Medieval Literature

Wales in the Middle Ages was a region both divided by war and united by culture. Frequent raids from the Hiberno-Irish, Scandinavians, and Flemish threatened Wales from the outside, while the kings within the borders of Wales fought for supremacy. During the late eleventh centur…

When a woman picks up her distaff, not to spin wool, but instead to mount a horse and use it to joust with a defenseless man, what is the significance? Several such motifs appear in the margins of New Haven, Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library, Ms. 229 and Paris, Bibliothè…

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Christine de Pizan has resurfaced in the academic and literary spheres as a paragon of proto-feminist thought. This modern fascination with the fifteenth-century writer is largely grounded in her surprisingly progressi…

In the 14th and 15th centuries, English went from a vernacular language to one used in literary and religious contexts. As a vernacular, English was the language of the lower and middle classes, and Latin was the language of religion and academia. The Lollards were early Christi…

This dissertation examines inventiones, that is narratives of relic discoveries, written in southern Italy between the tenth and twelfth centuries. During this period, communities dealt with sweeping changes brought on by political upheaval, invasion, and ecclesiastical reforms.…

The contribution of this work is to suggest that Beowulf was written with the purpose of converting Vikings and their descendants, living in and ruling over the Danelaw region of northern England during the tenth century, to Christianity. In order to make such an argument I

This dissertation seeks to redefine the traditional understanding of the relationship between hell and literary modernism by reading the medieval Inferno as an agent of inherent post-structuralism- a religious structure of dialectics rather than dogma. I argue that hell is a rea…

While the study of the Arthurian legend has been done extensively in the past, there are some areas that have not been examined at all. This study provides a look into the life of Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire and the corresponding life of Lancelot within Malo…

This dissertation analyzes local and regional histories written during the 10th to 13th centuries in areas that were historically a part of the Persian Empire. These texts are written in Persian or Arabic or both. Some sources were originally in Arabic and later translated into …

Traditionally, a study of crusading literature has always taken the approach of setting "east" against "west," a model which presents the crusades as a fragmented series of events, and a methodology which ultimately provides a fractional study of the textual traditions at hand. …

The success of the First Crusade by the Christian armies caught the interest and arrested the imagination of contemporaries, stimulating the production of a large number of historical narratives. Four eyewitness accounts, as well as letters written by the crusaders to the West, …

Recent studies into medieval pedagogy have shown that art and literature from this era are no longer considered to be centric to Western Europe, but rather, it extends across nations and cultures, creating a new and exciting genre of the Global Middle Ages. A reflection of this …

This thesis investigates the description of sensation in the scenes immediately before, during, and following the death of Tristan in variations in the Tristan cycle from the 12th through the 15th centuries. Using a sensory studies approach, the project considers these scenes as…

Many studies of the chant of the Cistercian order have focused on the order’s early roots in twelfth-century France. This study instead considers their activities in the thirteenth century in the area around the diocese of Liège, where Cistercians were instrumental in promoting …

This dissertation argues that the chivalric code and resulting “ethos” of chivalry creates a physical, religious, and social burden upon the medieval knights tasked with its application and adherence. The immediate result of this chivalric burden is the inability of knights to l…

This dissertation investigates the cultural construction of a modern global diaspora by foregrounding the historical, linguistic and nationalist contexts embedded in literary works produced over the last two centuries, written by a diverse collection of writers who imagine a pre…

This thesis seeks to provide a provisional edition of Baptista Massa's "De Fructibus Vescendis," a fifteenth-century treatise on the medicinal qualities of fruits. Included is a description of the manuscripts and textual tradition, as well as discussion on some distinctive featu…