Medieval Studies Commons^™

55th International Congress On Medieval Studies, Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University

International Congress on Medieval Studies Archive

The printed program of the 55th International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 7-10, 2020), which was canceled due to the COVID-19 outbreak and recommendations of the CDC and the WHO regarding social distancing and public gatherings.

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, …

The Medieval British Legacy Of The Founding Myth Of Britain, Timothy J. Nelson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Medieval British Legacy of the Founding Myth of Britain” examines the historiographical development of the founding myth of Britain between the 9th and 14th centuries. This study begins with an overview of the Latin, Anglo-Norman French, Middle English, and Middle Welsh texts that transmit this founding myth across medieval Britain. The stylistic features and the motivations of the authors who are adapting this myth are addressed but the main objective of this overview is to introduce the texts in question and to start establishing the intertextual relationships between these works. The textual examination of the historiographical development of the …

Vulgar Love: The Sicilian School And The New Aesthetic, Jason Collins

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Much consideration has been given in the last century to the Scuola Siciliana, or the Sicilian School, the first coterie of poets in an already developed but still emergent Italian vernacular, and this in spite of an almost complete lack of autograph copies of poetic works in the original language. A great deal of this scholarship or research has a taxonomic and theoretical approach to the works, their composition, and the atmosphere that fostered them, and oftentimes attempts to position the Sicilian School within the historiography of Italian literature (particularly as progenitors to the Tuscan poets and thus Dante, Petrarch, …

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 …

Convents And Novices In Early Modern English Dramatic Works: In Medias Res, Vanessa L. Rapatz

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Texts: In Medias Res attends to the religious, social, and material changes in England during the century following the Reformation, specifically examining how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta; Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious …

“Thus Seyden Sadde Folk”: Chaucer’S Oxford Clerk On Theological Controversy In The 14th Century, Molly Kluever

CSB and SJU Distinguished Thesis

Among the most disturbing of The Canterbury Tales, the Oxford Clerk’s story of the submissive Griselda and her husband-cum-tormentor Walter has, despite its categorization as one of Chaucer’s “religious tales,” resisted most, if not all, theological readings with its lack of a clear moral. I attempt to address this ambiguity by focusing on the teller himself. As an Oxford-trained cleric, the Clerk is uniquely qualified to juggle the interrelated but conflicting discourses of two significant theological controversies of the late fourteenth century: the ongoing realist-nominalist debate within medieval universities and the rising Wycliffite/lollardy reform movement among all levels of …

Questions Of Religion And Society In The Works Of Ibn Khaldun, Lazizakhon Abbasovna Alidjanova

The Light of Islam

Ibn Khaldun is one of the prominent scholars, studied and created works on religious science in harmony with secular science. His full name - Abdurahman Abu Zayd ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun (b. 1332, Tunisia / died. 1406, Cairo) – Arab historian and philosopher. He is considered as a follower of Ibn Rushd, in 1349-1375 he served in high posts under the rulers of Tunis, Fes, Garnot, Bujojya (Chorus). In 1382 he arrived in Egypt and began to work as a teacher at the local madrasah. Ibn Khaldun was part of the delegation negotiating the conditions for the surrender of the …

Gower As Data: Exploring The Application Of Machine Learning To Gower’S Middle English Corpus, Kara L. Mcshane, Alvin Grissom Ii

Accessus

Distant reading, a digital humanities method in wide use, involves processing and analyzing a large amount of text through computer programs. In treating texts as data, these methods can highlight trends in diction, themes, and linguistic patterns that individual readers may miss or critical traditions may obscure. Though several scholars have undertaken projects using topic models and text mining on Middle English texts, the nonstandard orthography of Middle English makes this process more challenging than for our counterparts in later literature.

This collaborative project uses Gower’s Confessio Amantis as a small, fixed corpus for analysis. We employ natural language processing …

Standing In The Dark: Sloth And Stability, Paralysis And Perseverance In Book Iv Of The Confessio Amantis, Andrea Schutz

Accessus

In Book IV of the Confessio, things happen in the dark – the dark of night, of dreams, of despair, of secrecy, of treachery, of death. The medieval sin of accidia sets the pace for this beautifully constructed book, whose tales link and cross, as in a dance. Dido, Phyllis, the bad, the forgetful, and the obsessive lovers swing like slowing pendulums back to their starting points, and stop still. On the whole, their dance with Amans is a slow and stately pavane of the dead and desperate. This is Gower’s darkest book, though not the most bloody: Sloth is …

Narcissus In Queer Time, Lacey M. Wolfer

Accessus

Queer temporality has been studied in relation to the Middle Ages as a means of questioning the prevailing historiography for other modes of connection to the past, such as embodied or affective. Conversely, the other branch of queer temporality has been primarily interested in how queer lifestyles today disrupt the heteronormative plan laid out by society. Joining these modes, Gower’s revision of Narcissus questions our notions of historiography through showing us an example of a queer, transgender character and his struggles with heteronormative expectations—demonstrating that the medieval is not so disconnected from the modern.

One Voice, Ancient And Resigned, Will Rogers

Accessus

While we know, or at least can imagine, what Gower looked like in his old age, it is hard to imagine or hear his voice. And yet, given what we know about his old age and visual impairments, his voice necessarily was important to his old age and continuing revisions of his texts. In this article, I attempt to reconstruct from some of his later poetry what that voice might have sounded like, at least in-text, and piece together how later authors heard that voice of old age.

Dark Money: Gower, Echo, And 'Blinde Avarice', Craig E. Bertolet

Accessus

Gower’s poetic works show a consistent concern with the darkness and deceit associated with Avarice, the sin mostly associated with commercial transactions. In the Confessio, he calls Avarice blind. This blindness seems to work both ways. Avarice blinds humans to their humanity because it causes them to cheat and steal from others. Avarice also blinds the victims of the greedy since the greedy resort to deception in order to gain what they want. In the Confessio, Genius tells the tale of Echo as an example of the practices that he calls usury but who works as an amalgam …

“Als Wel The Lord As The Schepherde, He Broghte Hem Alle In Good Accord”: Harmonious Materialism In The Confessio Amantis, Roger A. Ladd

Accessus

Using R. F. Yeager's analysis of the figure Arion as a starting point, this article argues that in the Confessio Amantis, John Gower shifts his impulse toward social correction from direct estates satire to a more subtle approach encoding his social critique in the love stories of the Confessio. Examples of this approach include a variety of tales from Book 5, and the Apollonius of Tyre story in Book 8. Details of the poem's ending and later works like "In Praise of Peace" indicate that Gower still retained an interest in direct critique of social problems.

Global Gower: The Archer Aiming At The World, Joyce Coleman

Accessus

This article explores the Vox Clamantis’ famous image of the archer shooting an arrow at a globe. There are sources and analogues for all the elements of the picture, but their combination and reinvention have produced a unique iconography. Gower’s multispectral conception of the globe combines ecological features with human estates with divine justice. Huntington Library HM 150 extends this innovation further, possibly even linking the miniature to the Wilton Diptych via the cross and pennon planted on the top of its globe. The complexity of the ideas embedded in the archer images suggests that Gower himself, and not …

Introducing Gower Shorts, Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin

Accessus

This essay provides an introduction to a special issue of Accessus, entitled "Gower Shorts," slightly expanded and revised versions of conference papers presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in 2018-19 and the Modern Language Association Conference in Chicago in 2019.

Divining Gospel. Oracles Of Interpretation In A Syriac Manuscript Of John, Jeff Childers

Graduate School of Theology

Ancient manuscripts of John’s Gospel containing hermeneiai have long puzzled scholars, provoking debate about their origins, purpose, and use. The fragmentary nature of the early evidence has impeded progress towards a better understanding of these specialized books. The present study shows that these books are "Divining Gospels"—editions of John’s Gospel incorporating lot divination materials for use in fortune-telling. The study centers on material presented here for the first time: the text and translation of a unique sixth-century Syriac manuscript, the earliest and most complete example of a hermeneia Gospel. An analysis of the Syriac along with evidence from Greek, Coptic, …

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 …

Mara Dzolan, Marija Maracic, Josipa Karaca

SICANJE

No abstract provided.

Marta Sarcevic & Mara Burecic, Maracic Marija, Josipa Karaca

SICANJE

No abstract provided.

Luca Markesic, Marija Maracic, Josipa Karaca

SICANJE

No abstract provided.

Ruza Ilicic, Marija Maracic, Josipa Karaca

SICANJE

No abstract provided.

Mara Pavlovic, Marija Maracic, Josipa Karaca

SICANJE

No abstract provided.

The Books Of Margery Kempe And Alice Rowley: Literate Religious Expression And Women In Late Medieval England, Carol Lynne Hemmingway

Dean's Leadership Council Library Research Prize

No abstract provided.

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 …

Lost & Found: New Harvest, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

Set in Fustat (Old Cairo) in the 12th century, a great crossroads of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens …

Malleus Marginalia: What Can Be Learned From The Marginalia In Portland State University's Edition Of The Malleus Maleficarum, Sarah Alderson

Extra-Textual Elements

In 2018, Portland State University Library Special Collections acquired a second edition Malleus maleficarum, printed by Peter Drach of Speier in 1490, which is bound with a copy of Werner Rolewinck’s Fasciculus temporum (printed by Prüss, Strassbourg).

In this copy, three separate notetakers’ handwriting may be identified. We know this because there are three distinctive scripts present in the margins of the texts, on the title page of the Fasciculus, and on blank folios between the two texts. This paper explains the relevance of the handwriting and the research behind the identification of the scripts.