Medieval Studies Commons^™

A Modern Approach To Classifying Medieval Latin Scripts, Robert L. Lane Jr, Rafia Mirza, Robert Slater

SMU Data Science Review

Paleography, the study of historical handwriting, is essential for preserving societal understanding of cultural, social, and legal frameworks from the past. Medieval manuscripts, often exhibiting refined craftsmanship, present unique challenges to modern readers due to differences in handwriting conventions and the absence of standardized punctuation and spaces. These texts hold valuable insights into the evolution of written communication, literacy, and language development. However, interpreting them requires specialized knowledge and technological solutions. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can be leveraged to classify scripts, an important step in Historical Document analysis. These models extract and analyze hierarchical features from images, addressing inconsistencies in …

“Þer Watz Mete, Þer Watz Myrþe, Þer Watz Much Ioye”: The Manipulative Sotilte Of Middle English Romance, Kelly Evans

English Theses and Dissertations

The Middle English sotilte and its Middle French counterpart, the entremet, refer to the elements during a feast that conjure wonder. Like “feast” and “banquet,” both terms have been used interchangeably, with the entremet coming to signify a sweet dessert at the end of a meal in modern usage of the term. In Middle English romance, the sotilte of the feast builds upon the connotations that “subtlety” carry—guile, artifice, craft, even deceit.

Perhaps the most well-known of all Middle English sotiltes is the sudden intrusion of the Green Knight during the Christmastide feast in Sir Gawain and the Green …

Preaching To The Converted: Religious Conversion In East Anglian Medieval Drama, Eleanor Davis

English Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation investigates religious conversion in late medieval East Anglian drama (c. 1400–1500). Each of my chapters examines a play with ties to fifteenth-century East Anglia, an economically prosperous region where orthodoxy and heterodoxy coexisted and religious drama flourished. All of the plays stage at least one miraculous conversion experience, yet the plays also offer reminders that conversion is an ongoing process that demands the convert’s continual effort to keep growing in faith. I demonstrate how these anonymous plays deliver their most important lessons about conversion in their much less miraculous moments, exposing a dramaturgy that revels in its ability …

The Humanity Of Christ As Instrument Of Salvation In The Theology Of Thomas Aquinas, J. David Moser

Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations

Interpreters of Thomas Aquinas’s Christology have long observed the uniqueness of his claim that Christ’s human nature is “an instrument of the divinity.” For Aquinas, the mysteries of Christ’s life, the actions and sufferings he underwent in the flesh (acta et passa Christi in carne), cause our salvation in the present. And they have this effect because Christ’s humanity is a “conjoined instrument” of the divinity, united to the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, in person. By contrast, nearly all of Aquinas’s medieval contemporaries, like Bonaventure (1224-1274) as well as Aquinas himself, argued that the humanity …

As Above, So Below: Italian Amuletic Practices Following The Black Death, Danielle Pigeon

Art History Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the production of amuletic rings in the Italian peninsula following the arrival of Yersinia pestis during the mid-fourteenth century. By examining patterns of ornamentation on a selection of Italian rings, I establish connections to the trauma experienced by individuals left in the wake of the plague and argue that these objects offered a sacralized model of protective adornment to counteract the threat of a fatal and seemingly unstoppable illness. Italian amuletic rings can thereby be read as a material response to the anxieties of mass death and bodily horrors that accompanied outbreaks of the Black Death.

The …

Desire, Frustration, And Resolution In The Ending(S) Of Troilus And Criseyde, Kenny Martin

SMU Journal of Undergraduate Research

This essay analyzes the final stanzas of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in order to challenge the critical commonplace that the poem’s ending is fraught, fragmented, unsatisfactory, or ultimately inconclusive. It questions the traditional view that the ending is a conspicuous departure from the poetic mode of the earlier poem, as well as the view that the final stanzas are dominated by an ideological struggle between earthly and divine love. Through a close reading of the final five stanzas of the poem—and with particular attention to their echoes throughout the larger work— the essay seeks to elucidate how Chaucer’s poetics of …

Te Deum, Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Research

Te Deum--87pp.

Introductory note: "The text of Te Deum has been set to music by many composers. The Latin text 'Te Deum laudames: te Dominum confitemur' begins the work, translated as 'We praise you, O God: we acknowledge you to be the Lord.' The writing of this work was inspired initially by the work of Arvo Pärt, whose setting I find to be one of the most beautiful. I share in the admiration of Pärt's music and his contribution to the genre of sacred choral writing with my friend and colleague Dr. Robert Saler, who has promoted Pärt's work with …