Bryce Lyon from the three editors, R. C. Van Caenegem, and Walter Prevenier, followed by three sections on the major areas on which Lyon's research concentrated: the legacy of Henri Pirenne, constitutional and legal history of England and the Continent, and the economic history of the Low Countries. Original essays by Bernard S. Bachrach, David S. Bachrach, Jan Dumolyn, Caroline Dunn, Jelle Haemers, John H. A. Munro, James M. Murray, Anthony Musson, David Nicholas, W. Mark Ormrod, Walter Prevenier, Jeff Rider, …

The Unbought Grace Of Life: Chivalry In Western Literature, Richard N. Boggs

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

The code of chivalry has a rich literary history. From the violence and misogyny of pre-chivalric ancient Greece and Rome, the chivalric code was constructed in a deliberate effort to curb and improve the most violent aspects of male behavior. The chivalric male ideal was built upon the tripartite foundation of the ancient archaic virtues, the gallantry of Germanic barbarians, and the Christian beatitudes. Chivalry sought a male ideal which brought raw strength and power under the concept of legitimate authority. By casting the literary male ideal – the knight – into the role of the defender of the weak …

Gender Concerns: Monks, Nuns, And Patronage Of The Cistercian Order In Thirteenth-Century Flanders And Hainaut, Erin L. Jordan

History Faculty Publications

The Cistercian order, which had its origins in the late eleventh century, transformed the spiritual landscape of western Europe. The order's insistence on a return to the austerity and simplicity that had originally informed Benedictine life reenergized monasticism, spawning hundreds of new abbeys within decades. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Cistercians dominated monastic life, surpassing their black-robed predecessors in terms of popularity and replacing them among patrons as favored recipients of donations. Yet, while a sizable body of historiography exists concerning the ability of men's houses to translate this appeal into spiritual and material success, questions remain …

Medieval Torture: A Brief History And Common Methods, Makena Bennett

A with Honors Projects

This essay examines the common devices and practices of torture employed during the medieval inquisition.

Dearabizing Arabia: Tracing Western Scholarship On The History Of The Arabs And Arabic Language And Script, Saad D. Abulhab

Publications and Research

This book is a reference book on the history of the Arabic Language and script, which goes beyond the sole discussion of technical matters. It studies objectively the evidence presented by modern-day western archeological discoveries together with the evidence presented by the indispensable scholarly work and research of past Islamic Arab civilization era. The book scrutinizes modern western theories regarding the history of the Arabs and Arabic language and script in connection with the roles played by Western Near East scholarship, religion and colonial history in the formation of current belief system, which is an essential step to study this …

The Glossa Ordinaria On Romans, Michael Scott Woodward

TEAMS Commentary Series

"The Gloss on Romans is a collection of sources from many periods and places, which accounts for its inconsistencies. And this is what gives the Gloss much of its charm. . . . The twelfth century was an age of gathering sources and commentaries, in theology (Lombard's Sentences), canon law (Gratian's Decretum), and biblical studies (the Glossa ordinaria). Education began to flourish into what would become universities, where the master's role was to elucidate traditional, authoritative texts. And chief among these was the Bible, not standing alone but with the accompanying Gloss." - from the introduction

Mythology In The Middle Ages: Heroic Tales Of Monsters, Magic, And Might, Christopher R. Fee

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

Myths of gods, legends of battles, and folktales of magic abound in the heroic narratives of the Middle Ages. Mythology in the Middle Ages: Heroic Tales of Monsters, Magic, and Might describes how Medieval heroes were developed from a variety of source materials: Early pagan gods become euhemerized through a Christian lens, and an older epic heroic sensibility was exchanged for a Christian typological and figural representation of saints. Most startlingly, the faces of Christian martyrs were refracted through a heroic lens in the battles between Christian standard-bearers and their opponents, who were at times explicitly described in demonic terms. …

Ladies, Whores, And Holy Women: A Sourcebook In Courtly, Religious, And Urban Cultures Of Late Medieval Germany, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Sarah Westphal-Wihl

TEAMS Medieval German Texts in Bilingual Editions

This sourcebook presents editions and translations of seven fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts that advance our understanding of gender, sexuality, and class in the late medieval German-speaking world. Three of the translated texts are fiction. Additionally, there is a religious treatise, a religious legend, an inventory of books, and a legal document. While each of these texts is instructive in and of itself, they gain in complexity when brought into dialogue with one another.

Der Welsche Gast (The Italian Guest), Marion Gibbs

TEAMS Medieval German Texts in Bilingual Editions

Friedrich Neumann described Thomasin's Der Welsche Gast as a linguistic phenomenon without comparison within the corpus of German literature of the Hohenstaufen period. In the didactic literature of the time, Der Welsche Gast does indeed occupy a unique position. . . . [It] betrays the heavy hand of the clerical moralist who moves from providing the younger members of his audience with a primer for proper social etiquette in his early verses to a meticulous analysis of what he clearly viewed as the appropriate ethical code for the nobility of his time, often presented against the backdrop of a thundering …

Excalibur's Siegfried And The Music Of Myth, Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand

New Research: Yearbook for the Society of Medieval Germanic Studies

No abstract provided.

Richard Newhauser (Ed.), The Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities To Individuals (Book Review), Denise A. Kaiser

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Denise Kaiser:

ISBN 9789004157859

The Rhetoric(S) Of St. Augustine's Confessions, James M. Farrell

Communication

In this essay, I offer a sympathetic reading of the rhetoric(s) of Augustine’s Confessions. First, as a historian of rhetoric I am interested in what Augustine’s narrative can tell us about the theory and practice of rhetoric in the late classical period and the early Christian era. From this perspective, I am interested in exploring what Augustine discloses about the rhetoric he learned in the provincial Roman schools, and taught at Carthage, Rome, and Milan. Second, I am interested in Augustine’s own work on rhetoric, especially his De Doctrina Christiana, most of which he composed during the period right before …

Landscapes Of Conversion: Guthlac's Mound And Grendel's Mere As Expressions Of Anglo-Saxon Nation Building, Paul Siewers

Faculty Contributions to Books

An examination of the Old English poem Beowulf as a landscape-text, expressing the Anglo-Saxon project of political hegemony over native peoples and environments.

Far From The Heart: The Social, Political, And Ecclesiastical Milieu Of The Early Abbotsof La Chaise-Dieu, 1052-1184, Maureen M. O’Brien

Dissertations

This study examines the institutional development of the abbey of La Chaise-Dieu, whose evolution depended upon its community of monks, its patrons, and its response to the demands placed upon it by the society at large and the Church in general. It examines these factors as they were managed by its first eightabbots by tracing the development of their personal, social, political, and ecclesiastical networks in an effort to identify how those interactions took place and why they took the forms they did. This analysis rests on the examination of charters that were drawn up by the abbey and by …

Vengeance And The Crusades, Susanna A. Throop

History Faculty Publications

This article demonstrates that the popularity of the idea of crusading as vengeance was not limited to the laity, and, instead of fading away after 1099, the ideology grew more widespread as the twelfth century progressed. The primary aim here is to present the evidence alongside preliminary analysis, reserving further, more detailed interpretation for future publications.

Gods, Heroes, & Kings: The Battle For Mythic Britain, Christopher R. Fee, David A. Leeming

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

The islands of Britain have been a crossroads of gods, heroes, and kings-those of flesh as well as those of myth-for thousands of years. Successive waves of invasion brought distinctive legends, rites, and beliefs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples, only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer's belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and …

Church Island : A Description, Frank Prendergast, Michael Ryan, Kevin Mooney, Barry Masterson

Books/Book Chapters

None

History As Literature, Graeme Dunphy

TEAMS Medieval German Texts in Bilingual Editions

This volume presents excerpts and translations of three thirteenth-century South German verse chronicles: Rudolf von Ems's Weltchronik, the anonymous Christherre-Chronik, and the Weltchronik of Jans Enikel. These three works are close in language, in date, and in conception, yet they also differ significantly, representing the perspectives of three distinct sections of medieval society: courtly, monastic, and urban. The excerpts have been chosen from the beginning of Rudolf's chronicle, the middle of the Christherre-Chronik and the end of Enikel, so that taken together they give something of an impression of the chroniclers' arrangement of material in a continuum from …

Ava's New Testament Narratives: "When The Old Law Passed Away", James A. Rushing Jr.

TEAMS Medieval German Texts in Bilingual Editions

Ava is the first woman whose name we know who wrote in German. She wrote her poem - or poems - on the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ sometime early in the twelfth century, no later than 1127. It seems certain that she was a layperson, and her work reflects a level of learning that raises all sorts of interesting questions about the education of the laity, especially the education of lay woman, and about the nature of authorship in the Middle Ages, generally and particularly in medieval Germany.

Studies In The Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, And Social Contexts Of British Library Ms Harley 2253, Susanna Fein

TEAMS Varia

Studies in the Harley Manuscript is the first comprehensive examination of a manuscript that is of supreme value to literary scholars of medieval English literature. In an Introduction and fifteen essays a team of scholars considers many aspects of the 140 folios of this trilingual miscellany that preserves 121 items (or 122 depending on how one counts) from which we get a strange and privileged glimpse into the rich literary heritage that existed in England prior to the flourishing of vernacular poetry in the Richardian era. As the Contents indicates, the history and composition of the manuscript are considered, as …

Sovereignty And Salvation In The Vernacular, 1050-1150: Das Ezzolied, Das Annolied, Die Kaiserchronik, Vv. 247-667, Das Lob Salomons, Historia Judith, James A. Schultz

TEAMS Medieval German Texts in Bilingual Editions

These texts will be of interest because they represent a kind of writing - at the intersection of ecclesiastical and secular power, drawing on the whole range of medieval Latin learning, yet written in vernacular verse - that is not found elsewhere in the European Middle Ages. In addition, they may be of use in teaching since, although relatively short, they illustrate a great number of characteristic medieval ways of writing and can be linked to a number of quite remarkable historical figures.

A Slice Of Life: Selected Documents Of Medieval English Peasant Experience, Edwin Brezette Dewindt

TEAMS Documents of Practice

"Since the audience for this text is assumed to be primarily students of medieval history, nothing from a specifically literary text has been included. Further, since archaeology deals in artifacts and other physical remains, it is impractical to supply material from that discipline. Therefore, only material from record sources is provided . . . These are the only written materials that permit some measure of personalized contact with specific men and women from the past, so this gives them a special importance." - from the Introduction

Sources For The History Of Medicine In Late Medieval England, Carole Rawcliffe

TEAMS Documents of Practice

The material contained here derives from a wide variety of printed and manuscript sources, chosen to give some idea of the rich diversity of evidence available to the historian of English medicine and its place in society during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. Latin and French have been translated into modern English, while vernacular texts have been slightly modified, and obsolete or difficult words explained. Middle English has otherwise been retained to give the past an authentic voice and to emphasize the similarities as well as the differences between the experience of modern readers and that of the …

Mirror Of Chivalry: Salah Al-Din In The Medieval European Imagination, John Victor Tolan

Faculty Book Chapters

This collective volume is the result of the Second Annual Conference on Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Mediterranean held at the American University in Cairo, 5-7 May, 1996. The contributors, David R. Blanks, John Victor Tolan, Nabil I. Matar, John Rodenbeck, Thabit Abdullah, E.M. Sartain, Omaima Abou-Bakr, and Nadia M. El-Cheik, take an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from sociology, anthropology, political science, history, and literature, in medieval their examination of past attitudes, in particular images of the 'Other' in medieval Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, in order to trace the origins of modern stereotypes. The essays are divided into three …

Christian Missionary Activity In The Early Middle Ages (Book Review), June-Ann Greeley

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Six essays by author Richard E. Sullivan. "Church historians, medieval historians, and all medieval scholars, especially those of the early Middle Ages, take note: this is a volume of well-written, expertly documented, and perceptive scholarship, well worth a close read from cover to cover"--from the review.

From Roman Britain To Norman England Continuity And Change - C. A. D. 284 - 1066, Gary Philip Priolo

History Theses & Dissertations

Prior to the Norman Conquest English Society was different in many ways. To understand these differences one must look at the various influences that over eight centuries combined to create Saxon England. This study examines how Saxon English society was created from the contributions of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, church, and Vikings.

Contemporary authors such as Bede and Gildas, and supporting archeological evidence indicate that the invaders and Christian missionaries had a significant impact on the native population of medieval Britain. Evidence suggests that the Romano-Britons were either killed or put to flight by the Anglo-Saxon settlers, the church first converted …