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Articles 181 - 210 of 497

Full-Text Articles in Medieval Studies

Elis Gruffydd And The Welsh Historical Tradition, Ann Dobbs Riley-Adams Dec 2022

Elis Gruffydd And The Welsh Historical Tradition, Ann Dobbs Riley-Adams

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Elis Gruffydd’s Cronicl is the longest piece of original prose ever written in the Welsh language, and the first example of writing by a Welsh author for a Welsh audience produced on the Continent. In 2018, Elis’s Cronicl was added to the prestigious UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register, one of only five such recognitions in Wales, giving the Cronicl globally recognized status. Despite this, Elis’s Cronicl is understudied, a “forgotten gem” most of which has never been transcribed, translated, or published in book form. Elis lived and wrote in the British military center and staple port, Calais, which …

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The Bond Of Empathy In Medieval And Early Modern Literature, David Strong Sep 2022

The Bond Of Empathy In Medieval And Early Modern Literature, David Strong

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

This study examines the various means of becoming empathetic and using this knowledge to explain the epistemic import of the characters’ interaction in the works written by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries. By attuning oneself to another’s expressive phenomena, the empathizer acquires an inter- and intrapersonal knowledge that exposes the limitations of hyperbole, custom, or unbridled passion to explain the profundity of their bond. Understanding the substantive meaning of the characters’ discourse and narrative context discloses their motivations and how they view themselves. The aim of this book is to explore the place of empathy in select late medieval and …

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Language And Meter, Ian Cornelius Aug 2022

Language And Meter, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

From a visual standpoint as well as a semantic and functional one, Middle English lyrics were often absorbed into their co(n)texts. In what sense, then, is a “Middle English lyric” a thing? I seek in this essay to show what metrical analysis may contribute to that question. Context is not all. If contextual analysis has tended to dissolve the presumed thing-hood of Middle English lyrics, metrical analysis shows that verses are robust enough to sustain that. Metrical structuration sets verse apart from its surround; it defines the verse object as a distinct entity, distinguished by a specifiable compositional craft.

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Langland Parrhesiastes, Ian Cornelius Jul 2022

Langland Parrhesiastes, Ian Cornelius

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The ancient Greek word parrhēsia designates speech that is bold, frank, and free, holding nothing back; a parrhēsiastēs is a person who gives voice to such speech. Although the word was little used in Latin literature and had no precise Latin equivalent, the concept was transmitted to medieval western Europe in rhetorical theory and the New Testament. In this essay I propose that the concept of parrhēsia may help to register the irruptive force, pointedness, risks, and complexity of certain acts of saying in Piers Plowman, a fourteenth-century English vision poem. For most of this essay, I focus on a …

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"Hail To The King[S], Baby" Arthur Vs Army Of Darkness, Jeff Massey Ph.D., Tabitha Ochtera Mlis, Mba Jun 2022

"Hail To The King[S], Baby" Arthur Vs Army Of Darkness, Jeff Massey Ph.D., Tabitha Ochtera Mlis, Mba

English: Faculty Publications

Given the current penchant for “medieval misappropriation” among white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and political pundits, medievalists are clearly justified in directing their critical attention toward debunking the overly popular neomedieval misrepresentations portrayed in so much serious modern Arthuriana. Yet, it is worth remembering that comedy also played an essential role in medieval Arthurian storytelling, and that neomedieval comic representations of King Arthur (and his silly English kuh-nigguts) remain worthy of critical attention as well, perhaps especially so during times of modern “darkness.” Two major strains of neomedieval Arthurian comedy remain perennially present in modern media: those following Mark Twain’s time-traveling Connecticut …

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Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building, Amanda Greene May 2022

Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building, Amanda Greene

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay accompanies and describes my thesis project, Medievalia Miscellany, a magazine for middle-grade readers which explores the world of medieval fantasy through art, comics, stories, and activities. Throughout the essay, I use my own term “archaeological upcycling” to discuss and explore a variety of relationships between ideas of parts and a whole. I then use it to characterize the way stories are created out of many different parts and how these parts help a reader to relate to both the world of the story and the world in which they live. I describe the genre of medieval fantasy …

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Affect And The Tomb In Robert Henryson's Testament Of Cresseid, Elizabeth Elliott May 2022

Affect And The Tomb In Robert Henryson's Testament Of Cresseid, Elizabeth Elliott

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The penultimate verse of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid suggests the possibility that Troilus raised a monument in memory of his former love, Cresseid: “Sum said he maid ane tomb of merbell gray” (l. 603). Examining the political implications of this uncertain act of memorialisation, this article considers how Henryson's poem mobilises the reader's emotional response to constitute Cresseid as a mourned subject, whose subjectivity is recognised only insofar as it is limited to suffering and death. In doing so, the Testament also establishes a subjectivity for women that offers conditional tolerance predicated on respectable behaviour, contributing to the historical production …

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A Mind Of Her Own: Women's Interiority In The Middle English And Older Scots Pastourelles, Anne L. Klinck May 2022

A Mind Of Her Own: Women's Interiority In The Middle English And Older Scots Pastourelles, Anne L. Klinck

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The pastourelle achieved what might be called its classic form in Middle French poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: a mini-narrative in which the narrator, a knight or clerk, tells how he tried to have his will with a lower-class girl he happened upon while riding in the country. He greets her, sweet-talks her, and propositions her; she protests vigorously. Sometimes the debate ends here. Otherwise, her accoster overcomes her resistance by guile or force, and sexually assails her. The tone is light-hearted and cynical, the action crude. To modern readers, this narrative may be mildly amusing, rather tedious, …

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Calkas’S Daughter: Paternal Authority And Feminine Virtue In Troilus And Criseyde, Jennifer Alberghini May 2022

Calkas’S Daughter: Paternal Authority And Feminine Virtue In Troilus And Criseyde, Jennifer Alberghini

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The heroine of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde has been of considerable interest to medieval feminist scholars as a woman who is depicted as both virtuous and an adulteress. Yet critical discussions do not often view Criseyde’s virtue in light of her role as daughter. This article explores that role, focusing on how her father Calkas is described by the characters as having authority over his daughter’s body in the marriage market. This will later enable them to use him as an excuse for Criseyde’s failure to return to Troy and thus preserve her status as virtuous. However, the characters …

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Definitions And Depictions Of Rhetorical Practice In Medieval English Fürstenspiegel., Joseph Ethan Blaine Sharp May 2022

Definitions And Depictions Of Rhetorical Practice In Medieval English Fürstenspiegel., Joseph Ethan Blaine Sharp

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how medieval authors defined rhetoric and depicted rhetorical practice in medieval English Fürstenspiegel. It begins by analyzing how the field of medieval rhetorical historiography has overlooked the Fürstenspiegel as a rhetorical genre due to its overt reliance on meta-rhetorical handbook genres as the objects of its analysis. This dissertation challenges traditional narratives that positions medieval rhetoric as a primarily academic discipline divorced from political practice by engaging in horizontal reading practices that examine the broader culture of medieval rhetorical practice alongside the definitions of rhetoric found in medieval English Fürstenspiegel. In so doing, this dissertation …

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The Whale-Road To Road House: A Study Of The Contemporary Transmission Of Beowulf, Haley Grindstaff May 2022

The Whale-Road To Road House: A Study Of The Contemporary Transmission Of Beowulf, Haley Grindstaff

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores three versions of Beowulf: Gareth Hinds’s graphic novel Beowulf (2007), Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation Beowulf (2020), and Rowdy Herrington’s film Road House (1989). While Hinds and Headley fail to convey Beowulf as a cultural elegy by subtracting or misrepresenting significant scenes and characters, Road House superimposes the story of Beowulf onto 1980s America. Parallels between the plots of Beowulf and Road House and Road House’s interaction with the political underpinnings of the 80s (such as Reaganomics and the AIDS epidemic) make the film one of the best at capturing the elements of cultural elegy in the …

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Reimagining History Dataset 3.0, Michelle R. Warren, Neil Weijer Apr 2022

Reimagining History Dataset 3.0, Michelle R. Warren, Neil Weijer

Other Faculty Materials

The Middle English prose Brut chronicle survives in nearly two hundred manuscripts. This corpus has been the subject of extensive study for more than a hundred years. The most recent research, however, has turned out to be the most fragile. In 2017, the multiyear digital humanities project “Imaging History: Perspectives on Late Medieval Vernacular Historiography” disappeared from the live Internet, only a decade after its publication. Shortly afterwards, we began a project called "Re-Imagining History"--to create a new dataset of information about the Brut manuscript corpus and learn how digital infrastructure might shape the production and preservation of historical data. …

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Sterner Stuff; Sansa Stark And The System Of Gothic Fantasy, Joseph R. Young Apr 2022

Sterner Stuff; Sansa Stark And The System Of Gothic Fantasy, Joseph R. Young

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Contests the suggestion that Sansa Stark, a character in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, is a weak and indecisive by analyzing her in relation to William Patrick Day’s system of Gothic fantasy. While Sansa is indeed physically passive, she manages to retain her own identity in a challenging literary environment. This physical passivity allows her to assert herself intellectually, analyzing and indicting the misdeeds and abuses she suffers. This combination of passive and active attributes precisely instantiates the skill set of the detective, a species of literary being developed from the Gothic fantasies Day analyses, and …

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“Hol Ynowh”, Maria Bullon-Fernandez Mar 2022

“Hol Ynowh”, Maria Bullon-Fernandez

Accessus

This essay is a response to a series of essays on hope and healing in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. It highlights and develops a common thread found in the essays: to Gower in order to heal, we need to accept that the cure for an illness may not restore us completely to our former selves but may make us just “hol ynowh.” And by accepting, we can find peace.

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Gower In Exile, Joel Fredell Mar 2022

Gower In Exile, Joel Fredell

Accessus

The articles in Hope and Healing reveal John Gower's interest in an inclusive approach to human suffering, but also a clear-eyed look at its suffering. The experience of Amans in the Confessio Amantis, exiled from the love court of Venus, represents a powerful vision of love-agony as a central form of human suffering, not a cliche of love poetry.

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Writing Into Hope: Laughter, Sadness And Healing In John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Natalie Grinnell Mar 2022

Writing Into Hope: Laughter, Sadness And Healing In John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Natalie Grinnell

Accessus

This article uses the theory of the narrative creation of the self to contend that the Confessio Amantis creates a space for narrative healing within the acknowledgement of mortality. Rather than being traditionally funny or ending in amorous or military victory, Gower’s poem uses the encyclopedia knowledge of the interpolated tales to establish a healing narrative in the face of failure and loss.

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The Price We Pay For Envy: A Political And Social “Maladie”, Will Rogers Mar 2022

The Price We Pay For Envy: A Political And Social “Maladie”, Will Rogers

Accessus

"The Travelers and the Angel" is a curious exemplum: depicting envy as almost an emotion, it depicts the seemingly hopeless worsening of the world, as the envious care more for others' pain than their own happiness. While the exemplum's moral is undoubtedly true, even for 21st century readers, we might address how Gower's particular framing of envy doesn't account for envy's potential to drive positive change.

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The Unfinished Hope Of Gower's Transgender Children, Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski Mar 2022

The Unfinished Hope Of Gower's Transgender Children, Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski

Accessus

This article examines two of Gower's tales from the Confessio Amantis that deal with trans youths: Iphis and Narcissus. Considering these two tales together, I ask the question: why does one story end with hopeful futurity for the trans masculine youth and the other end with death and the absence of futurity for the trans feminine youth. Connecting these medieval texts to premodern contexts and then with modern contexts, I map the trajectory of centuries long problems facing trans youths. In the end, I conclude that trans youth possess a healthier and more stable future when they receive trans affirming …

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The Consolation Of Exempla: Gower’S Sources Of Hope And “Textual Healing” In The Confessio Amantis, Curtis Runstedler Mar 2022

The Consolation Of Exempla: Gower’S Sources Of Hope And “Textual Healing” In The Confessio Amantis, Curtis Runstedler

Accessus

This article examines the role of exempla as the root cause of hope and healing in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. I argue that these exempla provide remedial action in the text. The exempla are sources of metaphorical healing in the text, functioning as what I have termed “textual healing,” that is the medicinal aspects of the text that helps remedy Amans (and the reader, to a certain extent) back to full health. This article also draws upon reading the Confessio Amantis as a consolatio poem, linking it to Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy in particular. I also discuss the role …

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Healing, Accountability, And Community In Gower’S Confessio Amantis, Kara L. Mcshane Mar 2022

Healing, Accountability, And Community In Gower’S Confessio Amantis, Kara L. Mcshane

Accessus

This piece focuses on the Tale of Lucrece and the Tale of Mundus and Paulina in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. I examine how these two quite distinct narratives of sexual assault emphasize key themes in community response to trauma. In these two tales, Gower emphasizes the extent to which interpersonal violence is also social violence; further, community demands for accountability are essential to social healing in both cases. These two models demonstrate the extent to which contemporary society, too, struggles to hold authority accountable and address social wrongs.

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Gower's "Herte-Thoght": Thinking, Feeling, Healing, Eve Salisbury Mar 2022

Gower's "Herte-Thoght": Thinking, Feeling, Healing, Eve Salisbury

Accessus

While much has been said about the ethical principles of Gower's poetry, less has been said about his understanding of the body, its principal organs, and its relation to the medical discourse of the time. This short paper, presented initially as part of the "Hope and Healing Symposium" sponsored by The Gower Project, approaches the poet's work from a more medically inflected point of view, one that suggests a stronger kinship between the material body and its use as a metaphor for the body politic. Gower appears to be situated within a continuing debate launched by Aristotle and taken up …

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Hope And Healing In Gower: A Special Issue, Georgiana Donavin Mar 2022

Hope And Healing In Gower: A Special Issue, Georgiana Donavin

Accessus

"Hope and Healing in Gower: A Special Issue" is the editor's short introduction to Accessus 7.1.

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Eotenas And Hobbits: Finn And Hengest, And Tolkien’S Speculation About Origins, Nicholas Birns Mar 2022

Eotenas And Hobbits: Finn And Hengest, And Tolkien’S Speculation About Origins, Nicholas Birns

Journal of Tolkien Research

This essay examines Tolkien’s Finn and Hengest, particularly concentrating on Tolkien’s interpretation of the word eotenas as meaning Jutes rather than ‘monsters’. As opposed to “Beowulf: The Monsters and The Critics,” where Tolkien emphasizes supernatural elements at the expense of history, Tolkien’s lecture on the Finnsburg episode in Beowulf and the Finnsburg fragment seems to present Hengest as an English national hero, despite the bloodiness and vengeance of his reprisals against Hnaef and the Frisian court. The use of the word 'eotenas,' which can be constructed as either 'monsters' or 'Jutes,' is at the nub of the conflict here, …

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Tolkien, Cline, And The Quest For A Silmaril, Tom Ue, James Munday Feb 2022

Tolkien, Cline, And The Quest For A Silmaril, Tom Ue, James Munday

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

J. R. R. Tolkien has had a significant influence on American writer Ernest Cline. In Ready Player One (2011), the character Ogden Morrow invites Wade and his friends to his mansion, which is modelled after Rivendell from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films (2001- 03). Cline goes further in his sequel Ready Player Two (2021) by staging a part of Wade’s virtual quest on Arda I, the First Age of Middle Earth. In this paper, we focus on this episode and, in so doing, argue for Cline’s insights into how we approach fantasy. First, we attend to the …

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Who’S His Daddy? Approaches To Merlin’S Father In Children’S And Ya Media, Michael Torregosa Feb 2022

Who’S His Daddy? Approaches To Merlin’S Father In Children’S And Ya Media, Michael Torregosa

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

In the 1130s, Geoffrey of Monmouth originated the character of Merlin, setting him upon the world stage as a wonder-working youth fathered (in the tradition of Greek and Latin authors of the past) by a daemon. However, later writers of the Middle Ages, beginning with Robert de Boron, reconceived Merlin within a more Christianized world, altering his heritage and transforming his sire into a demon from Hell. This shift from benign daemon to malevolent demon has impacted the representation of the wizard of Camelot for centuries. Contemporary fiction for the page as well as for the screen has adopted and …

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"Shivering Trees": Horror Monstrosity In Selected Stories From Tolkien’S The Silmarillion, Elise Mckenna Feb 2022

"Shivering Trees": Horror Monstrosity In Selected Stories From Tolkien’S The Silmarillion, Elise Mckenna

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

In The Silmarillion, Tolkien used conventions of horror within the setting of Arda. To begin with, the entire world, which is monstrous, is in upheaval with mountains being raised and valley being delved, lanterns of light created, and huge beings walking the land. Then, these landscapes are torn down, the lights are smashed and go out, and new creatures of horror prowl the world. The differences between the portrayals of monstrosity on a grand scale border the grotesque and the sublime. Monstrous beings, Valar and Maiar, command the elements of earth, air, fire, water. They have pre-ordained roles that …

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The Story, The Narrator And The Reader: Mediated Horror In C.S. Lewis’S Narniad, William Thompson Feb 2022

The Story, The Narrator And The Reader: Mediated Horror In C.S. Lewis’S Narniad, William Thompson

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

In her introduction to Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture, Jessica R. McCort defines horror for children and young adults as a hybrid genre, one having its roots in both the gothic and the nineteenth-century fairy tale. She explains that the exploration of dark forces in children’s books is often not limited to those tropes traditionally associated with the horror genre for adults: “Think of the books that are considered children’s classics. The best of them contain dark forces of one kind or another, as well as internal battles between the light and the dark: …

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Environmental Horror And Restoration: Tolkien And Today, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, Caitlin Rottler Feb 2022

Environmental Horror And Restoration: Tolkien And Today, Jessica Dickinson Goodman, Caitlin Rottler

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

J.R.R. Tolkien never forgot the felling of a willow tree that had overlooked the mill-pool in Sarehole, nor how his former climbing companion had been left to rot in the grass. His horror at that small environmental violence bleeds through his works, from poems like “From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames” (1913) to the Party Tree in The Hobbit (1937) to a letter to The Daily Telegraph in 1972 when he decried the modern “torture and murder of trees.” This presentation will draw on the excellent foundations laid by Dinah Hazell, as well as the father-son pair of …

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Nature And Horror In Tolkien’S Legendarium, Julia Bowers Feb 2022

Nature And Horror In Tolkien’S Legendarium, Julia Bowers

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

Tolkien incorporates horror in his legendarium through the twisting of the natural world in order to signal upcoming dangers to his characters. This creates a dichotomy between the idyllic natural world that represents good in his works and the twisted natural world that has been tampered with by evil. Most of the focus on Tolkien’s portrayal of nature looks at the conflict between nature and technology; the natural world of Middle-earth is portrayed as more complex than merely all nature being good. His natural settings take on an eerie tone to convey a sense of horror to the reader as …

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Charles Williams' P'O- L'U - The Cthulhu Connection, Eric Rauscher Feb 2022

Charles Williams' P'O- L'U - The Cthulhu Connection, Eric Rauscher

Online Midwinter Seminar (OMS)

This presentation delineates the connections between horrific elements in the work of H.P. Lovecraft and the situation of P’o-L’u from Charles Williams.

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