The Middle Ages ran from the end of the Dark Ages to the Renaissance in the 15th century. Eyewitness Medieval Life gives the reader an in-depth look at life during that era, in both the town and the country, and for the peasants as well as the aristocracy. Discover the hardships…
Chronicles the Great Plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the fourteenth century, documenting the experiences of people who lived during its height while describing the decline of moral boundaries that also marked the period.
In the twelfth century, Luxuria, the Vice of Lust, associated with overindulgence in sensual pleasures, was depicted in a variety of ways, from didactic trees to individual personifications. In this thesis, I consider how gender informed two image types, the Trees of Vices and t…
For centuries, people have been captivated by tales of questing knights, fair ladies, and magical encounters. As someone who grew up immersed in the fantasy genre, transitioning from the Brian Jacques Redwall series as a child to George R.R. Martin's A Song of lce and Fire as an…
The purpose of this project is to consider how medieval devotees experienced a specific set of cross-shaped reliquaries and their holy contents as well the obstacles they faced in doing. By placing these objects in dialogue with contemporary theological discourse on the nature o…
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Prince Cem Sultan’s (1459-1495) Dīvān (a collection of poems written in Ottoman Turkish) as a literary text and a historical document.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…
In the sixth-century, Gaul was undergoing a prolonged negotiation about how its communities should function, framed in terms of divine materiality, and it survives to us today in the period's most popular stories about itself: the Vitae of its saints. This thesis argues that hag…
In this dissertation I will consider how two 13th century theologians, William of Auxerre (1156-1231) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), explored the question, “Whether the same thing can be known (demonstratively) and (believed by faith)” (utrum idem sit scitum et creditum). B…
Despite their value as sources attesting to the reception of Buddhism by Chinese laypeople, miracle tale literature has escaped the attention of all but a few scholars of Chinese Buddhism. These scholars have tended to discuss this literature in general terms, seeking to underst…
The Unicorn Tapestries are a set of seven tapestries, located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters in New York, of Parisian design and woven in the Southern Netherlands in the late Middle Ages. It has baffled scholars for decades. These tapestries are shrouded in myster…
This project addresses the motives behind and interpretative outcomes of Christological sculptures of St. John the Baptist’s severed head in fifteenth-century England. These sculptures depart from the iconography of John’s death in Scripture and instead align with an English euc…
The Black Death of 1347-1351 in Europe wiped out nearly 60% of Europe’s entire population, killing men, women and children, young and old alike. It brought with it a wave of changes impacting everyday life and tradition, artistic expression, religious devotion and medical practi…
“Woven World: The Creation Tapestry of Girona” interrogates the function and meaning of the medieval map. Works of art like the eleventh-century Creation Tapestry of Girona, Spain redefine our modern definition of the word “map.” Medieval artists, like the exegetes of the time, …
This dissertation is a comparative theological study of an Islamic and a Christian text, which, though seemingly unrelated, share a commonality that allows one text to illuminate the other. One is Nah[dotbelow]w al-qulub by Sufi master `Abd al-Karim al-Qushayri (d. 1072), and th…
