Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. David Johnson, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 12, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

British Library MS Harley 2253 is a unique fourteenth-century miscellany consisting of 140 folios and containing 116 different texts, including lyrics, political poems, fabliaux and other secular and religious texts in verse and prose, Latin, Middle English and Anglo-Norman. While the so-called “Harley Lyrics” popularized by Brook’s edition may have registered widely on scholarly radar, many of the non-English texts in the collection have failed to elicit critical attention. However, these texts are vital points in the narrative of English literary history. In particular, the four Anglo-Norman fabliaux included in Harley 2253 constitute a majority of the extant pre-Chaucerian fabliaux produced on the English isles, and of these, Le Dit de la Gageure and Du Chevalier a La Corbeille have no Old French analogues. This report explores the Anglo-Norman fabliaux in this manuscript, their relationship to the continental French tradition and to the subsequent English (ie. Chaucerian) fabliaux incarnations. Specifically, I argue that representations of female desire – figured as an opposition between “stillness” and doing one’s “will” – surface in these obscene misogynist stories that simultaneously objectify and colonize the female body. “De Clerico et Puella”, Le Dit de la Gageure and Le Chevalier qui fist Les Cuns Parler all include an unmarried female who articulates her sexual desire freely, a sharp contrast to the traditional cuckoldry plot of Old French fabliaux which revolves around a married woman’s illicit affairs. Indeed, the grotesque images of sexual violence and the pornographic images of sexual fulfillment in these pre-Chaucerian fabliaux are not contained by the ecclesiastic context from which these texts originate, but rather they linger and are transformed by the female characters, patrons, readers and hearers of the medieval manuscripts in their domestic contexts. / text

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The right to belong and participate in some form of political community is the most fundamental social right there is. This dissertation argues that social rights have not been understood broadly enough, that there has not been enough attention paid to their historical roots, and that they must not be viewed as being simply passive welfare rights. Rather, they must be seen in their historical context, and they must be seen for what they are: a much larger and more substantive phenomenon than what liberal theory has projected: both theoretically and empirically. I am calling this body of discourse “the social citizenship tradition.” This dissertation hopes to show that there was more than one definition of social citizenship historically and that social rights are certainly not “new.” In surveying a vast literature in Britain, the United States, and Canada, it points to places where alternative social rights claims have entered politics and society. By looking at writings from these three countries over three centuries, the evidence points to some similarities as well as differences in how scholars approached questions of economic and social rights. In particular, similar arguments over labour and property figured prominently in all three countries. The contextual ground of right was different in each country but the voice of social action was similar. The objective here is to reunite this common tradition of social citizenship with its past. It is because of classical liberalism that social right has lost focus and power, and a whole tradition of political thinking has been lost.This tradition has been narrowed to the point that it might be unrecognizable to the more radical forces, those who also fought for it, in the American, Canadian and British pasts.

The Company Man argues that corporate ways of organising communities permeated British imperial culture. My point of departure is the obsession shared between Anglo-Indian writers and imperial policymakers with the threat of unmanageable agency, the employee who will not follow orders. By taking up Giambattista Vico's claim that human subjects and human institutions condition each other reciprocally, I argue that Anglo-Indian literature is properly understood as one of a series of disciplinary apparatuses which were developed in response to that persistent logistical problem: how best to convince plenipotentiary agents to work in the interest of a mercantile employer, the East India Company. The Company Man reconsiders the way we think and write about Victorian imperial culture by taking this institutional approach. For one thing, the dominant position of the Company highlights the limitation of our continuing dependence on the nation as a critical hermeneutic. Additionally, I show how the prevalence of ideas like duty, service, and sacrifice in colonial literature is more than simply the natural output of a nation looking to sacralise everyday practice in the wake of their famous "Victorian loss of faith." Rather, I place these ideas among a structure of feeling, which I call aristocratic virtue, that was developed by imperial policymakers looking to militate against the threat of rogue agents. The subject material under consideration includes novels, short stories, poems, essays, memoirs, personal correspondence, and parliamentary speeches. These texts span a century but are clustered around four nodal points, which illustrate moments of innovation in the technologies of regulation and control. My opening chapter examines how the idea of an overseas empire first acquired virtue in the minds of the British public. The second explores how the Company grafted this virtue onto its corporate structure in its training colleges and competition exams. The third shows how Anglo-Indian literature continued to disseminate the rhetoric of self-sacrifice and noble suffering long after the Company ceded control to the Crown. The final chapter shows how this corporate culture reflects in that most canonical of imperial novels, Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901).

The right to belong and participate in some form of political community is the most fundamental social right there is. This dissertation argues that social rights have not been understood broadly enough, that there has not been enough attention paid to their historical roots, and that they must not be viewed as being simply passive welfare rights. Rather, they must be seen in their historical context, and they must be seen for what they are: a much larger and more substantive phenomenon than what liberal theory has projected: both theoretically and empirically. I am calling this body of discourse “the social citizenship tradition.” This dissertation hopes to show that there was more than one definition of social citizenship historically and that social rights are certainly not “new.” In surveying a vast literature in Britain, the United States, and Canada, it points to places where alternative social rights claims have entered politics and society. By looking at writings from these three countries over three centuries, the evidence points to some similarities as well as differences in how scholars approached questions of economic and social rights. In particular, similar arguments over labour and property figured prominently in all three countries. The contextual ground of right was different in each country but the voice of social action was similar. The objective here is to reunite this common tradition of social citizenship with its past. It is because of classical liberalism that social right has lost focus and power, and a whole tradition of political thinking has been lost.This tradition has been narrowed to the point that it might be unrecognizable to the more radical forces, those who also fought for it, in the American, Canadian and British pasts.

Employing the concepts of lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and system as primarily discussed by Edmund Husserl and Jürgen Habermas, this dissertation argues that the lifeworlds of Anglo-Indian and Goan Catholics in the Greater Toronto Area have permitted members of these communities to relatively easily understand, interact with and manoeuvre through Canada’s democratic, individualistic and market-driven system. Suggesting that the Catholic faith serves as a multi-dimensional primary lens for Canadian Goan and Anglo-Indians, this sociological ethnography explores how religion has and continues affect their identity as diasporic post-colonial communities. Modifying key elements of traditional Indian culture to reflect their Catholic beliefs, these migrants consider their faith to be the very backdrop upon which their life experiences render meaningful. Through systematic qualitative case studies, I uncover how these individuals have successfully maintained a sense of security and ethnic pride amidst the myriad cultures and religions found in Canada’s multicultural society. Oscillating between the fuzzy boundaries of the Indian traditional and North American liberal worlds, Anglo-Indians and Goans attribute their achievements to their open-minded Westernized upbringing, their traditional Indian roots and their Catholic-centred principles effectively making them, in their opinions, admirable models of accommodation to Canada’s system.

The overarching theme of the book is differential treatment in death, which is examined at the site-specific, settlement, regional and national level. More specifically, the symbolism of conversion-period grave good deposition, the impact of the church, and aspects of identity, burial diversity and biocultural approaches to cemetery analysis are discussed.

This thesis examines the development, production and function of dress pins in Anglo- Saxon England. It proposes a dated typology for the mid-5th to the mid-llth century and notes the implications of this for discussions of contact and cultural interaction between England and other parts of Europe. Chapter 1 defines the parameters of the study, and describes the data that was assembled on Anglo-Saxon pins. An evaluation of the previous work on pins from Northern Europe (Chapter 2) is followed by an investigation in Chapter 3 of the methods and process of typological analysis. After arguing that one of the most important (and neglected) aspects of typological research is 'the process of study1 the chapter provides terminological definitions for the components of pins. Chapter 4 examines the problems, principal methods and developments in pin production and discusses how changes in method reflected changes both in fashion and metalworking techniques. Building on this, Chapter 5 defines the groups of pins that have been found on sites of the Anglo-Saxon period, including: (1) definition of the types and sub-types; (2) determination of their date ranges; (3) description of their distribution; and (4) suggestions about the origin of each type. In Chapter 6 the types are put into chronological order, to demonstrate which types existed simultaneously and how pins developed over time. The function of pins is considered in Chapter 7 and several tentative hypotheses are put forward. The final chapter draws a number of conclusions from the study including: (1) Anglo-Saxon pins display a great deal of insularity during all periods, but particularly in the 8th and 9th centuries; (2) while regionalism may have been a feature of 6th century pins, it ceases to be important by the 8th century when many finds from middle Saxon trading sites seem consistently to be the same types, suggesting that in addition to trade between England and the Continent and Scandinavia it is time to evaluate the micro-economic and information exchange networks in Anglo- Saxon England; (3) lastly it notes the problem of dissemination of artefactual analyses and the difficulties to be encountered in using typologies and it puts forward a preliminary proposal for the use of expert systems (computer programs that simulate human performance in specialist task areas) as a tool to distribute this information. An example of a knowledge base that might be used to disseminate the typology presented here, The Anglo-Saxon Pin Identification Assistant, is to be found in Appendix 2, as are several sample identification sessions.

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