Assuming that ancient traditions were at the very heart of medieval Jewish practices, I question to what extent the care for the dead in medieval Ashkenaz continued and to what extent it differed from the treatment of the body in earlier periods. Were the halakhic norms regardin…
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In 1349, the Aquitanian Franciscan John of Rupescissa (d. 1364) stood trial for heresy because he exhibited visionary behavior. To prove his innocence, which he gained, he wrote a work entitled the Liber Secretorum Eventuum or The Book of Secret Events. Rupescissa related how he…
In 1922 G. I. Gurdjieff (1872?--1949) arrived in Paris and began teaching a system of self-perfection gathered from the East and adapted for the West. Since his death in 1949 a growing body of secondary literature connected to his work has been proposed in fields as disparate as…
A first impression might lead one to characterize the Governance of the Solitary, the most famous treatise by the medieval Arabic-Islamic philosopher Ibn Bājjah, as favoring radical individualism, and thus as breaking with the political orientation of ancient philosophy. In fact…
This study traces the representations of the Nizari Isma'ilis, or Assassins, in medieval European texts, a process revealing three different discourses about the sect. I argue that when the crusaders first encountered the Syrian branch of the sect, they sought to enter into an a…
The purpose of this research is to seek and eventually follow lines of cultural production within Europe and specifically Italy between 1180-1320 that gave rise to a particular conception of the individual. This conception had as much to do with negation as affirmation and as su…
This dissertation explores how medieval French romances of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries construct representations of Byzantium. I claim that the culture of contact that existed during the Crusades offers a unique context for understanding how Byzantium comes to signi…
The dissertation traces a crucial transformation of the early modern Jesuit (and European) approach to conscience. This revolution involved the confrontation between two divergent ethical rules employed by a person confronting a doubtful moral issue: the medieval rule that one s…
This dissertation, "In another kynde": Modes of Recognition in Late Medieval English Literature, seeks to revive and broaden our interest in the topos of recognition and suggest its cultural importance. Scenes of recognition play an important role in narratives that explore iden…
This study examines how the combination between image, word, and space in the texts of Ramon Llull redefine the processes of reading, thus leading to a re-articulation of translatio and convivencia in the medieval canon. The terms translatio and convivencia have traditionally be…
This dissertation examines the architectural evidence in the ongoing debate surrounding the demographical and political value of the shifting Iberian frontier of the tenth through twelfth centuries. In particular, it seeks to problematize the current generalization of rural ston…
My study begins by outlining the historical significance of medieval studies in African-American colleges and scholarly writing in the decades after the Civil War. Scholars have studied this period with respect to the myth of racial purity that pervaded white racial discourse at…
ABSTRACT During the Middle Ages, Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted (often uneasily) on the Iberian Peninsula. These three religious groups were in a constant process of defining and preserving their identities, which were often constructed in terms of the relationships with…
Relics and the Eucharist, powerful physical links between the divine and the human, sit at the heart of narratives about twelfth-century English religious conflicts. These conflicts centered around internal strife between Jews and Christians, prior to the Jews' expulsion from En…
Medieval Toledo was a political and economic center whose ethnic diversity promoted cultural variety. It was the first place where Castilian Christians lived beside large numbers of Jews and Muslims for extended periods of time. The norms of coexistence that developed there duri…
An important trading center for at least three distinct periods in its long history, and entrepot of the highly visible medieval trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, Aden owes much to its strategic geographical location. An exploration of the elements that defin…
During the twelfth century, a group of poets at the Norman court in Sicily composed traditional Arabic panegyrics in praise of the kingdoms Christian monarchs. Less than a century later, at the court of Frederick II, Sicilian poets wrote the first lyric love poetry in an Italian…
This study investigates The Cloisters panel painting Scenes from the Life of St. Augustine assigned to the anonymous painter The Master of St. Augustine by Max Friedländer in 1937. Chapter one outlines the current state of research available on the panel. Chapter two reviews the…
My dissertation is a study of the importance of female impurity for medieval Jewish spirituality. It is striking that of the three major religions in medieval Europe, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Judaism alone cannot boast a single female mystic. I argue that the notion of …