Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [227]-240).

Proefschrift - Leyden. / Includes bibliographical references.

Proefschrift - Leyden. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (B.A. honors)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Dr. Robert Sattelmeyer, committee chair; Wayne Erickson, committee member. Electronic text (40 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed May 7, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 39-40).

Thesis--Bonn. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 310-326).

Thesis--Bonn. / Bibliography: p. 310-326.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2007. / Title from PDF title page screen. Advisor: Karen Weyler; submitted to the Dept. English. Includes bibliographical references (p. 36-38 , p. 66-68).

Hemingway's dialogue and the texts of politeness and literature -- Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies -- The face of honesty in "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife -- The face of bravery in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" -- The face of love in "Hills Like White Elephants" -- Interpretive implications of politeness theory.

This thesis discusses the ideals of behaviour which sought to govern family life and which were common currency in England and northern Europe, how they were constructed, and how the late medieval gentry and nobility interacted with them. Hagiography, sermons, and courtesy literature all explicitly sought to influence the views and behaviour of their audiences, whilst the letter collections of the Pastons, Plumptons, Stonors, Celys, and Armburghs offer an insight into the self-perceptions of the recipients of this didactic material. Much of this material has been studied, but it did not exist in a vacuum. Images in books, often marking key moments in a typical life-cycle, supported, extended, even contradicted the notions inculcated by these texts, were increasingly relevant to later medieval daily lives, and both influenced their audience and were used by their audience as a form of self-fashioning. The five chapters of this thesis each explore a different aspect of the medieval lifecycle. Chapters One and Two take the foundation of the household, marriage, as their starting point, discussing courtship and the ideal marriage ceremony, as well as the attributes and behaviour of the ideal spouse. Chapter Three turns to how this household operated on a wider scale, demonstrating how lords were caught between Christ's example and the pressures of lavish lay display when building networks of friendship. Chapter Four considers the genesis of a new generation: how images and texts conveyed sometimes different notions of the ideal mother and father, the location of the household as a place of learning, and the importance of models when shaping the development of the ideal child. Lastly, Chapter Five investigates the end of the lifecycle, death, and how images and texts worked together to propound the central medieval idea of a 'good death'. Consideration is given throughout this thesis to how the norms of behaviour communicated by texts and images may be studied.

In its current sense, courting means 'wooing'; but its original meaning was 'residing at court'. The amorous sense of the word developed from a purely social sense in most major European languages around the turn of the sixteenth century, a time when, according to some historians, Western states were gradually moving toward the genesis of absolutism and the establishment of courts as symbols and agents of centralised monarchical power. This study examines the shift in meaning of the words courtship and to court, seeking the origins of courtship in court society, with particular reference to the court and literature of the Elizabethan period. Chapter 1 charts the traditional association between courts and love, first in the historiography of 'courtly love', and then in historical and sociological accounts of court society. Recent studies have questioned the quasi- Marxist notion that the amorous practices of the court and the 'bourgeois' ideals of harmonious, fruitful marriage were antithetical, and this thesis examines whether the development of 'romantic love' has a courtly as well as a bourgeois provenance. Chapter 2 conducts a lexical study of the semantic change of the verb to court in French, Italian, and English, with an extended synchronic analysis of the word in Elizabethan literature. Chapter 3 goes on to diversify the functional classification required by semantic analysis and considers the implications of courtship as a social, literary and rhetorical act in the works of Lyly and Sidney. It considers the 'humanist' dilemma of a language that was aimed primarily at seduction, and suggests that, in the largely discursive mode of the courtly questione d'amore, courtship could be condoned as a verbalisation of love, and a postponement of the satisfaction of desire. Chapter 4 then moves away from the distinction between humanist and courtly concerns, to examine the practice of courtship at the court of Elizabeth I. It focuses on allegorical representations of Desire in courtly pageants, and suggests that the ambiguities inherent in the 'legitimised' Desire of Elizabethan shows exemplify the situation of poets and courtiers who found themselves at the court of a female sovereign. In chapter 5 discussions of the equivocation inveterate to courtly texts leads to a study of The Faerie Queene, and specifically to Spenser's presentation of courtship and courtly society in the imperialist themes of Book II and their apparent subversion in Book VI. The study concludes with a brief appraisal of Spenser's Amoretti as a model for the kind of courtship that has been under review.