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Articles 1 - 12 of 12
Full-Text Articles in Medieval History
Judgement And Doom: Apocalyptic Anxiety And Rhetoric In Anglo-Saxon England, Lauren Coghlan
Judgement And Doom: Apocalyptic Anxiety And Rhetoric In Anglo-Saxon England, Lauren Coghlan
Honors Theses
Comparable to the “Y2K” phenomenon at the turn of the twentieth century, many historians posit that there was a similar concern a thousand years prior at the turn of the first millennium. This rested on the belief that Christ would return and initiate the world’s end—the apocalypse. In ninth and tenth-century England, Vikings raids were instilling terror into the hearts and minds of those who experienced them, and the clergy often observed these calamities in an apocalyptic light. This thesis will examine the rhetorical and theological expressions of apocalyptic concern in Anglo-Saxon writing from the ninth century into the tenth …
Æthelflæd, Lady Of The Mercians, And Women In Tenth-Century England, Rebecca Hardie
Æthelflæd, Lady Of The Mercians, And Women In Tenth-Century England, Rebecca Hardie
Richard Rawlinson Center Series
Æthelflæd (ca. 870–918), political leader, military strategist, and administrator of law, is one of the most important ruling women in English history. Despite her multifaceted roles and family legacy, however, her reign and relationship with other women in tenth-century England have never been the subject of a book-length study. This interdisciplinary collection of essays redresses a notable hiatus in scholarship of early medieval England. Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England argues for a reassessment of women’s political, military, literary, and domestic agency. It invites deeper reflection on the female kinships, networks, and communities that give meaning …
Unearthing The Witch: Reckoning With Gender, Magic, And The Unusual Dead Within Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burials, Samantha Melvin
Unearthing The Witch: Reckoning With Gender, Magic, And The Unusual Dead Within Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burials, Samantha Melvin
Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects
The fifth to seventh centuries CE, or the Migration Period, marked the development of Anglo-Saxon culture and society in England. The early Anglo-Saxons are known largely through their material culture and mortuary practices, left behind in medieval cemeteries that twist their way across the English landscape. The remains of early Anglo-Saxons tell rich and interesting histories about past peoples, but within the broader landscapes of these cemeteries are deviant burials. These are burials that are specifically typified as ones that ‘deviate’ from the norm, usually indicating that the inhumed individual was punished in death for actions committed in life. These …
Vice & Virtue As Woman?: The Iconography Of Gender Identity In The Late Anglo-Saxon Psychomachia Illustrations, Stephenie Mcgucken
Vice & Virtue As Woman?: The Iconography Of Gender Identity In The Late Anglo-Saxon Psychomachia Illustrations, Stephenie Mcgucken
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
In the Late Anglo-Saxon illustrated manuscripts of Prudentius's Psychomachia, vice and virtue are often shown ambiguously and the audience is encouraged to question what is male and what is female, and whether such categories are appropriate in understanding these illustrations. This paper utilises transgender theory to demonstrate how gender could be deployed in Late Anglo-Saxon manuscripts to question the roles of men and women with the ultimate aim of stressing the importance of righteous behaviours.
The Great Heathen Failure: Why The Great Heathen Army Failed To Conquer The Whole Of Anglo-Saxon England, Ryan Macneill
The Great Heathen Failure: Why The Great Heathen Army Failed To Conquer The Whole Of Anglo-Saxon England, Ryan Macneill
Graduate Theses
In the year 865 CE, a coalition of Viking forces combined to form an army aimed at the conquest and settlement of England. Known as The Great Heathen Army, these Vikings managed to capture most of the territory that today constitutes England with the notable exception of the English kingdom of Wessex. And so, despite many successes, they failed to conquer all of English territory. Though these events, which transpired throughout the 860s and 870s, are well documented, the Viking perspective is rarely taken into account and there has yet to have been an argument that pinpoints how and why …
Demonic Pedagogy And The Teaching Saint: Voice, Body, And Place In Cynewulf's Juliana, Christina M. Heckman
Demonic Pedagogy And The Teaching Saint: Voice, Body, And Place In Cynewulf's Juliana, Christina M. Heckman
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
In Cynewulf’s Old English poem Juliana, the saint frames her encounters with her adversaries as pedagogical confrontations, refusing the lessons they attempt to “teach” her and ultimately adopting the identity of a teacher herself. These confrontations depend on three key tropes in the poem: Juliana’s voice, as a material manifestation of language deployed by the saint; her body, both as living body and as relic; and place, especially the place of the saint’s martyrdom and/or burial. Viewed through theories of material feminism, these tropes reveal diverse forms of agency in the poem, as both human and non-human agents make …
"We Are Strangers In This Life": Theology, Liminality, And The Exiled In Anglo-Saxon Literature, Nathan John Haydon
"We Are Strangers In This Life": Theology, Liminality, And The Exiled In Anglo-Saxon Literature, Nathan John Haydon
Graduate Theses and Dissertations
In “‘We Are Strangers in this Life’: Theology, Liminality, and the Exiled in Anglo-Saxon Literature,” I analyze the theme of exile in the theological literature of the Anglo-Saxon era as a way of conveying the spiritual condition of eschatological separation. The anthropological theory of liminality will be applied in this dissertation as a way of contextualizing the existence of the exiled, and the multiple ways in which exile is enacted. The intervention of the theory of liminality in this dissertation offers a methodology and vocabulary for assessing what exile means in terms of a spiritual identity, how it operates in …
An Analysis Of The Metal Finds From The Ninth-Century Metalworking Site At Bamburgh Castle In The Context Of Ferrous And Non-Ferrous Metalworking In Middle- And Late-Saxon England, Julie Polcrack
Masters Theses
This thesis opens with an investigation of the evidence for blacksmithing and non-ferrous metalworking in Anglo-Saxon England during the Middle- and Late-Saxon periods, c. 700-1066. The second chapter of this thesis focuses on knives and non-ferrous strap-ends during this period in order to discern any regional distinction in metalworking from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. I initially conjectured that Northumbrian knives and strap-ends would show stylistic differences from knives and strap-ends made in other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, but in this chapter, I conclude that Northumbrian metal objects were homogenous with the assemblages from the remaining kingdoms. In the final chapter of …
Responding To Modern Flooding: Old English Place-Names As A Repository Of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Richard L.C. Jones
Responding To Modern Flooding: Old English Place-Names As A Repository Of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Richard L.C. Jones
Journal of Ecological Anthropology
Place-names are used to communicate Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) by all indigenous, aboriginal and First Nations people. Here and for the first time, English place-names are examined through a TEK lens. Specifically, place-names formed in Old English—the language of the Anglo-Saxon—and coined between c. 550 and c. 1100 A.D., are explored. This naming horizon provides the basic name stock for the majority of English towns and villages still occupied today. While modern English place-names now simply function as convenient geographical tags Old English toponymy is shown here to exhibit close semantic parallels with many other indigenous place-names around the world. …
The Conversion Of The Anglo-Saxon Kings, Marc Beneduci
The Conversion Of The Anglo-Saxon Kings, Marc Beneduci
Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)
This thesis examines the history of the establishment of the Anglo-Saxon practice of kingship and explores the conversion of that institution from a native and traditional pre-Christian political apparatus into one of autocratic Christian rule. By examining this period of history and studying the infiltration of foreign cultural elements, this study explores and discusses the ways in which the Anglo-Saxon regnal society was fundamentally transformed from an archetypal representation of the Germanic heroic age into one with a synthesis with aspects of Christian rule and religiosity. The nature of the time period requires alternative methods of historic understanding to be …
Bound By Words: Oath-Taking And Oath-Breaking In Medieval Lceland And Anglo-Saxon England, Gregory L. Laing
Bound By Words: Oath-Taking And Oath-Breaking In Medieval Lceland And Anglo-Saxon England, Gregory L. Laing
Dissertations
The legal and literary texts of early medieval England and Iceland share a common emphasis on truth and demonstrate its importance through the sheer volume of textual references. One of the most common applications of truth-seeking in these sources occurs in the swearing of oaths. Instances of oath-taking and oath-breaking, therefore, are critical textual loci wherein the language of swearing unites an individual’s socially constructed reputation and his personal guarantees under the careful supervision of the community. Traditionally, scholars looking at truth and attestation from the later medieval period tend to view early cases of swearing as procedural, artless, or …
Landscapes Of Conversion: Guthlac's Mound And Grendel's Mere As Expressions Of Anglo-Saxon Nation Building, Paul Siewers
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.