My dissertation assesses medieval Ottoman Prince Cem Sultan’s (1459-1495) Dīvān (a collection of poems written in Ottoman Turkish) as a literary text and a historical document. Cem’s imprisonment in Rhodes, France, and Italy is a unique example of Ottoman European confluence. He…
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This dissertation investigates “vertical readings” of the Commedia, i.e., the interpretive method that compares and contrasts same-numbered cantos in the three canticles of the poem: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Although there is a consensus that specific vertical readings…
The Renaissance had both apocalyptic and hopeful visions of the future, but both were tied into the idea of the Golden Age, a past age that could be described as perfectly fertile or hopelessly barren, as a time of plenty or of hunger. The idea of a time before agriculture was a…
Penance Terminable and Interminable reads Piers Plowman as a penitential poem. The dissertation will argue that Langland’s repeated staging of penitential fantasies, tropes, and structures of feeling helps illuminate the narrative procedures of late medieval allegory, even as it…
This dissertation performs an archeology of the reductio ad absurdum in theology and romance texts of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Intervening in the fields of romance, logic, and rhetoric, this dissertation asserts the value of this rhetorical structure as an anchoring …
This dissertation traces adapted forms of the medieval mystery cycle tradition within different transnational moments of social, political, and cultural crisis. In redirecting the spiritually didactic aims of medieval performance, the modern mysteries that constitute this projec…
This dissertation explores the notion of prophecy as a semiotic construct in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on a chronological span that runs from Late Antiquity to the 14th century. It argues that theories of prophecy offer useful insights in the domain of rhetoric and not ju…
Different cultures have different conceptions of fate but share parallel metaphors for this phenomenon in the personified forms of goddesses (and mythic women) and the non-personified forms of cloth and thread. This study proposes that such common fate- metaphors are archetypal.…
Rhetorical studies are deeply concerned with the way that human beings use language and symbols to interact and persuade others to follow a particular point of view, or plan of action. In the male dominant culture of 15th century France, Christine de Pizan recognized the limitat…
A presentation of village life has long stood in the foreground for projects of nationalism in the German-speaking world. From the noble, agrarian barbarians of Tacitus’ Germania to the Blut und Boden rhetoric of Nazi propaganda, the aesthetic of an ethnically homogenous and cul…
The field of forensic linguistics has burgeoned in the past several decades within a current-day framework of language use, ranging from dialectal analysis to legal language analysis in court cases, to trademark and authorship disputes, and more. When it comes to utilizing foren…
This thesis focuses on the origins of Þórðar saga kakala. Chapter 1 reviews scholarship on the lost original version of Þórðar saga kakala (*Þórðar saga kakala hin mikla). By testing previous arguments and suppositions, it concludes that: *Þórðar saga kakala hin mikla was a “bio…
The history of English literature is a history of cultural collision, fusion, and reappropriation. When the Germanic tribes who invaded England in the 5th century were converted to Christianity, their pagan ethos was reframed through a Christian lens, and a heroic literary and c…
Dante’s Divine Comedy plots a literary history of epic poetry from the apparitions and mythologies of Homer through those of Vergil, Statius, and even St. Augustine. While Dante employs the standard conventions of epic poetry, he manipulates these standards in various ways, such…
This thesis explores the possible meanings and functions of medieval labyrinths and mazes in architecture and literature. Information on labyrinths, including historical and oral traditions, as well as descriptions in narrative texts, are considered. In this project, I examine m…
Mystical texts often present themselves as possessing a “donative” intent, in which writers aim to share the significance of their own experience. This dissertation will show how a consideration of donative intent and its textual results can enrich the study of medieval and earl…
The rich medieval Icelandic literary record, comprised of mythology, sagas, poetry, law codes and post-medieval folklore, has provided invaluable source material for previous generations of scholars attempting to reconstruct a pagan Scandinavian Viking Age worldview. In modern I…
This thesis encompasses the first partial critical edition and specialised study of a series of lectures from the cathedral school of Notre-Dame, Peter Comestor’s Glosae super Iohannem glosatum. Delivered in Paris in the mid-1160s, Comestor’s lecture course on the Glossa ‘ordina…
This hermeneutic study explores the esoteric context and complementary ritual discourse of Medieval Haṭha-Yoga and Hindu alchemy, from a Jungian depth psychological perspective. Its comparative approach draws on the essential values, fantasy images, and key concepts of esoterici…