Medieval Studies Commons^™

Space, Image, And Reform In Early Modern Art: The Influence Of Marcia Hall, Arthur J. Difuria, Ian Verstegen

Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

The essays in Space, Image and Reform in Early Modern Art build on Marcia Hall's seminal contributions in several categories crucial for Renaissance studies, especially the spatiality of the church interior, the altarpiece's facture and affectivity, the notion of artistic style, and the controversy over images in the era of Counter Reform. Accruing the advantage of critical engagement with a single paradigm, this volume better assesses its applicability and range. The book works cumulatively to provide blocks of theoretical and empirical research on issues spanning the function and role of images in their contexts over two centuries. Relating Hall's investigations …

Medieval Infertility: Treatments, Cures, And Consequences, Zia Simpson

The Forum: Journal of History

Since the first civilizations emerged, reproductive ability has been one of the most prominent elements in assessing a woman’s value to society. Other characteristics such as beauty, intelligence, and wealth may have been granted comparable consequence, but those are arbitrary and improvable. Fertility is genetic, and for centuries it was beyond human control. Among the medieval European nobility, fertility held even greater power. The absence of an heir could, either directly or indirectly, bring about war, economic depression, and social disorder. Catholicism provided a refuge by allowing barren women to retain their hopes, while simultaneously enriching Rome’s coffers. Other women …

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

The Failure Of Chivalry, Courtesy, And Knighthood Post-Wwi As Represented In David Jones’S In Parenthesis, Taylor L. Hubbard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes David Jones’s In Parenthesis to demonstrate the failed notion of chivalry, courtesy, and knighthood in modernity during and after the war. Jones’s semi-autobiographical prose poem recounting his experiences of WWI was published in 1937, nineteen years after the war ended. Jones applied the concepts of chivalry, courtesy, and knighthood to his experiences during WWI through In Parenthesis. Jones used these concepts, which originated in the classical period and the Middle Ages, to demonstrate how they have changed over time, especially given the events of WWI. The best way for Jones to demonstrate the impact of WWI …

Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Building And Using A Linked Open Data Environment For Medieval And Renaissance Manuscript Studies, Lynn Ransom, Toby Burrows

Digital Initiatives Symposium

“Mapping Manuscript Migrations” is a digital humanities project that brings together three distinct data sets about the histories of more than 215,000 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts for browsing, searching, and visualization. Four leading institutions from Great Britain, France, Finland, and the United States collaborated on this project, pooling their expertise in Semantic Web technologies and medieval manuscript curation and research, as well as contributing their own data from the three contrasting datasets. The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, the Medieval Manuscripts Catalogue at the University of Oxford, and the Bibale database from the Institut de recherche …

Remix The Manuscript: A Chronicle Of Digital Experiments (2015-2020), Michelle R. Warren

Other Faculty Materials

Remix the Manuscript is a digital humanities research project centered around a single medieval manuscript, the Dartmouth Brut Chronicle (Rauner Codex MS 003183). This ongoing experiment with digital tools uses this one example to explore one broad question: How are the digital tools available today determining what we will know 100 years from now about things that happened 1000 years ago?

Reading The Old Norse-Icelandic Maríu Saga In Its Manuscript Contexts, Daniel Najork

Northern Medieval World

Maríu saga, the Old Norse-Icelandic life of the Virgin Mary, survives in nineteen manuscripts. In the extant manuscripts Maríu saga rarely exists in the codex by itself. This study restores the saga to its manuscript contexts in order to better understand the meaning of the text within its manuscript matrix, why it was copied in the specific manuscripts it was, and how it was read and used by the different communities that preserved the manuscripts.

The Development Of Education In Medieval Iceland, Ryder Patzuk-Russell

Northern Medieval World

This book investigates the institutions and practices of education which lay behind medieval Icelandic literature, as well as behind many other aspects of medieval Icelandic culture and society. By bringing together a broad spectrum of sources, including sagas, law codes, and grammatical treatises, it addresses the history of education in medieval Iceland from multiple perspectives.

Reading Plague Images: Visual Literacy In The History Classroom, Katherina Fostano

Developing Pedagogy Graduate Student Showcase

In 2016 Peter Felten, Director of the Center for Advancement of Teaching and Learning at Elon University, wrote, “Our students live in a highly visual world, where images are fundamental in shaping their understandings of history before they ever enter our classrooms.” This observation prompted me to create a series of exercises that introduce students to general visual literacy skills in the History classroom. These exercises aim to help students use visual sources to make evidence-based interpretations of the past with rigor and efficacy. In this presentation, I focused on images of past plagues since the recent proliferation of plague-related …

The Wisdom Of Exeter: Anglo-Saxon Studies In Honor Of Patrick W. Conner, Edward J. Christie

Richard Rawlinson Center Series

This interdisciplinary volume collects original essays in literary criticism and literary theory, philology, codicology, metrics, and art history. Composed by prominent scholars in Anglo-Saxon studies, these essays honor the depth and breadth of Patrick W. Conner’s influence in our discipline. As a scholar, teacher, editor, administrator and innovator, Pat has contributed to Anglo-Saxon studies for four decades. It is hard to say which of his legacies is most profound.

No Nazis In Valhalla: Understanding The Use (And Misuse) Of Nordic Cultural Markers In Third Reich Era Germany, Lena Nighswander

International ResearchScape Journal

While medieval concepts are frequently used as a means for the general public to understand emerging global political institutions around the world, they also have immense capability to be purposely misused by political groups due to the generally vague and misguided understanding of these concepts by the masses. At one core of these movements is the legacy of Vikings and the misrepresentation of their history by far-right political groups, especially in mid-20^th century Europe, in order to push a fictitious agenda of a prosperous, all-white race of seafaring warriors. Through the appropriation of medieval Old Norse imagery and mythology, …

Pratiquer Ou Incarner La Vertu? L'Agentivité Des Femmes Chez Marie De France Et Christine De Pizan, Kathe Blydenburgh

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the treatment of women in Medieval literature as active agents in their roles of upholding the virtues of the societies in which they live. This study focuses on works written by the female authors Marie de France and Christine de Pizan.

The Aesthetics Of Storytelling And Literary Criticism As Mythological Ritual: The Myth Of The Human Tragic Hero, Intertextual Comparisons Between The Heroes And Monsters Of Beowulf And The Anglo-Saxon Exodus, Daniel Stoll

Undergraduate Honors Theses

For thousands of years, people have been hearing, reading, and interpreting stories and myths in light of their own experience. To read a work by a different author living in a different era and setting, people tend to imagine works of literature to be something they are not. To avoid this fateful tendency, I hope to elucidate what it means to read a work of literature and interpret it: love it to the point of wanting to foremost discuss its excellence of being a piece of art. Rather than this being a defense, I would rather call it a musing, …

Between The Judean Desert And Gaza: Asceticism And The Monastic Communities Of Palestine In The Sixth Century, Austin Mccray

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The dissertation focuses on the religious culture of Christian monasticism in sixth-century Palestine. Rather than see the monastic communities of the Judean Desert, just to the east of Jerusalem, and those around Gaza as two independent monastic regions, as much scholarship has done, the dissertation focuses on the common threads that can be seen in the monastic teachings and idealized ascetic practices in the literature of the area. This dissertation reveals ways to redefine the boundaries between the monastic communities of Palestine during the sixth century as well as emphasizes the continuities between the monks of the Judean Desert and …

Paranormal Encounters In Iceland 1150-1400, Ármann Jakobsson, Miriam Mayburd

Northern Medieval World

This anthology of international scholarship offers new critical approaches to the study of the many manifestations of the paranormal in the Middle Ages. The guiding principle of the collection is to depart from symbolic or reductionist readings of the subject matter in favor of focusing on the paranormal as human experience and, essentially, on how these experiences are defined by the sources. The authors work with a variety of medieval Icelandic textual sources, including family sagas, legendary sagas, romances, poetry, hagiography and miracles, exploring the diversity of paranormal activity in the medieval North. This volume questions all previous definitions of …

Drach, Prüss, And The Fifteenth-Century Book Trade, Jonathan Taylor

Extra-Textual Elements

The development of the moveable-type press in the mid-fifteenth century led to the rise of a new industry, the manufacture and trade of printed books. Before this, written works existed as handwritten manuscripts individually produced by scribes.

The printing press allowed works such as the Malleus maleficarum and Fasciculus temporum contained within Portland State University’s codex to be produced in a significantly more efficient manner. The printers of the two volumes contained in the codex, Peter Drach and Johann Prüss, successfully avoided the pitfalls facing early printers to become successful in their trade, and may have actively cooperated in the …

Watermarks In The Psu Malleus Maleficarum, Laura Lindenthal

Extra-Textual Elements

This paper seeks to connect the watermarks found in PSU’s codex to the printer (or printers) of the included texts, the Malleus maleficarum and the Fasciculus temporum. Specifically, this essay considers three watermarks found on the paper of the Malleus maleficarum, one of which, an ox-head with staff, occurs on a blank page between the Malleus and the Fasciculus temporum, which precedes it in the codex. These watermarks and their common variations are described and their inclusion in several watermark databases is discussed. The three marks found in the Malleus maleficarum may be directly connected to the printer, …

Marginalia And Nota Bene In The Fasciculus Temporum: Frontispiece And Folios 4-23, Michael Jeremy Maly

Fasciculus Temporum

The goal of this project was the creation of a catalogue of all marginal notes and nota bene intended to draw attention to specific passages within the Fasciculus temporum.

This catalogue is meant to be used as a quick reference for readers to assist in finding specific marginalia and nota bene with greater ease. It covers folios 4-23. This compilation of notes written in the Fasciculus temporum could also be used as a research tool for further study of this edition (Prüss, Strassburg, c.1490) of the Fasciculus temporum.

This catalogue describes the notations by folio and location on the …

The Carthusian Influence On Werner Rolewinck’S Approach To History, Nathaniel Harris

Fasciculus Temporum

The Carthusian Order was founded in 1084 by St. Bruno of Cologne and a small number of followers, all seeking greater solitude and a more austere, contemplative monasticism. Carthusian monks lived predominantly isolated lives, only coming together co-operatively for prescribed religious purposes.

The intellectual and separate life of a Carthusian monk appealed to Werner Rolewinck (1425-1502), the author/compiler of the Fasciculus temporum, one of the two texts (together with the Malleus maleficarum) included in Portland State University Library’s late fifteenth-century codex. With its structure modeled on early chronicles and biblical conventions, its inclusion of a variety of woodcut …

Woodcuts Of Human Oddities In The Fasciculus Temporum, Brady Brick

Fasciculus Temporum

This paper focuses on two woodcut images of human oddities in Portland State University’s edition of the Fasciculus temporum (Prüss, Strassburg, 1490).

One woodcut shows children with birth anomalies affecting their eyes, arms, and legs. The second is of a cynocephalus or dog-headed man. The history and context of these types of images and their significance within the text are both considered. This paper also examines possible medical explanations for the physical anomalies shown in the woodcut images.

Pope Innocent Viii (1484-1492) And The Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, Maral Deyrmenjian

Malleus Maleficarum

The papal bull (or decree) Summis desiderantes affectibus, issued in 1484 by Pope Innocent VIII (1484-1492), specifically addressed the malign presence of witches and witchcraft in the Holy Roman Empire and authorized a formal inquisition into their activities. It was one of several official condemnations of heretics and other enemies of Christendom, both groups and individuals, issued during Innocent VII’s reign.

Heinrich Kramer, the primary author of the Malleus maleficarum (1486/7) prefaced the second edition of his witch-hunting manual with the Summis desiderantes affectibus without explicit permission; scholars argue that he considered it likely to bolster the work’s authority …

Watermarks In The Psu Codex Fasciculus Temporum And The Paper Trade, Christian Graham

Extra-Textual Elements

Medieval watermarks were introduced into early printed works during the production process of the paper. It is not known exactly when or why they came into common use, but they did come to identify specific paper suppliers.

As the number of paper suppliers grew enormously in concert with the growth of popularity of printed books, identifying the watermarks of specific producers can provide the modern scholar with valuable information about an early printed work, including dating editions and providing insight into trading relationships and connections between paper-makers and printers.

This paper examines some of the watermarks present in the PSU’s …

Rational Creatures: Examining The Cat-Dog Divide In The Medieval World, Emily Price

Capstone Showcase

The spiritual chasm of status that exists between man and beast is daily put to the test by the very beasts kept in our homes. Human beings have a long history of keeping animals for one reason or another, but it has only been recently that the concept of animals purely maintained for companionship has taken center stage. The Middle Ages in particular served as a transformative moment in the history of the “pet,” where not only was the role of the animal within man’s existence re-examined, but so, too, were the specific animals preferred by different cultures more solidly …

The Reconquista And Crusading In The Late 11th And Early 12th Century, Catherine Hill

Capstone Showcase

The purpose of this project is to recount the historiography and literature of the Crusades and the Reconquista and then offer some commentary on their relationship in Spain in the late 11th and early 12th centuries. Both of these fields have a tremendous amount of scholarship to understand these phenomena in medieval history. Therefore, the scope of this project is to compile the main scholarly debates surrounding the connection between the Crusades and the Reconquista and consider the evidence for the various approaches. The relevant background history of the Reconquista contextualizes the literature of the two fields. The main debates …

Rational Creatures: Examining The Cat-Dog Divide In The Medieval World, Emily Price

Capstone Showcase

The spiritual chasm of status that exists between man and beast is daily put to the test by the very beasts kept in our homes. Human beings have a long history of keeping animals for one reason or another, but it has only been recently that the concept of animals purely maintained for companionship has taken center stage. The Middle Ages in particular served as a transformative moment in the history of the “pet,” where not only was the role of the animal within man’s existence re-examined, but so, too, were the specific animals preferred by different cultures more solidly …

Spices, Spirituality, And Scarcity: Experiences Of Food And Drink In The Middle Ages, Thomas Nelson

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay………………………….......3

II. Primary Documents and Headnotes………27

III. Textbook Critique…………………………...37

IV. New Textbook Entry………………………...40

V. Bibliography…………………………………..49

Tolerance, Prejudice, And The Ornament Of The World, Elijah Zane

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay…………………………....3

II. Primary Documents and Headnotes…….32

III. Textbook Critique………………………....38

IV. New Textbook Entry………………………42

V. Bibliography………………………………..52

The Vikings Reimagined: Reception, Recovery, Engagement, Tom Birkett, Roderick Dale

Northern Medieval World

Rediscovering the Vikings explores the changing perception of Norse and Viking cultures across different cultural forms, and the complex legacy of the Vikings in the present day. Bringing together experts in literature, history and heritage engagement, this highly interdisciplinary collection aims to reconsider the impact of the discipline of Old Norse Viking Studies outside the academy and to broaden our understanding of the ways in which the material and textual remains of the Viking Age are given new meanings in the present. The diverse collection draws attention to the many roles that the Vikings play across contemporary culture: from the …

Monsters In Society: Alterity, Transgression, And The Use Of The Past In Medieval Iceland, Rebecca Merkelbach

Northern Medieval World

Dragons, giants, and the monsters of learned discourse are rarely encountered in the Sagas of Icelanders, and therefore, the general teratological focus on physical monstrosity yields only limited results when applied to them. This, however, does not equal an absence of monstrosity — it only means that monstrosity is conceived of differently. This book shifts the view of monstrosity from the physical to the social, accounting for the unique social circumstances presented in the Íslendingasögur and demonstrating how closely interwoven the social and the monstrous are in this genre. Employing literary and cultural theory as well as anthropological and historical …

Teaching The Principles Of Research Through The Creation Of Digital Content, Melodie H. Eichbauer

Florida Statewide Symposium: Best Practices in Undergraduate Research

This presentation highlights the outcomes of a series of student internships that resulted in the production of successively more complex content videos for my undergraduate survey EUH 2021 Medieval European History. The production of the videos mirrored the research process and those creating the videos thought about and worked through the steps that a research project takes. Students enrolled in the course, which explores the period c.400 and c.1400 A.D., oftentimes have a difficult time with how to conceptualize the information, how to navigate the information, and how to delve into the information. The students engaged in the video product …