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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'English literature Literature, Medieval English literature Literature, Medieval'
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Malo, Roberta. "Saints' relics in medieval English literature." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1186329116.
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Citrome, Jeremy J. "The surgeon in medieval English literature /." New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb41014151z.
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Jose, Laura. "Madness and gender in late-medieval English literature." Thesis, Durham University, 2010. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/217/.
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This thesis discusses presentations of madness in medieval literature, and the ways in which these presentations are affected by (and effect) ideas of gender. It includes a discussion of madness as it is commonly presented in classical literature and medical texts, as well as an examination of demonic possession (which shares many of the same characteristics of madness) in medieval exempla. These chapters are followed by a detailed look at the uses of madness in Malory’s Morte Darthur, Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and in two autobiographical accounts of madness, the Book of Margery Kempe and Hoccleve’s Series. The experience of madness can both subvert and reinforce gender roles. Madness is commonly seen as an invasion of the self, which, in a culture which commonly identifies masculinity with bodily intactness, can prove problematic for male sufferers. Equally, madness, in prompting violent, ungoverned behaviour, can undermine traditional definitions of femininity. These rules can, however, be reversed. Malory’s Morte Darthur presents a version of masculinity which is actually enhanced by madness; equally divergent is Margery Kempe’s largely positive account of madness as a catalyst for personal transformation. While there is a certain consistency in the literary treatment of madness – motifs and images are repeated across genres – the way in which these images are used can alter radically. There is no single model of madness in medieval literature: rather, it is always fluid. Madness, like gender, remains open to interpretation.
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Fleming, Carolyn Evine Mary Elizabeth. "Ideas of the self in Medieval English literature." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.328079.
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Semper, Philippa Judith. "Diagrams in English medieval manuscripts." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.261166.
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This thesis examines diagrams found in English medieval manuscripts dating from the ninth to the fourteenth century. It is based upon a survey of diagrammatic material, the results of which are presented in the catalogue raisonnee (Appendix A). The lack of adequate terms to define diagrams is addressed, as is the lack of a consistent and coherent treatment of diagrams in existing literature. A close critique of diagrams can be an aid in dating manuscripts and tracing textual recensions, and therefore a well-defined yet flexible framework must be established in order to further future research. The catalogue establishes standard types for particular diagrams, which can be used for comparison and identification of examples in manuscripts. The discussion of the thesis is largely structured on a chronological basis, studying the types of diagrams which were in use in three periods; late Antiquity, the Dark Ages, and the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. The main diagrammatic forms which were transmitted from late classical commentaries in medieval manuscripts are analysed in terms of their content and technique. These diagrams are still influenced by Greek learning. Changes and adaptations in these forms and techniques are then observed. The degeneracy of learning in the Dark Ages is characterised by diagrams based on cyclical rather than circular forms. The availability of translations of Greek texts through Arab sources in the twelfth century leads again to precise diagrams which accompany logical textual exposition. Diagrams are finally viewed within the wider context of medieval art. Features of medieval aesthetics are highlighted which make it possible to approach diagrams in the same way as works of art. The importance of geometric structures to artistic composition is increased by the symbolic meanings which are attached to certain shapes and proportions. Pictorial diagrams themselves migrate into wall-paintings and floor-mosaics, and also eventually into literature
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Bradley, James Lyons. "Legendary metal smiths and early English literature." Thesis, University of Leeds, 1987. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/615/.
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'Legendary Metal Smiths and Early English Literature' is a study of Christian religious influence on the portrayal of a powerful technology, metallurgy, in Old English verse. Starting from the controversy over the supernatural role of metal smiths in a metrical Anglo-Saxon charm, it proceeds to explore the impact of Christian thought on attitudes to the metal-worker in late antiquity and early medieval Europe. Significant and contentious characterizations of the smith in the Cain legend, the lives of the saints, and legends of Christ are discussed in turn. A chapter on heroic verse and another on wonder-working discuss, among other topics, the theory that Anglo-Saxon metal smiths were regarded with fear and superstition. The thesis put forth by the author in the course of this survey is that the critical approach which explains the concern of Anglo-Saxon literature with smithcraft as little more than an irrational primitivism finds little support in the religious writing of the period. What requires explanation is not the view that metallurgy was a matter of Christian concern, but the assumption that it was not. While this study is primarily concerned with mapping literary themes, it is not confined to the world of the imagination. Holding that themes, in order to be appreciated, must be perceived, where possible, in the light of the historical conditions in which they flourished, it devotes part of its space to a consideration of the latter. It examines the role of the monastic movement in disseminating an idealistic view of industry; describes the achievements of Anglo-Saxon metal-working; and attempts to appreciate some of the real hardships faced by workers in the Anglo-Saxon forge. The insights gained from this approach lead ultimately to a new reading of the metrical Anglo-Saxon charm with which the study began, a reading which, rather than peering backwards into the pagan past, looks forward to subsequent and more familiar examples of the forge in literature.
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Keating, Lise Manda. "Religious propaganda in selected Anglo-Saxton literature." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 1999. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/17868.
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Includes bibliographical references.<br>This study of selected Old English texts, from the canons of Aelfric and Cynewulf, presents the argument that the primary purpose of the Saints' Lives in question is that of instruments of persuasion. After a description of the rites of Anglo-Saxon paganism, an attempt is made to outline the manner in which the Christian missionaries used certain aspects of pagan belief to promote Christianity. As such, these texts may therefore be viewed as religious propaganda in the Anglo- Saxon Church's attempt to win new converts to Christianity and to strengthen the faith of those already within its fold, firstly by promoting belief in the miraculous and secondly by investing Anglo-Saxon Christianity with the supernatural powers of the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Pagan religions. Although the works of Cynewulf predate those of Aelfric, I have chosen to discuss the prose works of Aelfric first. However, I do not believe that reversing the historical order invalidates the argument.
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Belcher, Wendy Laura. "Discursive possession Ethiopian discourse in medieval European and eighteenth-century English literature /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1619156921&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Oswald, Dana M. "Indecent bodies gender and the monstrous in medieval English literature /." Connect to resource, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1116868190.
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Mann, Erin Irene. "Relative identities: father-daughter incest in Medieval English religious literature." Diss., University of Iowa, 2011. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/4873.
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Medieval tales of father-daughter incest depict more than offensively dominant fathers and voiceless, victimized young women: these stories often contain moments of surprising counternarrative. My analysis of incest narratives foregrounds striking instances of feminine resistance, where daughters act independently, speak unrestrainedly, adopt masculine behaviors, and invert masculine gazes. I argue that daughters of incestuous fathers participate in a complex back-and-forth of attraction and rejection that thrusts the fraught nature of the incest into sharp relief, revealing the ways in which medieval families--as well as the medieval church and state--constructed and deconstructed identities and sexualities. Extending Judith Butler's insights on how incest tales interrogate state and kinship networks, I show how the liminal position of daughters in the family destabilizes the sex/gender system as it functioned in both the family and the larger world, secular and sacred. My dissertation thus relocates daughters from the periphery to the center of the medieval family. Christian thematics likewise provide a key framework for both my argument and medieval audiences: biblical translations and retellings, saints' lives, and moral exempla offered familiar points of reference. By revealing how authors and artists employed well-known religious stories to impart political readings of sexuality and of the family, the four chapters of my dissertation assert daughters' key role in medieval Christian culture. I examine both Anglo-Saxon texts--the biblical epic Genesis A and the prose Life of Euphrosyne--as well as the late medieval poem Cursor mundi and Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. My readings are enhanced by recourse to the medieval visual record offered by three manuscripts that illustrate the Lot story--British Library MS Cotton Claudius B.iv, the Old English Hexateuch, and Oxford Bodleian Library MSS Junius 11(the Genesis A manuscript) and Bodley 270b, a Biblé moralisée. Artistic renderings of father-daughter incest are no less unsettled than their literary counterparts, and demonstrate that the position of daughters was so fundamentally unstable that it often varied not only within an era, but also within a single manuscript. I argue that authors and artists radically reimagined the fundamental texts of the Middle Ages, including the Old Testament, to establish new narratives of sin and salvation, self and other, and power and submission.
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Coleman, Joyce. "The world's ear : the aurality of late medieval English literature." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/19635.
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This thesis examines the reception formats of late medieval upper-class literature in English--i.e., how its readers read it. My particular interest is aurality, the reading aloud of literature to one or a group of listeners. I try to show that aurality was not merely the byproduct of technological deficiencies (such as illiteracy and the scarcity of manuscripts) but also represented a contemporary preference for the shared experience of literature. Chapter 1 reviews the evolutionary and polarizing assumptions that underlie, and undermine, many discussions of late medieval, particularly Chaucerian, reception. The popular argument I call 'fictive orality' claims, for example, that Chaucer's references to hearers derive from nostalgia or else are an involuntary holdover of 'minstrel formulas'. But if Chaucer's texts were read aloud, as he keeps assuming they will be, there is nothing 'nostalgic' or anachronistic about references to hearers. Chapter 2 outlines the methodology used to construct the following chapters' 'ethnography of reading', then presents a variety of generalizations to frame the intensive data presented in those chapters. Topics considered include the chronological and functional origins of medieval aurality, the varieties of late medieval English literacy, the role of aurality in generating a public sphere, the 'constellation' of reception-phrases characteristic of late medieval texts, and the crossover of scholarly reading practices into recreational ones.
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Avis, Robert John Roy. "The social mythology of medieval Icelandic literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2837907c-57c8-4438-8380-d5c8ba574efd.
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This thesis argues that the corpus of Old Norse-Icelandic literature which pertains to Iceland contains an intertextual narrative of the formation of Icelandic identity. An analysis of this narrative provides an opportunity to examine the relationship between literature and identity, as well as the potency of the artistic use of the idea of the past. The thesis identifies three salient narratives of communal action which inform the development of a discrete Icelandic identity, and which are examined in turn in the first three chapters of the thesis. The first is the landnám, the process of settlement itself; the second, the origin and evolution of the law; and the third, the assimilation and adaptation of Christianity. Although the roots of these narratives are doubtless historical, the thesis argues that their primary roles in the literature are as social myths, narratives whose literal truth- value is immaterial, but whose cultural symbolism is of overriding importance. The fourth chapter examines the depiction of the Icelander abroad, and uses the idiom of the relationship between þáttr (‘tale’) and surrounding text in the compilation of sagas of Norwegian kings Morkinskinna to consider the wider implications of the relationship between Icelandic and Norwegian identities. Finally, the thesis concludes with an analysis of the role of Sturlunga saga within this intertextual narrative, and its function as a set of narratives mediating between an identity grounded in social autonomy and one grounded in literature. The Íslendingasögur or ‘family sagas’ constitute the core of the thesis’s primary sources, for their subject-matter is focussed on the literary depiction of the Icelandic society under scrutiny. In order to demonstrate a continuity of engagement with ideas of identity across genres, a sample of other Icelandic texts are examined which depict Iceland or Icelanders, especially when in interaction with non-Icelandic characters or polities.
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Grossi, Joseph L. "Uncommon fatherland : Medieval English perceptions of Rome and Italy /." The Ohio State University, 1999. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1488188894438393.
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McCarthy, Marcella. "Late medieval English treatments of the Grail story." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.304980.
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Smith, Nathanial B. "Dreams of influence embodied reading in late medieval and Renaissance English literature /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3330817.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2008.<br>Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 22, 2009). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-10, Section: A, page: 3963. Adviser: Judith H. Anderson.
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Thompson, Kimberly Ann. "Money and the man economics and identity in late medieval English literature /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1180117288.
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McGill, Anna. "Magic and Femininity as Power in Medieval Literature." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2015. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/293.
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It is undeniable that literature reflects much about the society that produces it. The give-and-take relationship between a society and its literature is especially interesting when medieval texts are considered. Because most medieval plots and characters are variants of existing stories, the ways that the portrayals change has the potential to reveal much about the differences between medieval societies separated by distance and time. Changes to the treatment of these recurring characters and their stories can reveal how the attitudes of medieval society changed over time. Perceptions of magic and attitudes toward its female practitioners, both real and fictional, changed drastically throughout the Middle Ages among clergy members and the ruling class. Historically, as attitudes toward women became more negative, they were increasingly prohibited from receiving a formal education and from gaining or maintaining positions traditionally associated with feminine magical power, such as healer, midwife, or wise woman. As the power of the Church grew and attitudes changed throughout the Middle Ages, women’s power in almost all areas of life experienced a proportional decrease. Using a combination of historical and literary sources, this paper will explore whether this decrease in power is evident in literary portrayals of magical female characters in medieval literature. Specifically, it will examine the agency and potency, or the intrinsic motivation and effectiveness within the story, respectively, of female characters within medieval narratives, comparing the characters to their earlier iterations. This research will offer a unique perspective on the roles of magical women in medieval literature.
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Melick, Elizabeth H. "Four Middle English Roland Romances: An Edition of Poems Drawn from Medieval Manuscripts." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1523367850331762.
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Becker, Alexis Kellner. "Practical Georgics: Managing the Land in Medieval Britain." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:23845446.
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This dissertation shows how the management of the land is both a material precondition for and an obsession of medieval British reading and writing. In medieval Britain, the people who read and wrote were the people with power over land, and ecological management was a major imaginative project of these text-producing elites. The years between 1000 and 1400 saw major changes and crises—including the climatic transition from the medieval warm period to the little ice age—and each century saw different literary efforts to sustain the fiction that the land’s productivity as well as its social meanings were constant and manageable. Land management is an imaginative, affective, and literary activity as well as a social, ecological, and material one, and the history of who manages the land and how is the history of who reads, who writes, and how.
Texts from Domesday Book to husbandry manuals to Piers Plowman not only engage with the social meanings of physical environments; they demonstrate how power over the land intersects with power over language. Written across four centuries and in Latin, Old English, Middle English, Anglo-Norman French, and Middle Welsh, these texts are all invested in managing their environments. Each chapter is a case study of a different genre of land management text: Domesday Book, estate management treatises and guides for managers, language pedagogy texts, romance, and Piers Plowman. In addition to these fundamentally elite, literate forms, the final chapter explores a reading event in the fourteenth century during which over forty groups of servile peasants, whose relationships to land and to texts were always mediated through the aristocracy, took possession of and read extracts of Domesday Book that described the land they lived on and worked but could not own.<br>English
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Mair, Olivia. "Merchants and mercantile culture in later medieval Italian and English literature." University of Western Australia. English, Communication and Cultural Studies Discipline Group, 2006. http://theses.library.uwa.edu.au/adt-WU2006.0088.
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[Truncated abstract] The later medieval Western European economy was shaped by a marked increase in commerce and rapid urbanisation. The commercialisation of later medieval society is the background to this research, whose focus is the ways in which later medieval Italian and English literature registers and responds to the expanding marketplace and the rise of an urban mercantile class. What began as an investigation of the representation of merchants and business in a selection of this literature has become an attempt to address broader questions about the later medieval economy in relation to literary and artistic production. This study is therefore concerned not just with merchants and their activities in literature, but also the way economic developments are manifested in narrative. Issues such as the moral position and social function of the merchant are addressed, alongside bigger economic issues such as value and exchange in literature, and to some extent, the position of the writer and artist in a commercialised economy. The study is primarily literary, but it adopts a cross-disciplinary method, drawing on economic and social history, literary criticism, art history and sociology. It begins with an assessment of the broader socio-economic context, focusing on ecclesiastical and social responses to the growth of … This chapter discusses the thirteenth-century Floris and Blauncheflur (c. 1250), and the late fourteenth-century Sir Amadace, Sir Launfal, Octavian and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in relation to the commercialised economy and with reference to late medieval thought concerning value, exchange and the role and function of merchants. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1380s) is the subject of the third and final chapter, “Narrative and Economics in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales”. Chaucer treats commerce and merchants with a complexity very close to Boccaccio’s approach to commerce. Both writers are acutely aware of the corruption to which merchants are susceptible, and of the many accusations levelled at merchants and their activities, but they do not necessarily perpetuate them. Rather than discussing exclusively the tales that deal extensively with merchants and commerce, or that told by the Merchantpilgrim, this discussion of the Canterbury Tales focuses on the Knight’s Tale, the Man of Law’s Tale and the Shipman’s Tale and the way they relate to broader ideas about the exchange and the production of narrative in the Canterbury Tales as a whole.
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Smyth, Benjamin Michael. "Errant individualism in late medieval English literature : The poetics of failure." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.526808.
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Turner, Christian. "The reception of Plato and Neoplatonisms in late medieval English literature." Thesis, University of York, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.245911.
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Hawes, Janice. "Monsters, heroes and social identity in medieval Icelandic and English literature /." For electronic version search Digital dissertations database. Restricted to UC campuses. Access is free to UC campus dissertations, 2004. http://uclibs.org/PID/11984.
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Williamsen, Elizabeth A. "The quest for collective identity in the Middle English Charlemagne Romances." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2009. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3380139.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2009.<br>Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 14, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: A, page: 4673. Adviser: Patricia C. Ingham.
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DeVito, Angela Ann. "Gendered speech in Old English narrative poetry: A comprehensive word list." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280305.
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The purpose of this dissertation is to create a word list of male and female speech in those Old English narrative poems which contain dialogue, to use as a reference in determining what, if any, differences existed between the way male Anglo-Saxon poets constructed speech for their male and female characters. Using a specifically designed computer program and an on-line text of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, I electronically tagged those lines assigned to male characters, and then those assigned to female speakers, to generate two separate word lists. I eliminated all immortal speech (God, angels, demons), and all proper nouns as not germane to a study of male and female speech patterns. After I created the raw word lists, I parsed each individual word, and placed it under the appropriate headword. I further classified nouns, adjectives and pronouns according to case and number, and verbs according to person, number, tense and mood. In addition to the word lists, the dissertation includes a critical introduction, and a brief analysis of differences between male and female speech patterns in selected poems.
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Cowdery, Taylor. "The Premodern Literary: Matter and Form in English Poetry 1400-1547." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493299.
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In poetry—so the story often goes—form is more important than content. After all, poets and critics since the early modern period have said so. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote that content and form should be “organic” friends, with form the more important friend of the pair. Philip Sidney thought that the poet should make the “brazen” stuff of nature into better, “golden” forms of his choosing, as God himself might do. How did such an apparent preference for form over content happen? This dissertation suggests that one answer might be found in a study of pre-modern ideas of content, or what, in the literary criticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was called matere, or “matter.”
In the later Middle Ages, matere referred at once to a writer’s source materials, her broader topic, and the parchment and ink with which she worked. A thing both physical and metaphysical, matere was seen to possess its own agency and force, and was held to be an equal partner to form in the making of poetry. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, these ideas of matter and form shifted. Since the Scholastics, medieval English poetic theory had held to a roughly Aristotelian notion of matter and form, wherein form inhered within matter. Poets could change the appearance of matter, but not its inner essence. An influx of Humanist and Neo-Platonic thought at the end of the fifteenth century, however, led to a different view in the sixteenth. Form came to be seen as an eidos, or “idea,” that was separable from matter—partly, because Humanist theory stressed style over content, and partly because of the renewed influence of these Platonic notions of form.
My dissertation traces these different attitudes towards form, matter, and the literary over the course of four chapters, each focused on a single poet who wrote between 1400 and 1547: Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, John Skelton, and Thomas Wyatt. Where Hoccleve and Lydgate are shown to prioritize matter over form in their visions of poetry, Skelton and Wyatt gradually turn away from matter and towards form in their work. A consideration of each poet’s theoretical attitudes towards matter is paired, in each chapter, with a careful study of his practical treatment of source matter and manuscript materials. My introduction focuses primarily on those broader intellectual historical shifts that may have contributed to evolving conceptions of matter and form during the late medieval and early modern period. Ultimately, the dissertation concludes that, while early modern poetry remains as concerned with matter as it is with form, there is an ideological move away from ideas of materiality in the literary arts during the sixteenth century. This, in short, is the reason that Elizabethan poets claim that their work is, in Sidney’s words, “golden” rather than “brazen.”<br>English
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Eddy, Nicole. "Marginal annotation in medieval romance manuscripts| Understanding the contemporary reception of the genre." University of Notre Dame, 2013.
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Melick, Elizabeth. "Lovers' prayers and divine opposition in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde." Thesis, Kent State University, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1555285.
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<p> This thesis examines the complicated network of deities and divine forces in Geoffrey Chaucer's “Troilus and Criseyde” and how these forces contribute to the lovers' tragic ends. The gods of Love and War—Venus, Cupid, Mars, and Minerva—are the central focus of this study, but Fortune and the Christian God are examined as well. I propose that both the beginning and end of the affair are brought about by the gods in order to punish Troilus or Criseyde for excessive pride. </p>
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Moberly, Brent Addison. ""Wayke been the oxen" plowing, presumption, and the third-estate ideal in late medieval England /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3297100.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2007.<br>Title from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 25, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0608. Adviser: Lawrence Clopper.
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Spellmire, Adam. "Unfinished Quests from Chaucer to Spenser." Thesis, Tufts University, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10118638.
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<p> Late medieval English texts often represent unfinished quests for obscurely significant objects. These works create enchanted worlds where more always remains to be discovered and where questers search for an ur-text, an authoritative book that promises perfect knowledge. Rather than reaching this ur-text, however, questers confront rumor, monstrous babble, and the clamor of argument, which thwart their efforts to gather together sacred wholeness. Yet while threatening, noise also preserves the sacred by ensuring that it remains forever elsewhere, for recovering perfect knowledge would disenchant the world. Scholarship on medieval noise often focuses on class: medieval writers tend to describe threats to political authority as noisy. These unfinished quests, though, suggest that late medieval literature’s complex investment in noise extends further and involves the very search for the sacred, a search full of opaque language and unending desire. Noise, then, becomes the sound of narrative itself.</p><p> While romance foregrounds questing most clearly, these ideas appear in a variety of genres. Chapter 1 shows that in the <i>House of Fame</i> rumor both perpetuates and undermines knowledge, so sacred authority must remain beyond the poem’s frame. Chapter 2 juxtaposes the <i>Parliament of Fowls</i> and the <i>Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale</i>, in which lists replace missing quest-objects, the philosopher’s stone and certainty about love. Chapter 3 centers on <i>Piers Plowman</i>, which becomes encyclopedic as one attempt to “preve what is Dowel” leads to another, and Will never definitively learns how to save his soul, the knowledge he most wants. Chapter 4 turns to Julian of Norwich’s search for divine “mening” and her confrontation with an incoherent fiend, an anxious moment that aligns her with these less serene contemporaries. Chapter 5 argues that Thomas Malory’s elusive, noisy Questing Beast at once bolsters and undermines chivalry. The final chapter looks ahead to Book VI of <i>The Faerie Queene</i>, where the Blatant Beast, a sixteenth-century amalgam of the fame tradition and the Questing Beast, menaces Faery Land yet, as a figure for poetry, also contributes to its enchantment. In trying to locate and maintain the sacred, these unfinished quests evoke worlds intensely anxious about “auctoritee.”</p>
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White, H. R. B. "Nature and the Natural Man in some Medieval English writers." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.371776.
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Wallis, Mary V. "Patterns of wisdom in the Old English "Solomon and Saturn II"." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/7793.
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The Old English Solomon and Saturn II has received virtually no extended critical commentary since Robert J. Menner's 1941 edition of it and its companion piece, Solomon and Saturn I. The few brief attempts made to explain the poem, moreover, have been without reference to the body of OE sapiential thought to which it belongs. This thesis offers a close structural and thematic reading of SS II as it appears against the background of general notions and concepts belonging to the body of OE wisdom. The thesis begins with a review of the poem's history and related literary criticism. Lexical and thematic material is then selected from the entire OE corpus to present those aspects of OE wisdom that bear on an understanding of SS II. The thesis addresses the conceptual and intellectual formulations of wisdom in the Anglo-Saxon period, rather than simply its literary forms, and it takes into account both pre-conversion and Christian views on human and divine wisdom. The thesis then illustrates how SS II reflects certain patterns that exist in the general OE wisdom tradition. The narrator's framework establishes a metaphysical context for the whole poem that is consistent with the Christian Anglo-Saxon concept of divine Wisdom. The epistemological premises of the debate itself, as well as a core of beliefs and implicit assumptions shared by the opponents, Solomon and Saturn, reflect the tensions and harmonies that appear in the broad view of OE wisdom. The interaction between Saturn and Solomon--the one a travelling Chaldean noble, the other the Old Testament King, is examined next. The competition between an epic rhetorical model, namely, the visit of a roving hero to the court of an established king, and the Christian typology that surrounds the wise King Solomon, is arguably a significant source of meaning in the poem. The tension between literary and figural patterns provides an interpretive matrix against which the audience can follow the discourse of the two men. Finally, the thesis turns to the structure of the SS II dialogue and demonstrates that far from being a simple contest of wit and "wisdom," the poem is a sophisticated process of education through dialogue whose central concern is the emancipation of the mind from the illusions of language. The dialogue shares several "habits of thought" with Boethius' Consolation Philosophiae and Augustine's Soliloquia in the process by which it restores to Saturn's infirm and misguided mind its natural wisdom and its power of interpretation.
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Judkins, Ryan R. "Noble Venery: Hunting and the Aristocratic Imagination in Late Medieval English Literature." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1337896675.
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Walther, James T. "Imagining The Reader: Vernacular Representation and Specialized Vocabulary in Medieval English Literature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2592/.
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William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman was probably the first medieval English poem to achieve a national audience because Langland chose to write in the vernacular and he used the specialized vocabularies of his readership to open the poem to them. During the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, writers began using the vernacular in an attempt to allow all English people access to their texts. They did so consciously, indicating their intent in prologues and envois when they formally address readers. Some writers, like Langland and the author of Mankind, actually use representatives of the rural classes as primary characters who exhibit the beliefs and lives of the rural population. Anne Middleton's distinction between public-the readership an author imagined-and audience-the readership a work achieved-allows modern critics to discuss both public and audience and try to determine how the two differed. While the public is always only a presumption, the language in which an author writes and the cultural events depicted by the literature can provide a more plausible estimate of the public. The vernacular allowed authors like Gower, Chaucer, the author of Mankind, and Langland to use the specialized vocabularies of the legal and rural communities to discuss societal problems. They also use representatives of the communities to further open the texts to a vernacular public. These open texts provide some representation for the rural and common people's ideas about the other classes to be heard. Langland in particular uses the specialized vocabularies and representative characters to establish both the faults of all English people and a common guide they can follow to seek moral lives through Truth. His rural character, Piers the Plowman, allows rural readers to identify with the messages in the text while showing upper class and educated readers that they too can emulate a rural character who sets a moral standard.
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Little, F. "The alienated protagonist : Some effects of generic interaction in Middle English literature." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.383252.
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This thesis discusses the effect that the use of more than one genre in a medieval narrative has upon the way we read the character of the main protagonist. Where most medieval writing aligns protagonist and narrative with a single genre, the main texts in this thesis confuse the reader's sense of such an alignment and the resulting generic interaction has the effect of separating the protagonist from the narrative, an effect I have called 'alienation'. This terminology relates to the Augustinian metaphor for the experience of the righteous in a fallen world. It is an image which describes a conflict of semiologies: individuals who operate according to one set of terms in a context which operates according to a different set of terms. The thesis examines the idea that the gaps in the narrative that are created by the alienation of the protagonist - the reader's sense of the protagonist having a meaning which does not work smoothly within his/her narrative context - allow for an interpretation of the character of the protagonist which is more sympathetic to a post- Romantic concept of individuality than is usual in medieval characterisation. Chapter One defines 'genre' and 'alienation' in relation to their application in the thesis, and discusses medieval ideas of individuality and the framework of language available to medieval writers for describing the individual. Two texts are used to illust~ate some of the points made in this discussion: the Confessions of Saint Augustine, and William Langland's ?iers Plowman. The following five chapters each give a reading of one of the main texts. Chapter Two shows how the romance characterisation of Sir Gawain, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is undermined by penitential and fabliau elements, Chapter Three, how Sir Lancelot in Malory's ~ale of the Sankgreal, is juxtaposed with a hagiographical narrative and an alternative hero, Sir Galahad. In Chapters Four and Five Criseyde, in Chaucer's ~roilus an~_~iseyd~, and his Canon's Yeoman, in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, are both generically alienated as a mimesis of their---- thematic alienation as traitor and as alchemist. And Chapter Six establishes a working definition of Complaint and shows how Hoccleve, in his Complaint, uses and then transcends the genre's characteristic representation of righteous alienation to demonstrate his recovery from madness. Finally, Chapter Seven looks beyond Middle English to Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the representation of character in the Renaissance.
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Cole, Chera A. "'Fairy' in Middle English romance." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6388.
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This thesis, ‘Fairy in Middle English romance', aims to contribute to the recent resurgence of interest in the literary medieval supernatural by studying the concept of ‘fairy' as it is presented in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English romances. This thesis is particularly interested in how the use of ‘fairy' in Middle English romances serves as an arena in which to play out ‘thought-experiments' that test anxieties about faith, gender, power, and death. The first chapter considers the concept of fairy in its medieval Christian context by using the romance Melusine as a case study to examine fairies alongside medieval theological explorations of the nature of demons. The thesis then examines the power dynamic of fairy/human relationships and the extent to which having one partner be a fairy affects these explorations of medieval attitudes toward gender relations and hierarchy. The third chapter investigates ‘fairy-like' women enchantresses in romance and the extent to which fairy is ‘performed' in romance. The fourth chapter explores the location of Faerie and how it relates as an alternative ‘Otherworld' to the Christian Otherworlds of Paradise, Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell. The final chapter continues to examine geography by considering the application of Avalon and whether Avalon can be read as a ‘land of fairies'. By considering the etymological, spiritual, and gendered definitions of ‘fairy', my research reveals medieval attitudes toward not only the Otherworld, but also the contemporary medieval world. In doing so, this thesis provides new readings of little-studied medieval texts, such as the Middle English Melusine and Eger and Grime, as well as reconsider the presence of religious material and gender dynamics in medieval romance. This thesis demonstrates that by examining how fairy was used in Middle English romance, we can see how medieval authors were describing their present reality.
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Breuer, Heidi Jo. "Crafting the witch: Gendering magic in medieval and early modern England." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/280400.
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This project documents and analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. In the earlier texts, magic is predominantly a masculine pursuit, garnering its user prestige and power, but in the later texts, magic becomes a primarily feminine activity, one that marks its user as wicked and heretical. The prophet becomes the wicked witch. This dissertation explores both the literary and the social motivations for this transformation. Chapter Two surveys representations of magic in the texts of four authors within the Arthurian canon: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, and Layamon. These writers gender magic similarly (representing prophecy and certain forms of transformative magic as masculine and healing as feminine) and use gendered figures to mitigate the threat of masculine power posed by the feudal patriarchy present in England and France in the twelfth century. Chapter Three explores representations of two magical characters who appear in a group of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century romances associated with Gawain: the churlish knight and the loathly lady. The authors of these romances privilege gender conventions radically different from those in earlier models and conjure a figure neglected by the earlier writers, the wicked witch. In particular, representations of the witch as a wicked step-mother reflect the anxiety created by expanding space for women (especially mothers) in previously exclusively male arenas of English society. In Chapter Four, I follow the romance tradition into early modern England, studying the work of Malory, Spenser, and Shakespeare. For these authors, the wicked witch (alternately represented as temptress or crone) is connected specifically to maternity; the severe anxiety about maternity in these texts is representative of widespread concern about mothers and motherhood in sixteenth-century England. Chapter Five traces the legislative policy governing prosecution of witches in England and offers suggestions about the relationship between legal climates and literary representations of magic. Though prosecution of witchcraft is now extremely rare in the U.S., filmmakers still rely on medieval and Renaissance models to inform their representations of witches. Once she arrived, the witch never left.
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Oberer, Karen. "The arc of character: medieval stock types in Shakespeare's English history plays." Thesis, McGill University, 2012. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=106396.
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This dissertation focuses on practices of stock characterisation as they are represented in literature and drama of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries in England, with particular emphasis on the transformations of social types from medieval literature to early modern drama, specifically Shakespeare's English history plays. Its wider focus is on the social context in which medieval authors created their characters, and on the conventional construction of medieval characters from what Elizabeth Fowler defines as "social persons." I argue that stock characters allow for permeability between past history and present performance. Attendant on their deployment in literature and drama is their recollection of past literary and cultural traditions. This is why Shakespeare employs them to such great effect in his English history plays: stock characters have an overt purchase on the past that makes history more socially immediate to early modern audiences. Shakespeare's stock characters recall medieval privileging of family and community, and thus are particularly suitable to the English histories' narratives of a country subsumed by family tragedy. The dissertation focuses on four social persons which Shakespeare uses to construct stock characters: the Garcio, the Alewife, the Corrupt Clergyman and the Romance Heroine. He employs these social persons in four characters: the Bastard Faulconbridge in King John, Mistress Quickly in the second "tetralogy," Cardinal Beaufort in the first "tetralogy" and Queen Isabel in Richard II. This dissertation is intended to provoke reconsideration of the stock characters as "flat" stereotypes, and to elaborate upon their complex roles in literary and dramatic history.<br>Cette thèse examine la représentation des personnages types dans la littérature et le drame en Angleterre du quatorzième au seizième siècle en mettant particulièrement l'accent sur les transformations des types sociaux entre la littérature médiévale et le drame de la Renaissance, surtout dans les pièces historiques britanniques de Shakespeare. Au plus large, la thèse porte sur le contexte social dans lequel les auteurs médiévaux ont façonné leurs personnages et sur la fabrication conventionnelle des personnages médiévaux à partir des « personnes sociales » telles que définies par Elizabeth Fowler. Les personnages types, je soutiens, créent un espace de perméabilité entre l'histoire du passé et la performance au moment présent. L'emploi de ces personnages dans la littérature et dans le drame est associé à leurs souvenirs des traditions littéraires et culturelles du passé. C'est pourquoi Shakespeare s'en sert si bien dans ses pièces historiques : les personnages types ont une prise sur le passé qui rend l'histoire plus immédiate sur le plan social pour les spectateurs de la Renaissance. Les personnages types de Shakespeare rapellent l'emphase sur la famille et la communauté pendant l'époque médiévale, ce qui les rend particulièrement appropriés aux récits des pièces historiques d'un pays subsumé par la tragédie familiale.Cette thèse porte sur quatre personnes sociales à partir desquelles Shakespeare fabrique des personnages types, soit le « garcio », la femme du tavernier, le curé corrompu, et l'héroïne des histoires romanesques. Il a recours à ces personnes sociales dans quatre personnages, soit le bâtard Faulconbridge dans La vie et la mort du roi Jean, Madame Quickly dans la deuxième tétralogie, Cardinal Beaufort dans la première tétralogie, et la Reine Isabel dans Richard II. Le but de cette thèse est de provoquer une reconsidération des personnages types comme des stéréotypes « plats » et d'élaborer sur leurs rôles complexes dans l'histoire littéraire et dramatique.
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Parker, Eleanor Catherine. "Anglo-Scandinavian literature and the post-conquest period." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:18aa9912-85f6-4cba-b4d6-4f8f7453402f.
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This thesis concerns narratives about Anglo-Scandinavian contact and literary traditions of Scandinavian origin which circulated in England in the post-conquest period. The argument of the thesis is that in the eleventh century, particularly during the reign of Cnut and his sons, literature was produced for a mixed Anglo-Danish audience which drew on shared cultural traditions, and that some elements of this largely oral literature can be traced in later English sources. It is further argued that in certain parts of England, especially the East Midlands, an interest in Anglo-Scandinavian history continued for several centuries after the Viking Age and was manifested in the circulation of literary narratives dealing with Anglo-Scandinavian interaction, invasion and settlement. The first chapter discusses some narratives about the reign of Cnut in later sources, including the Encomium Emmae Reginae, hagiographical texts by Goscelin and Osbern of Canterbury, and the Liber Eliensis; it is argued that they share certain thematic concerns with the literature known to have been produced at Cnut’s court. The second chapter explores the literary reputation of the Danish Earl of Northumbria, Siward, and his son Waltheof in twelfth-century sources from the East Midlands and in thirteenth-century Norwegian and Icelandic histories. The third chapter deals with an episode in the Middle English romance Guy of Warwick in which the hero helps to defeat a Danish invasion of England, and examines the romance’s references to a historical Danish right to rule in England. The final chapter discusses the Middle English romance Havelok the Dane, and argues that the poet of Havelok, aware of the role of Danish settlement in the history of Lincolnshire, makes self-conscious use of stereotypes and literary tropes associated with Danes in order to offer an imaginative reconstruction of the history of Danish settlement in the area.
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Harper, Stephen. "The subject of madness : insanity, individuals and society in late-medieval English literature." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1997. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3152/.
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Chapter Three discusses the dream vision of Book I of the Vox Clamantis; it shows how Gower repeats the commonplaces of medieval didactic writers, regarding the peasant insurrection of 1381 as an outbreak of demonic derangement. It is seen that Gower makes use of the 'organic analogy' of society to show this madness as an infection of the entire social body. The sufferings of the nobility at the hands of the rioting mobs are described sympathetically in terms of 'grief-madness'. Thus Gower presents two very different, class-based, attitudes towards insanity. The discussion of Chaucer's Miller's and Summoner's tales in the following chapter continues the investigation of the link between madness and social class. Here it is seen how Chaucer undermines the traditional theological interpretation of madness as a punishment for sin by encouraging comparison and contrast of the many allegations of insanity in the texts. A rather different approach is taken in Chapter Five, which examines the major works of the civil servant Thomas Hoccleve. Far from regarding madness as essentially spectacular, the apparently insane narrator of Hoccleve's major poems stresses that insanity is a hidden and undetectable affliction. This conclusion, it is argued, contradicts the standard view of psychiatric history regarding madness in the Middle Ages. The relationship between madness, expressions of interiority and medieval autobiography is considered. The final chapter explores the association of madness, female unruliness and mystical rapture in The Book of Margery Kempe. It argues that the Book displays two contradictory attitudes towards madness. Kempe is eager to present madness as a moral abomination and she frequently invokes ecclesiastical authority to do so. Nevertheless, she herself is held mad by many of her contemporaries on account of her controversial devotional behaviour; this explains why madness is presented positively elsewhere in the Book, as a blessed condition of increased spiritual insight. In this sense the Book contains a craftily double-edged attempt by Kempe to vindicate her conduct.
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Hyttenrauch, David Edward. "Ladies and their knights in Middle English Arthurian romance." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.239380.
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Griffith, David Michael. "The significance of folklore in some selected Middle English romances." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1992. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.304285.
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Montague, Tara Bookataub. "Narrating battle in the early medieval Germanic poetic tradition /." view abstract or download file of text, 2006. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/uoregon/fullcit?p3211224.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2006.<br>Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 294-314). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.
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Walts, Dawn Simmons. "Time's reckoning time, value and the mercantile class in late medieval English literature /." Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=osu1185814575.
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Hay, Lucy Arianwen. "Measure as a heroic virtue in early medieval English literature to c. 1200." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.272638.
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Mayrhofer, Sonja Nicole. "The body (un)balanced : humoral theory and late medieval literature." Diss., University of Iowa, 2015. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6203.
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My dissertation examines late medieval literature through the lens of medical history, especially humoral psychology. Although the humors are still of interest to the history of medicine, they are often overlooked in current literary criticism. My project examines how the humors influenced representations of bodies in medieval literary texts (St. Erkenwald, Chaucer's Franklin's Tale, Richard Coer de Lyon, and Marie de France's Yonec). In chapters exploring the connection between the humors and religious devotion, marriage, cannibalism, and shape-shifting, I show that humoral psychology was not just a medical theory known to medieval medical practitioners, but also a deeply influential cosmology for the literary representation of bodies and emotions.
I approach this project from two angles, using a methodology that relies on textual analysis and cultural contextualization. My work also aligns itself with scholars who have explored early modern works through the lens of historical phenomenology (Smith, Paster, Floyd-Wilson, Rowe). The project moreover encourages and contributes to the dialogue between the humanities and sciences in general and literature and medicine more specifically, as it makes connections to medical theories post-Descartes (Damasio) and to current scholarship regarding non-Western medical practices (Horden; Hsu) that discuss debates about balancing emotions and locating those emotions within the physical body. My project thus provides an analytical approach for interpreting medieval literature via medical models while also showing what the medieval period can contribute to the ongoing work of assessing the role of emotions in the past and its continued resonance in current medical debates.
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Maddern, Carole Anne. "Female mobility in medieval English romance : a study of travel and transgression." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.251851.
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Miller, Susanna Louise. "The character and presentation of the courtly heroine in English medieval romance." Thesis, Cardiff University, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.375964.
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Regetz, Timothy. "Lollardy and Eschatology: English Literature c. 1380-1430." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2018. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1404582/.
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In this dissertation, I examine the various ways in which medieval authors used the term "lollard" to mean something other than "Wycliffite." In the case of William Langland's Piers Plowman, I trace the usage of the lollard-trope through the C-text and link it to Langland's dependence on the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares. Regarding Chaucer's Parson's Tale, I establish the orthodoxy of the tale's speaker by comparing his tale to contemporaneous texts of varying orthodoxy, and I link the Parson's being referred to as a "lollard" to the eschatological message of his tale. In the chapter on The Book of Margery Kempe, I examine that the overemphasis on Margery's potential Wycliffism causes everyone in The Book to overlook her heretical views on universal salvation. Finally, in comparing some of John Lydgate's minor poems with the macaronic sermons of Oxford, MS Bodley 649, I establish the orthodox character of late-medieval English anti-Wycliffism that these disparate works share. In all, this dissertation points up the eschatological character of the lollard-trope and looks at the various ends to which medieval authors deployed it.
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Ewoldt, Amanda M. "Conversion and Crusade| The Image of the Saracen in Middle English Romance." Thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2019. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10813454.
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<p>Abstract
This dissertation is a project that examines the way Middle English romances explore and build a sense of national English/Christian identity, both in opposition to and in incorporation of the Saracen Other. The major primary texts used in this project are Richard Coer de Lion, Firumbras, Bevis of Hampton, The King of Tars, and Thomas Malory?s Morte Darthur. I examine the way crusade romances grapple with the threat of the Middle East and the contention over the Holy Land and treat these romances, in part, as medieval meditations on how the Holy Land (lost during a string of failed or stalemated Crusades) could be won permanently, through war, consumption, or conversion. The literary cannibalism of Saracens in Richard Coer de Lion, the singular or wholesale religious conversions facilitated by female characters, and the figure of Malory?s Palomides all shed light on the medieval English politics of identity: specifically, what it means to be a good Englishman, a good knight, and a good Christian. Drawing on the works of Homi Bhabha, Geraldine Heng, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and Siobhain Bly Calkin, this project fits into the overall conversation that contemplates medieval texts through the lens of postcolonial theory to locate early ideas of empire.