Critical scholarship has established that “the earliest and the most authoritative copies” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 392D, and San Marino, Calif., Huntington Library, …
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This dissertation pursues two distinct but parallel projects in relation to the work of Bernard of Clairvaux and Middle English imaginative literature. First, I argue for a Bernardine anagogical lens as a way to better understand the deepest theological commitments and most dist…
More than one contemporary scholar has written about the “search” for the Anglo-Saxon oral poet. They consider historical texts and poetry and every other possible place where some record of who the Anglo-Saxon scop may have been might be found. Some claim to recognize the Old E…
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Prince Cem Sultan’s (1459-1495) Dīvān (a collection of poems written in Ottoman Turkish) as a literary text and a historical document.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…
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…