Suchergebnisse

Female friendships and visionary women / Jennifer N. Brown -- The foundations of friendship: Amicitia, literary production, and spiritual community in Marie de France / Stella Wang -- Friendship and resistance in the Vitae of Italian holy women / Andrea Boffa -- Sisters and friends: the medieval nuns of Syon Abbey / Alexandra Verini -- "Amonge maydenes moo": gender-based community, racial thinking, and aristocratic women's work in Emaré / Lydia Yaitsky Kertz -- Women's communities and the possibility of friendship in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur / Usha Vishnuvajjala -- Female friendship in late medieval English literature: cultural translation in Chaucer, Gower, and Malory / Melissa Ridley Elmes -- Cultivating cummarship: female friendship, alcohol, and pedagogical community in the alewife poem / Carissa M. Harris -- "All these relationships between women": Chaucer and the Bechdel test for female friendship / Karma Lochrie -- The politics of virtual friendship in Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies / Christine Chism -- Prosthetic friendship and the theater of fraternity / Laurie A. Finke -- Conversations among friends: Ælfflæd, Iurminburg, and the arts of storytelling / Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing -- Afterword: Friendship at a distance / Penelope Anderson.

Canacee's Mirror: Gender and Treason in Medieval Literature examines the multifaceted and constantly shifting definitions and applications of treason law in several key texts of the Middle Ages. Whether in the form of political treason or romantic infidelity, treason presents a serious problem, the very idea of it revealing anxieties about discerning truth, judging speech and appearances, and performing loyalty. These anxieties become most pointed when examined through the lens of gender. Each chapter moves chronologically through the shifts in French and English law, drawing on the work of legal scholars to explore Roman and Germanic antecedents as well as contemporary applications of treason law. The changes in the laws are reflected and refracted in medieval literature by the way individual authors and texts present nuanced and varying depictions of treason, betrayal, guilt, and truth. These nuances are magnified and complicated when the traitor in question is a woman, and thus the chapters alternate between analysis of both male and female traitors. While the charge of treason for men could be levied for deceptive disloyalty in either realm of the political or the romantic, as Ganelon shows on the one hand, and the men of The Legend of Good Women show on the other, for many women in the literature of the Middle Ages romantic treason necessarily involves a breach of political or feudal bonds as well. In general, with the notable exception of Lancelot, female characters such as Béroul's Iseut, Chaucer's Criseyde, and Malory's Guinevere demonstrate a much greater awareness of the repercussions of their betrayal, in both reputation and physical punishment, than their male counterparts. Each chapter, thus, examines the complicated nexus of expectations and behaviors with which medieval authors negotiated the definition, presentation, and consequences of treason for both men and women.

There is innumerable literature that have appeared in our Tamil language which is the most ancient language in the world. Tamil literature has reached various stages of development from the Tholkappiyar period to the twentieth century. During the Sangam period, Sangam literature, Sangam literature during the Maruviya period, epics during the Chola period and Medieval literature during the Nayakas period were well understood. Each period in which Tamil literature appeared reflected the social, political, cultural and economic backgrounds of the time. Literature also needs to change according to social background as time goes on. It is the literature that appears to bring about such change that is enduring. Conceived in the Tholkappiya Noorpa, the Sangam literature have undergone various stages of development in the devotional literature, and the epics that have evolved into separate literary genres which have multiplied beyond the tradition of ninety-six epics during the Nayakas period. Some of the best-known literature of a given period stops its developmental stage with that period. However, Medieval literatures have been revived in the twentieth century with various changes in the subject matter and structure of society.

This thesis is the first sustained study of Christopher Marlowe's strategic handling of medieval literature. This study identifies and explores Marlowe's subversive use of a range of medieval material, both textual and cultural, in his dramas. In addition to identifying Marlowe's medieval sources, this thesis also delineates how this material was used: to offer a subtle and subversive critique of the core principles of Elizabethan ideology. After first establishing Marlowe's medieval sources, his "medieval library," this study then explores the ultra-specific application of this material across Marlowe's oeuvre. Close textual analysis of Marlowe's seven plays is the main methodology utilised in this study, facilitating the discovery of Marlowe's politic evocation of medieval literature. This thesis seeks to advance our understanding of Marlowe's subversive theatre by identifying his unique and subversive medievalism.

This dissertation compares the poetry of two political figures, the Buyid vizier al-Sahib Ibn 'Abbad (938-95 CE) and King Alfonso X of Castile (1221-84 CE). I argue that they produced poems to control elite discourse, managing rules of linguistic style and social decorum. In so doing, they ensured an obedient court. This technique is most evident in their authorship of ribald, slanderous poetry, which purported to break down social rules but in fact shaped and enforced the court's normative logic. Ibn 'Abbad, writing Classical Arabic poetry, did not seek to change preexisting notions of high and low speech; nor did Alfonso, who codified the Spanish language and was the most famous troubadour of Galician-Portuguese lyric. Instead, they recognized the utility of writing across the rhetorical spectrum of a courtly poetic tradition. Most of their political forebears and contemporaries limited themselves to writing such poetic motifs as panegyric, chaste love, and friendship. Invective poetry had been considered an outside force, a pastime of disgruntled or merely playful poets seeking to chide or manipulate the patron. Ibn 'Abbad and Alfonso made proprietary, authorial claims to scathing invective as well as grand praise, a combination that allowed them to dominate would-be opponents in the poetic field. I suggest that this dominance of language translates into political advantage, a sign of protection from opportunistic poets and a potential threat to enemies.Diverging from prior taxonomies of medieval literature, which station panegyric and invective as ethical opposites, I argue that the specific court politics of the Buyid and Castilian court resist this binary reading. The first chapter provides historical and linguistic accounts of the two empires, then details Ibn 'Abbad's and Alfonso's interventions therein. Because they took seemingly contradictory positions in their legislation, administrative prose, official correspondence, rhetoric, and poetry, their work forecloses certain broad arguments on ethics. This breach makes way for my epistemological discussion of poetic form, which connects the poetic analysis in chapters 2 and 3. The study then moves into a structural account of the poetic utterance. In chapter 4, I show how the social hierarchies invented in the poetic text push insistently outward, shifting our critical view toward the hierarchy of the court.

Taking literature in the wide sense of the entire handwritten book-culture of the European Middle Ages (here with focus on Latin Christendom), this article sketches some of the important turning points of the parameters of textual canonicity, in the Middle Ages themselves, as well as in the early modern and modern period. These critical junctures lie around 1050, 1300, 1450 and 1800. In this article, book-technical and linguistic accessibility is suggested as an agent of change in itself – in addition to the factors of cultural politics, ideologies and shifting tastes. In the second part of the article a model is proposed for assessing and measuring the canons operative today – still basically faithful to the romantic turn around 1800. The paper ends with reflections on how the present age of radical accessibility puts us at another historical watershed in how we engage with the rich textual record of the Middle Ages

Das Dissertationsprojekt fragt nach divergenten Konzeptionen von Riesen in mittelalterlichen Texttraditionen. Der Fokus liegt auf mittelhochdeutschen und lateinischen Texten mit gelegentlichen Ausflügen in die Skandinavistik und Anglistik. Der methodische Zugriff besteht aus einer Verquickung von historischer Diskursanalyse und historischer Anthropologie. Das Nebeneinander der Wissensordnungen und diskursiven Formationen wird im Zeitraum von ca. 800 n. Chr. bis etwa 1600 n. Chr. anhand von signifikanten Textausschnitten, bildlichen Darstellungen und materiellen Zeugnissen untersucht. Die Reflexion der Riesenkonzepte gliedert sich thematisch nach der biblischen, enzyklopädischen und legendarischen Tradition, der Antikenrezeption und der Heldenepik, sowie genealogischen Aspekten und der Frage nach der Wahrheit von Riesen im Mittelalter. Im Gegensatz zu früheren vereinheitlichenden oder rein motivgeschichtlichen Forschungsansätzen in der mediävistischen Germanistik rekonstruiert die Studie anhand einer differenzierten Analyse ein Mosaik unterschiedlicher Wahrnehmungen und Vorstellungen von Riesen im Mittelalter. ; Many disciplines have produced major studies about giants in medieval literature. However, Medieval German Literature Studies are lacking sufficient coverage. Therefore, the dissertation aims to fill this void with a conclusive study focusing on German medieval literature, with the occasional reference to Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian Studies. The project denies that there is a simple concept of giants in medieval literature and examines the coexistence of discursive formations from 800-1600 A.D. Methodologically, historical discourse analysis and historical anthropology are employed to answer questions such as whether giants were considered real in the Middle Ages, why heroes and giants are blending together semantically, and whether giant size could only be viewed as negative. The study emphasizes the versatile knowledge accessible about giants via biblical, encyclopedic, and hagiographic traditions, and occasionally pictures as well as material objects such as bones. Middle High German heroic epics, the reception of Greek mythology in the Middle Ages, and giants as instruments of political power are also core aspects of the thesis. The diverse nature of the subject requires a multidisciplinary approach and invites a more reflected view on giants when encountered in medieval texts, especially in Middle High German literature.

This dissertation examines motion as a literary trope in several late medieval English texts. The types of movement examined here fall into three categories: physical motion recurring in narrative, mobility of textual form that produces the phenomenon of motion in the reader or listener, and the variety of movements external to the narrative but related to the text. Each chapter is organized around an individual author or genre, and Chapter One explores two of Geoffrey Chaucer's early dream vision poems: The House of Fame and The Parliament of the Fowls . Attention to Chaucer's engagement with motion as a concept of natural philosophy and as a desirable state of being reveals connections between his writing and the physics of William of Ockham, and suggests the centrality of fragmentary and complex movement to Chaucer's own poetics. Chapter Two turns to William Langland's Piers Plowman , analyzing its mobile, convoluted, and jarring form, the compulsive nature of its narrative motion, and the poem's involvement in extra-narrative movements--including those that were subversive and revolutionary. Chapter Three examines movement as it appears in several fourteenth-century metrical romances, primarily surrounding the tropes of the quest and the forest. Finally, Chapter Four analyzes movement in Sir Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century Morte Darthur with a focus on simple narrations of travel, the aesthetics of the motion of battle and journeying, the way this text looks back to earlier romances in relation to this subject, and how it uses motion outside of the primary narrative frame to expand the vision of a randomized, always-moving Arthurian world. The organizing contention running through these chapters is that each text studied here employs motion as a central preoccupation, that the complexity and importance given to the trope in these works relates to the philosophical and scientific context of fourteenth-century England, and that these representations and embodiments of motion tend to have similar features: complexity, fragmentation, randomization, and a form that produces the phenomena of acceleration and jarring transitions. Finally, movement is presented as an impulse: a primary state of existence independent of any defined direction or destination.

The article presents Eiríksdrápa, a poem dedicated to Erik the Good, king of Denmark (1095–1103), written by Markús Skeggjason, an Icelandic poet. The poem graced the visit of Jón Ǫgmundarson in Lund w 1105, where the local archbishop Gizurr ordained him Bishop of Hólar. The poem glorifies King Erik's achievements that indicate the Christian character of his rule, which was additionally confirmed by obtaining consent to create a new Archdiocese in Lund and by the king's pilgrimages to Rome and the Holy Land. The Christian dimension of Erik's rule is also reflected in the motif of his military actions against the pagan Slavs; it occupies a prominent place in Markús's poem and is analysed in the present article. The motif depicts the Slavs as traitors (svikmenn) and pagans (heiðnar), who were a threat to the peace in the kingdom. Erik's lack of mercy to them proved his just and pious rule in Denmark. The motif in question turned out to be very useful in the process of building up an image of a Christian ruler; on the other hand, it shows the artistic skills of Markús, based on the oeuvre of other poets who also described the pagan Slavs.

Reading Across Languages in Medieval Britain presents historical, textual, and codicological evidence to situate thirteenth- and fourteenth-century vernacular-to-vernacular translations in a reading milieu characterized by code-switching and "reading across languages." This study presents the need for--and develops and uses--a new methodological approach that reconsiders the function of translation in this multilingual, multi-directional reading context.A large corpus of late thirteenth- through early fourteenth-century vernacular literature in Britain, in both English and Welsh, was derived from French language originals from previous centuries. These texts include mainly romances and chansons de geste, and evidence suggests that they were produced at the same time, and for the same audience, as later redactions of the texts in the original language. This evidence gives rise to the main question that drives this dissertation: what was the function of translation in a reading milieu in which translations and originals shared the same audience? Because a large number of the earliest or sole surviving translations into English from French language originals appear in Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates' MS 19.2.1 (the Auchinleck Manuscript), my study focuses on the translations preserved in this manuscript. Although it is known for being the earliest virtually monolingual anthology of Middle English texts, I illuminate the multilingual milieu in which the Auchinleck Manuscript circulated and argue that an audience of multilingual readers who were familiar with the original French language sources of the texts enabled an extratextual discourse for reading in translation. The practice of reading across languages gave rise to a particular mode of discourse in which translative revisions could generate an intertextual dialogue with source texts. In many cases, this dialogue was both subversive and interrogative, in that it prompted an extratextual discussion that revised values expressed in the source texts and, in so doing, commented on ideological issues that were important to an early fourteenth-century audience. Moreover, the act of moving into the English language texts which had been read in French for approximately a hundred years mimetically effected a revision of another sort by urging the cultural reorientation of the Anglo-Norman reader and generating a significant dialogue about vernacular literary production in England. The Auchinleck translations represent a method of inscribing significance and receiving information that alters the way we think about the transmission of ideas and the use of the English language, which invites new questions regarding the role of English as its use increased and developed through the fourteenth century. In chapter one I argue that Middle English translations were produced with the knowledge that readers would put them in dialogue with their French language source texts, and I contextualize the Auchinleck Manuscript in particular within this multilingual milieu. I further describe the historical and cultural context that made this manuscript a rich site for the subversive interrogation of traditional values, an important context for my discussion, in later chapters, of the translative revisions in the Auchinleck texts. Chapter two considers the Auchinleck Guy of Warwick and Reinbroun, which, taken together, translate the Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic. I provide new evidence to argue that these were original translations composed in conjunction with the production of the Auchinleck Manuscript, a theory first proposed by Laura Hibbard Loomis, but which has been summarily dismissed in recent scholarship. Chapter three reexamines the same texts in light of the arguments presented in chapters one and two. I consider how the multilingual cross-reader may have interpreted translative revisions as rhetorical gestures, and I identify what I call an interrogative translative pattern that questions some of the values depicted in the source text, thereby generating an extratextual dialogue about the fourteenth-century cultural and political issues I described in chapter one.Chapter four steps back in time to consider the small handful of French-to-English translations that clearly pre-date those discussed in chapters two and three, including King Horn, Floris and Blauncheflour, and Havelok. Manuscript evidence shows that these texts also circulated in a multilingual reading milieu, but they did not operate in a discursive mode that generated an intertextual dialogue with their source texts. A description of the translative methodology exhibited in these texts helps us understand how later examples of French-to-English translation developed in interesting ways. Chapter five considers four other translations that appear in the Auchinleck Manuscript, all of which preserve evidence to suggest that they, too, may have been translated in conjunction with the production of this manuscript. A study of Lay le Freine, Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, Amis and Amiloun, and Beves of Hampton gives rise to the main argument of this dissertation, discussed above, and shows that the Auchinleck translations represent an important development in the function of translation and the use of the English language in medieval England. Chapter six considers Welsh translations of several of the same texts that appear in translation in the Auchinleck Manuscript and contextualizes them within a discussion of English-Welsh political and cultural relations. The Welsh texts that tell the stories of Beves of Hampton (Bown o Hamtoun), Otinel (Rhamant Otuel), and Amis and Amiloun (Kymdeithas Amlyn ac Amic) were probably translated from French and Latin at the same time that they were translated into Middle English, and cultural and historical evidence suggests that the producers of the English and Welsh translations should have been aware of one another's work. A study of these parallel translation projects reveals interesting differences in the methods of translation that reflect the cultural concerns of the Welsh after Edward I's conquest and that also point to the genuinely innovative rhetorical function of translation in the Auchinleck Manuscript.

This essay argues for the consideration of energy and an energy-based humanities model in the study of water in the Middle Ages. It also proposes that 'energy', when discussed in the context of the Middle Ages, is in fact a study of 'energies', derived from technology, material culture, and intellectual culture in equal measure. It proposes three genres of medieval water energy as a model for the multi-valent study of the energy politics underpinning medieval society: the philosophical, the hydro-social, and the intellectual. The essay surveys approaches to medieval water history to propose a new approach, and makes an argument for the reimagination of water as an entity of energy with dimensions flowing beyond the history of science and social history dimensions of water history. Medieval thought did not conceive of water as wholly material or wholly abstract, but as a part of a larger world-system spanning the material and spiritual.Just as medieval people drew on a tiny percentage of gravity flow through hydraulics, so too did the water of medieval intellectual culture provide motive power through the infusion of divine power, setting the world-machine in process. A new approach to medieval water studies follows Imre Szeman's description of energy as an underpinning force within society, shaping its discourses, dialogues, norms, and political ecologies. For the Middle Ages, this model must account for a differing intellectual culture encompassing religious, philosophical, and technical models of water.

This dissertation explores Middle English literary texts that consistently portray ethics as a patently emotional affair. The introduction rehashes recent neuroscientific discourses that similarly assert the centrality of emotion in processes of ethical decision-making, as well as other contemporary theoretical and historiographic accounts of emotion. Chapter 1 argues that Middle English rhetorics of righteous and sinful anger played an important role both in sparking the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and in retroactively reevaluating the dangers of unin-hibited anger in the uprising's posttramatic wake. The second chapter discusses Middle English discourses on dread that suggest that devotees in late medieval England conceptualized the ascetic project of dreading well as integral to the ethical project of living well. The third chapter argues that the three successive versions of _Piers Plowman_, as we know them today, contain three strikingly different theologies of love and dread. Rather than reading these as evidence of one man's gradual movement from a theology of dread to one of love, it reimagines the production of _Piers Plowman_ as a densely intersubjective affair that engendered a network of differing (and deferring) theologies of love and dread. Chapter 4 turns to the famous Middle English elegy _Pearl_, arguing that the Pearl-maiden does not prompt the dreamer to happily share in her celestial estate, but instead stirs his envy of her heavenly bliss, suggesting that terrestrial devotees ought to work through, rather than eschew, their envy of their celestial loved ones. Chapter 5 focuses on another poem solely attested in Cotton Nero A.x: _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_. While critics often read Gawain's shame at the end of the poem as sundering him from his fellow courtiers, I read Gawain's shameful confession to the court as profoundly and successfully reparative of the homosocial, chivalric habitus wounded by Gawain's life loving transgression. Moving next to Geoffrey Chaucer's _Troilus and Criseyde_, Chapter 6 builds on a scholarly tradition that reads Troilus as a masochistic courtly lover, arguing that, at the poem's conclusion, Troilus spontaneously transforms into a sadistic courtly hater. Since masochistic courtly love and sadistic courtly hate constitute different responses to social privilege, the courtly lover always already possesses the potential to morph suddenly into a courtly hater, as does Chaucer's Troilus when he channels his disappointment at having lost Criseyde's love into vengeful, militarized violence against any and all Greeks. Finally, by way of conclusion, I discuss some of the pedagogical implications of my research into Middle English ideologies of emotion, focusing particularly on the vexed question of how one might ethically teach medieval cultures of compassion.

This essay argues for the consideration of energy and an energy-based humanities model in the study of water in the Middle Ages. It also proposes that 'energy', when discussed in the context of the Middle Ages, is in fact a study of 'energies', derived from technology, material culture, and intellectual culture in equal measure. It proposes three genres of medieval water energy as a model for the multi-valent study of the energy politics underpinning medieval society: the philosophical, the hydro-social, and the intellectual. The essay surveys approaches to medieval water history to propose a new approach, and makes an argument for the reimagination of water as an entity of energy with dimensions flowing beyond the history of science and social history dimensions of water history. Medieval thought did not conceive of water as wholly material or wholly abstract, but as a part of a larger world-system spanning the material and spiritual.Just as medieval people drew on a tiny percentage of gravity flow through hydraulics, so too did the water of medieval intellectual culture provide motive power through the infusion of divine power, setting the world-machine in process. A new approach to medieval water studies follows Imre Szeman's description of energy as an underpinning force within society, shaping its discourses, dialogues, norms, and political ecologies. For the Middle Ages, this model must account for a differing intellectual culture encompassing religious, philosophical, and technical models of water.

This article deals with the productive reception and re-working of the Medieval Arthurian topic in the theatre of the former GDR. In Die Ritter der Tafelrunde, the East German playwright Christoph Hein dramatises the decadence and subsequent disappearance of chivalrous ideals in the decline of the Middle Ages. The play was first performed in April 1989, only months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, bringing a definitive end to the GDR. The fact that the play's central theme was the disappearance of an obsolete social and political system made it easier for the Arthurian court to be read as a metaphor for Erich Honecker's government. But, beyond its ad hoc interpretations, it is worth studying this drama as part of an ongoing trend throughout this country's history: the adoption of the literary legacy, represented in this case by Wolfram von Eschenbach's novel Parzival and its manipulation for extra-literary purposes. ; Este estudio trata acerca de la recepción productiva y reelaboración de la materia artúrica medieval en el teatro de la extinta RDA. En Die Ritter der Tafelrunde, el dramaturgo germano- oriental Christoph Hein lleva a escena la decadencia y posterior desaparición de los ideales caballerescos en el ocaso de la Edad Media. La obra se estrenó en abril de 1989, meses antes de la caída del muro que daría paso al final definitivo de la RDA. El hecho de que el motivo central de la pieza fuera la desaparición de un sistema social y político obsoleto facilitó la interpretación de la corte artúrica como trasunto del gobierno de Erich Honecker. Pero más allá de las interpretaciones ad hoc, interesa estudiar esta pieza dramática dentro de una tendencia constante a lo largo de la historia de aquel país: la adopción del legado literario, representado en este caso por la novela de Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, y su instrumentalización con fines extraliterarios.

This dissertation rereads five thirteenth-century Spanish hagiographic poems in the light of modern subaltern studies: the anonymous Vida de Santa María Egipciaca, and Gonzalo de Berceo's Martirio de San Lorenzo, Vida de San Millán de la Cogolla, Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos, and Vida de Santa Oria. Observing the numerous similarities between hagiographic writing and twentieth-century Latin American activism literature known as testimonio—the innocent and suffering victim, the elite facilitator of the narrative, the illiterate speaker, and the sense of urgency caused by oppression and injustice—the project concludes that the invention and promotion of martyrs and saints provided a crucial space for Christianity to constitute and maintain its power and identity while at the same time providing a space for diverse, marginalized individuals to find expression and influence in their societies. In hagiography, as in testimonio, powerful writers seek legitimacy within their communities by representing, imitating, conveying, facilitating, or portraying voices in pain, exploiting the heroism of suffering and the ideal of administering to others in need. In this way, the politics of suffering unifies the discourses of both hagiography and testimonio as multivalent interests and variant powers cohabitate not merely to entertain or instruct, but to motivate change in society.