abstract: This study examines the ways in which translators writing in two contemporary medieval languages, Old Norse-Icelandic and Middle English, approached the complicated doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary. At its core this project is dedicated to understanding the spread and development of an idea in two contemporary vernacular cultures and focuses on the transmission of that idea from the debates of Latin clerical culture into Middle English and Old Norse-Icelandic literature written for an increasingly varied audience made up of monastics, secular clergy, and the laity. The project argues that Middle English and Old-Norse Icelandic writing about the bodily Assumption of Mary challenges misconceptions that vernacular translations and compositions concerned with Marian doctrine represent the popular concerns of the laity as opposed to the academic language, or high Mariology, of the clergy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2014

This M.A. thesis consists of a close-textual reading of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s four sets of villancicos dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary (1676, 1679, 1685 and 1690), with a special focus on Sor Juana’s marianism and a contrast with Juan Correa’s painting, La Asunción de la Virgen (1689). This thesis will cover Sor Juana’s innovation in her representation of Mary as a model of femininity, Mary’s creative abilities, the crowning of Mary, Mary as a dwelling for God, Sor Juana’s feminization of the divine, Mary’s Assumption itself, masculine aspects and professions attributed to Mary, and Sor Juana’s identification with the Virgen.