Saint James Apostle has been historically associated with his predications in the Iberian Peninsula. His cult started in the medieval times and has prolonged until the present, where he is considered the patron Saint of Spain. The construction and promotion of this symbol has be…
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Previous analyses of late medieval writing produced in Western Europe and its relationship to the East have been largely occupied by studies concerning the monstrous. Said studies dealt with how the West depicted the people of the East as “Other” and grotesque due to religious a…
Bridges to the Past: Orientation, Materiality, and Participatory Reading in Late Medieval England explores the value that Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological theorization of “orientation” holds for thinking about the kinds of participatory, embodied, spatial, and temporal performances…
This dissertation seeks to explore how theological and philosophical traditions during the medieval period lead to the establishment of views on the nature of God, the best manner of living, as well as the best way of remaining faithful to a proper mode of religious worship. Fur…
This dissertation explores the relationship between the compendios de castigos brought into Castilian during the last years of the reign of Fernando III and the first four years of Alfonso X's rule and the socio-political milieu in which they were circulated. The first two works…
Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century recovery romances create a convergent set of fantasies that reflect desires both for the reclamation of the Holy Land and for the protection and ascendance of Christianity. The disunity of Europe and the emergence of the Ottoman Empire produced …
The doctrine of divine providence was considered fundamental to understanding the nature of reality in medieval Christian orthodoxy. One of our greatest modern impediments to proper understanding of this law are the radically different ontologies that flourished in the Latin Wes…
The reign of King Baldwin I (1100-1118) has thus far received little noteworthy attention by historians as the important pivotal period following the First Crusade conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. The two decades of his rule marked the extension of Latin conquests in the east, mos…
This study examines crusader kingship as a unique paradigm of monarchy in the twelfth century. Using crusade chronicles, chansons de geste, trouveres poetry, coronation liturgies, letters, treatises and artwork, three themes of royal power are identified and analyzed: chivalric …
The medieval crusades played a major role in the literature of the period. Some may consider crusade literature as primarily celebratory in nature; however, the examination of two medieval source texts, The Song of Roland and The Sultan of Babylon, reveals literature that reache…
This Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the nostalgic feelings of the Andalusian Arabs and Jews toward the East and on the role that eastern poetic conventions played in the literary composition of al-Andalus. The first chapter introduces a quick survey of nostalgia among Arabs from …
This dissertation explores two thirteenth century hagiographic poems by Gonzalo de Berceo, Vida de San Millán de la Cogolla and Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos, and two seventeenth century hagiographic comedias by Lope de Vega, El santo negro Rosambuco de la ciudad de Palermo and…
This study examines the importance of geographical ideas in Dante’s Commedia and develops a historically sensitive geocritical methodology to analyze the function of real world geography within Dante’s poem. I aim to expand our understanding of the importance of the poet’s use o…
Embodied Ethos explores how coins negotiate rhetors’ ethos in antiquity and how Renaissance texts illustrated with coin images reconstruct and appropriate the ethos of ancient coins. With a methodological framework that puts in conversation ancient rhetorical theories, modern th…
Within the past twenty years, scholars have explored romance representations of religious conversion as windows to larger issues of race, community, and proto-nationalism in late-medieval England. Until now, scholars have focused on discrete groups of converts, such as former Mu…
In this dissertation, I describe social, economic and political relations between Jews and Christians in medieval Europe before presenting the intellectual and religious context of Jewish life in Christian Spain. The purpose of this endeavor is to provide the framework for analy…
This project examines the Middle English Charlemagne Romances, a scattered group of nine metrical romances from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the sociocultural context of late medieval England's growing perception of nationhood. I argue that these romances employ the…
Despite general consensus among scholars that race in the West is an early modern phenomenon that dates to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, late medieval English texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries expend no small amount of effort depicting the differences b…
The poet-paraphraser of The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament (MEMPOT) imagines Judith and other women biblical characters as courtly ladies, whose performance and dress reflect the values and customs of literary courtesy, as well as the poet's interpretati…