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 …
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In a time of multiplying histories and changing perceptions of geography, my dissertation looks to revise prevailing conceptions of medieval space. It does so by challenging the consensus view that medieval maps of the world, or mappaemundi, have primarily a 'theological functio…
This study is an analysis of relations between Christians and non-Christians (Jews, Muslims and the pagan Cumans) in the thirteenth-century frontier kingdom of Hungary. Thirteenth-century Hungary was both an area of recent Christianization and a meeting-point of two frontiers, w…
The thirteenth-century missionary effort of the Order of Preachers to convert Jews, Muslims and other non-Christians has been viewed by scholars as a manifestation of a “persecuting society.” Jeremy Cohen argues that the mendicants, under the direction of Friar Raymond of Peñafo…
This dissertation examines two works of Robert Grosseteste (c. 1169–1253), his astronomical textbook, the De spera, and his computistical work, the Compotus correctorius. Through the use of a technique labelled exposition, the texts are presented to the reader through a means th…
In Spain, science, history and law began to be written in Romance in the 13th century. At this time, and corresponding to a new interest in the dissemination of the medieval sciences, a need arose to transmit a way of understanding man and creation that integrated practical wisd…
This dissertation questions the notion of miscellany as it is applied to compilations from the high Middle Ages. My intention is twofold: to show how the interpretation of a medieval text can change when it is studied in conjunction with other texts bound in the same manuscript …
This dissertation draws upon unpublished testimonies collected over two hundred and one days (between the first of May 1245 and the first of August 1246 beneath the great basilica of Saint-Sernin at Toulouse) that five thousand four hundred and seventy-one men and women gave bef…
Though students of Scholasticism have described in impressive detail the reception of Aristotle during the High Middle Ages, they have practically left the Secretum secretorum out of account. Given that the Secretum is not a formal work of philosophy but rather a letter of advic…
In the wake of the abolition of the Caliphate in the Islamic world with the advent of the Mongols in the 13th century, Islamic scholarship paradoxically flourished, especially in the Shi'i milieu. This era marked a renaissance which has influenced the course of Shii thought ever…
Women who commissioned manuscripts in the Welsh Marches produced, utilized, and engaged the exotic in Latin and vernacular religious texts to help regulate textual communities and regional identity. By employing exoticism, these religious manuscripts attempted to reconcile the t…
In the form of Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah, the literary image of God as a suckling mother constructs a metaphysical social relationship between God and humanity that is unprecedented in Jewish theological literature. This striking image arises from a stream of Jewish tho…
In the late eleventh century, with the collapse of the Iberian Caliphate, the Ebro watershed came under the control of the Christian principalities which would become the 'Crown of Aragon.' The majority of the vanquished elected to remain under terms of surrender negotiated with…
The imposition of Mongol political authority over the Seljuk realms of Anatolia during the mid-thirteenth century brought about vast changes not only in the demographics of the region, but also in its political structures and culture. This dissertation studies the dynamics of ea…
Born in the years following the Disputation of Barcelona of 1263, the Castilian Jew Abner of Burgos (c.1270--c.1347), known after his conversion to Christianity as Alfonso of Valladolid, wrote various anti-Jewish polemics in Hebrew that included arguments similar to those made p…
This Dissertation discusses the cultural, historical, and linguistic influences of Arabic civilization that led to the incorporation of Arabic words into the German language over the period from 700 to 1200 AD, when the Arab and Germanic cultures enjoyed an especially complex re…