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This dissertation contributes to medieval feminist scholarship by forging new insights into the relationship between gender theory and developing notions of orality and textuality in late medieval Europe. I examine three conventional satirical depictions of women as deviant speakers in medieval literature---as loquacious gossips, scolding shrews and cursing witches---to reveal how medieval perceptions of oral and textual discursive modes influenced literary representations of women. The dissertation demonstrates that our comprehension of the literary battle between the sexes requires a recognition and understanding of how discursive modes were gendered in a culture increasingly defining itself in terms of textuality. My work pursues the juxtaposition of the rational, literate male and the irrational, oral female across a wide range of texts, from Dunbar and Chaucer's courtly literature, to more socially diffused works, such as carols, sermon exempla and the Deluge mystery plays, as well as texts, like Margery Kempe's autobiography and witchcraft documents, that pertain to historical women. I demonstrate the social impact of this convention by anchoring these literary texts in their socio-historical context. The significance of my identification of this nexus of orality and femininity is that I am able to delineate an ideology profoundly affecting the way women's speech and writings have been received and perceived for centuries. This notion of gendered discourse can also redefine how we perceive medieval literature. Mikhail Bakhtin's discursive principles---ideas that stem from his application of the dynamics of oral communication and performance to the literary text---help to liberate new meanings from old texts by allowing us to read against the grain of convention. Both Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and Walter Ong's summary of the psychodynamics of orality suggest that orally influenced discourse is less interested in monolithic truth than in the art of tellin

This thesis examines the positive role of evil in select Old English Poetry, namely The Junius Book, "Guthlac", "Vainglory", "The Whale", "Juliana", "Judith" and "Beowulf". Using a background of Augustan and Boethian thought, each adversarial character is discussed with regard to role and imagery, but specifically in relationship to the protagonist. Evil plays a surprisingly positive role when it offers the protagonist the opportunity to defeat it. The protagonists' honour at the poem's conclusion is necessarily defined by the extent of resisting the antagonists. The hero must fight evil on two levels: the temporal in humans and the metaphysical in Satan. The thesis examines the various levels of victory and indeed failure they achieve, and concludes that of all the heroes only Juliana is completely successful. Although evil itself cannot be defined as "good", this thesis discovers that in its relationship with the human hero, it can indeed give rise to goodness.

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The language of Chaucer bears a close relationship to his versification, meter, and rhyme. Chaucer's experimentation in a variety of verse forms in his career as a poet show how he tried to deal with the English language that was then undergoing major changes in phonology, morphology, and syntax.This thesis has analyzed the grammatical characteristics and syntax of selected Chaucerian rhyme words and has established the frequency of phrasal constituent structures in the sample. The sample consists of random groups of 1,000 lines from 12 tales which are divided into four groups in terms of the periods of writing date. In addition, those 12 tales have been classified into two types according to their rhyme scheme. The findings demonstrate that:1. The nominal rhyme is used most frequently and twice as much as the verbal rhyme.2. There is a tendency that the verbal rhyme is less frequently used in the heroic couplet writings but more often used in the rhyme royal writings.3. The adjective and adverbial rhymes seem to occur almost equally in ratio.4. There is a tendency that the nominal rhyme appears most frequently in the noun phrase functioning as an object of the preposition.5. Concerning the adverbial rhyme, the highest usage is as one indicating manner.6. There is a tendency that, in accordance with the progress of the periods, the frequency of the nominal rhyme gradually increases while the verbaladverbial rhymes, on the contrary, decrease.7. It is likely that the frequency variation might be caused by the progress of the periods, not by the type of rhyme scheme.8. Chaucer seems to prefer the minimal phrase to the expanded one.