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The miracles performed by saints in Old English hagiography provide the starting point for this thesis, and serve as a route into exploration of wider issues within the saints' lives. The thesis is structured around a series of case studies based on the classifications of sanctity found in the Anglo-Saxon Litanies, with chapters on Virgins, Confessors, Martyrs and Apostles, which explore the presentation of miracles in an AElfrician and anonymous life of each type of saint. Each case study assesses the manner in which the Latin biographies of established saintly figures are handled by their vernacular translators, and the potential agenda of Old English hagiographers suggested by this treatment.;The manipulation of Latin tradition in the lives is revelatory regarding perceptions of authorship and sanctity in the early medieval period, and questions of textual and divine authority are raised in the analysis of each hagiography. The exploration of miracles is framed by the assessment of these two interrelated concepts within the lives. Assessment of inscribed authority centres on the textual and personal authority advocated by the author of the saintly biography, investigating their claimed and actual adherence to tradition and attitudes to orthodoxy. Exploration of divine authority assesses the validation a saint is said to receive from the Lord in their biography, for which the performance of miracles can serve as a primary channel. The thesis explores the relationship between these kinds of authorization, and the different approaches to these notions found in the AElfrician and anonymous corpora. It argues that suggestive differences exist between AElfrician lives and the anonymous corpus in these areas, and suggests that AElfric's treatment of saints' miracles was intended to further the spiritual wonders he envisaged himself to be enacting.

This thesis takes as its subject the representation of animals and the natural world in two key genres of medieval literature: hagiography and romance. Focusing on the early Lives of St. Francis of Assisi, the romances Sir Gowther, Octavian, and Sir Orfeo, the Middle English Alexander Romances, and the Collatio Alexandri cum Dindimo, it examines the diverse ways in which animals are portrayed in these texts, and the range of mimetic, symbolic, and representative functions that they fulfil. Rather than endorsing the view that medieval culture was characterised by a unified and homogenous attitude towards nature and the natural, the thesis draws out the diversity of opinion and outlook evident in the imaginative literature of the period, and demonstrates in detail the crucial role of genre in determining the representative strategies of individual texts.

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This thesis takes a finnly interdisciplinary approach to the subject of late medieyal fatherhood. It investigates the ideology of fatherhood, as well as the relationships between fathers and their sons and daughters, both legitimate and illegitimate, and also their stepchildren. In doing this it not only illuminates a previously unexplored aspect of family life, but also demonstrates the importance of fatherhood in male identity formation, and so expands the current understanding of medieval masculinities. As its source material this thesis uses Middle English romances and fifteenth-century gentry and mercantile letters. Rather than attempting a survey of late medieval fatherhood, this thesis concentrates on 'fictions' of fatherhood - the constructed worlds of letters and romances. Whilst letters and romances may reflect reality, and in the case of letters in particular may provide details of even the most mundane realities, they are strongly and self-consciously generic. The narrative of the romance is very important, but the story is also the means by which ideas are transmitted. Likewise the fonns of letters, whilst used to transmit practical details, are also a way of encapsulating ideological perspectives. This thesis is principally about ideas of fatherhood, and thus illuminates late medieval perceptions of fathers and their functions. The Introduction presents current scholarship and the source material. Chapter 1 argues that fatherhood was a defining aspect of establishing an adult male identity. Chapter 2 is concerned with fathers and sons, and engages closely with the specific vocabulary of fatherhood. Chapter 3 uses the fatherdaughter relationship to consider the nature of patriarchal authority. Chapter 4 looks at 'outsiders' - stepchildren and bastards - to consider how far stretched the bonds of fatherhood. The Conclusion raises areas for further research.

The extant vernacular literature of the Anglo-Saxons bears witness to a profound and widespread interest in the inner domain of human experience, as can be seen in the great variety of vocabulary relating to inner faculties and processes and in the diversity of recurring fonnulas, expressions and metaphors depicting the inner life. This thesis examines the remarkably innovative conceptions and expressions of the inner self which we find in a number of Cynewulfian and Alfredian texts. Part One of this thesis considers the diverse approaches to matters of soul, mind and self in a number of disciplines in order to introduce the relevant tenninology and accompanying critical controversies. In Chapter One, I argue for a definition of the inner self as the centre of agency, experience and identity and consider the way in which attention to the inner domain is a useful henneneutic tool for the analysis of anthropological and psychological ideas in the Western intellectual tradition. Chapter Two introduces the relevant Old English vocabulary in reference to divergent critical approaches and the persistent difficulties which we face when trying to analyse AngloSaxon anthropological and psychological ideas in tenns of a rigid soul-body or spiritmatter dualism. Chapter Three examines how attention to the inner domain allows us to appreciate the diversity of vernacular accounts of psychological workings and of differing anthropological schemata in Old English literature. In Parts Two and Three, I examine a number of texts, both in poetry and prose, which explore the inner self in reference to larger ideas about human nature and human purpose and which engage with the implications of Latin Christian anthropological ideas. In Part Two, Chapters Four. Five and Six examine Cynewulfs Christ II, Juliana and Elene respectively. with particular emphasis on the way in which the poet underpins his didactic instructions with of human nature, human types and individual characters. In Part Three, Chapters Seven and Eight explore the systematic approach to psychological and anthropological ideas in the Alfredian 'philosophical' works, namely the Consolation and Soliloquies. respectively. In all of these case studies, I focus on the way in which the internal coherence of ideas in the texts (and in the respective canons) informs the authors' constructions of interiority and in doing so illustrate that a philosophical approach to both poetic and prose texts allows a wider appreciation of innovative thought and expression relevant to human and personal identity in the Anglo-Saxon period.

This thesis examines the reception formats of late medieval upper-class literature in English--i.e., how its readers read it. My particular interest is aurality, the reading aloud of literature to one or a group of listeners. I try to show that aurality was not merely the byproduct of technological deficiencies (such as illiteracy and the scarcity of manuscripts) but also represented a contemporary preference for the shared experience of literature. Chapter 1 reviews the evolutionary and polarizing assumptions that underlie, and undermine, many discussions of late medieval, particularly Chaucerian, reception. The popular argument I call 'fictive orality' claims, for example, that Chaucer's references to hearers derive from nostalgia or else are an involuntary holdover of 'minstrel formulas'. But if Chaucer's texts were read aloud, as he keeps assuming they will be, there is nothing 'nostalgic' or anachronistic about references to hearers. Chapter 2 outlines the methodology used to construct the following chapters' 'ethnography of reading', then presents a variety of generalizations to frame the intensive data presented in those chapters. Topics considered include the chronological and functional origins of medieval aurality, the varieties of late medieval English literacy, the role of aurality in generating a public sphere, the 'constellation' of reception-phrases characteristic of late medieval texts, and the crossover of scholarly reading practices into recreational ones.

In the opening Chapter of the thesis, various possible approaches to the reconstruction of Old English phonology are considered. Of the five types of approach normally employed, it is concluded that the limitations and drawbacks involved in using orthoepic, metrical, contact and comparative evidence, mean that only the fifth approach, that which makes use of the evidence of Old English spelling itself is direct and reliable enough to be used in the reconstruction of Old English phonology. An examination and critique of traditional approaches to the interpretation of Old English spelling data, as well as traditional means of presenting findings are then offered. The notion of a 'standard' Old English is questioned, in the context both of Old English spelling and of Old English dialects. In the light of the findings of these Chapters, a new approach to the interpretation of Old English spelling is offered. This is based on (1) a taxonomy which establishes, by examining spelling usage, the principles and procedures of the spelling system and (2) the external and linguistic circumstances surrounding the origins of Anglo-Saxon literacy and the Old English spelling system. For (2), details and results of direct and indirect language contact between Pre Old English, early Old Irish and Late Latin/Early Romance are given and discussed. The influences of the latter two languages on the spelling-sound correspondences chosen and established for the eventual writing-down of Old English is then investigated by means of the reconstruction of 7th century sound and spelling systems for both. After an examination of the methodology pertaining to the genesis of a spelling system, this Latin and Old Irish 'supply' is then compared with the 'demand' of the reconstructed Pre Old English sound system. Preliminary findings are presented, followed by a corpus of the earliest Old English spelling data, together with a detailed proposal on how these might best be analysed to gain information on the relative degrees of adoption and adaptation of the Roman-letter alphabet necessary for the writing-down of Old English, the relative degrees of influence exercised by Latin and Old Irish spelling traditions on Anglo-Saxon approaches to spelling, the Old English spelling system itself and Early Old English phonology.

The work of Robert Henryson constitutes a sophisticated critical engagement with Scholastic literary theory, embodying a deep commitment to the priorities dictated by that theory while attending closely to the problems which it presents. The works of St Augustine and other medieval thinkers provide the theoretical background to the suspicion of poetic discourse which recurs throughout Henryson's works. The common accusations that poets are liars and rouse the passions, which led in the earlier Middle Ages to a minimising of the authority afforded to poetic discourse, are founded on a consideration of how such writing destabilises meaning in resisting assimilation to a referential model of linguistic signification. Comparative analysis of the exemplative theory of Averroes and the interpretative strategies of allegoresis illustrates that the affective literary theory of Scholasticism positively reappraises literature by making it conformable to a referential view of language. Developments in late-medieval philosophy which produce a tension between Scholastic theory's idealising and affective emphases result in modifications of that theory among vernacular writers which exploit its transformative potential, as exemplified in Dante's Commedia. Henryson's work similarly enacts a process of critique and modification of Scholastic theory, providing a particularly flexible and critical deployment of its resources. The patterns of disjunction which occur in the Moral Fables are organised around the need to find a model of signification which closely addresses particular circumstances without having the destabilising forces of textuality undermine the ideal basis of meaning. Henryson's work both posits and criticises a range of literary solutions to the problems. New concepts of authorship which Henryson introduces, while suggesting affiliations with Renaissance humanism, are couched in terms which show that they derive from and modify Scholastic literary theory. The Testament of Cresseid employs these concepts in developing a perspectival mode of signification which encompasses the idealising and particularising imperatives of Scholastic theory, but which in turn problematised by the Fables' depiction of the limitations of human vision.