This thesis offers an assessment of late medieval public response to the crusades through an investigation of emotional rhetoric in the Middle English crusading romances. It argues that the prevailing climate after the fall of Acre in 1291 and the evacuation of the last Christian strongholds in the Levant was characterized by a mixture of enduring enthusiasm and fascination, but also of concern, anxiety, and self-questioning, engendered by the enterprise's failures. The loss of the Holy Land had enduring repercussions on Christian crusading mindsets, marking a culminating point in Islam's seemingly relentless victories in wars believed to be ordained by God, and the collapse of Christendom's ambitions to secure lasting dominion over Christ's patrimony. The late thirteenth century was also a turning point in the history of insular romance, with the progressive displacement of Anglo Norman by Middle English, expanding the genre's audience. Reworking the emotional depictions of their sources, authors or adaptors of late medieval English crusading romances engaged with, and elicited reflection on, the cultural anxieties of the time: man's relation to God, the workings of divine providence, Christianity's ascendency over Islam, human agency, the connection between morality and fortune, the bearing of motives on actions, and the moral limitations of violence.

This study focuses on the peculiar success that a number of Middle English romances achieved in fourteenth-century England. The romances, Otuel a Knight, Otuel and Roland, Duke Rowland and Sir Otuell of Spayne, Sir Ferumbras, Firumbras, and The Sowdone of Babylone, are narratives about the Saracen knight Otuel or Ferumbras who convert to and fight for Christianity. Given the particular cultural preoccupation with the crusades in Europe and the common vilification of Islam throughout European literature, the popularity of a Saracen hero for the English is unexpected. In accounting for the popularity of these figures and their tales in medieval England, I analyse through a socio-historic approach the concepts of Islam and views of conversion in medieval Europe and England, the particular resonances between English concerns and these narratives, and the converts and conversions in these romances. I approach this subject with an eye to source material from historical documents, comparing the subject matter of the romances to the preoccupations of medieval Christians demonstrated in the historical material. Through this discussion, it becomes clear that the popularity of these romances was assured because of the unwavering promotion and idealizing of the project of Christian reclamation and unification exemplified through the tales. Differently from much scholarship on romances that extensively use Saracen characters, this study demonstrates that the Saracens in these romances become less of an Other and more of a misled aspect of Christianity that must be led back to the church for the complete unification of Christendom to take place.

The representations of the Saracen in medieval English romances have attracted a great deal of critical attention. Earlier interest concentrated on the (mis)perceptions of the nature of Islam and the behaviors of its adherents. For the last two decades, analysis of the imagery of the Saracens has been drawn in new directions. The Saracen is treated as ¡§the other,¡¨ which functions as everything opposed to Christian and the western world. Consequently, ¡§the other¡¨ is often linked to the formation of ¡§the self¡¨ in terms of race, culture, religion or nation. Previous studies implicitly or explicitly respond to the binary paradigm proclaimed by Roland in The Song of Roland that the ¡§Pagans are wrong and Christians are right¡¨ (1015) and prove the inappeasable enmity between the two peoples. Attached to this presumption are two shared supportive beliefs that make the stereotypical imagery and the binary paradigm sustainable. One is that the nature of romance is homogeneous and is constituted by literary conventions. The other is that medieval England was a world which was isolated from the actual encounter with the Saracens and thereby tended to adhere to the design of a propagandistic stereotype of the Continent (Metlitzki 167). This dissertation will attempt to explore the representation of the Saracens in Middle English romances, and at the same time to reshape the understanding of the binary paradigm as well as the two associated supportive beliefs. My approaches to studying the representations of the Saracens in Middle English romances are two: one is intratextual and the other is intertextual. The first is to take Middle English romances as a corpus, to investigate its homogeneity as well as its variants in the representations of the Saracens. The second is to draw the strands of theological, sociological and historical references to shed light on the contextual knowledge of Middle English romances in the representations of the Saracens. Chapter one introduces the binary paradigm and the supportive beliefs. Chapter two explores the representations of the Saracens mainly in Floris and Blancheflour and the medieval ideas regarding magic. Chapter three investigates mainly Josian, the Saracen Princess as the embodiment of the Saracenic intellectual culture in Bevis of Hampton and compares her with other Saracen females and Christian counterparts. Chapter four focuses on the representation of the Sultan of Babylon in the eponymous romance The Sultan of Babylon. He is represented as an offender of God on the one hand; on the other hand, he is a worthy conqueror, a competent leader and a kind father. The complex image modifies the rivalry paradigm. Chapter five concludes that alternative Saracen characters are not as rare as might be supposed and antagonism coexists with tolerance and inclusion in medieval English romances. In Middle English romances, the Saracens are not always evil, wrong and savage. English romancers express their understanding of the Saracens, the curiosity about the Saracenic culture, and give fair appraisals of the Saracens. They reflect ¡§real¡¨ encounters with the Saracens, they suggest the ambiguity of literary conventions and they indicate the possibility of toleration and inclusion. They reshape the paradigm proclaimed by Sir Roland, break down the myth of the unity and continuity of Western civilization and mark the particularity of English romances.

This thesis is a study of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript and print contexts of Older Scots romance. Building on recent developments in Middle English romance scholarship and Older Scots book history, it seeks to contextualise the surviving corpus of Older Scots romances in light of their unique material witnesses and contemporary cultural milieu. Chapters 1 to 8 focus respectively on the following Older Scots romances: the Octosyllabic Alexander, the Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, Florimond, Lancelot of the Laik, King Orphius and Sir Colling, Golagros and Gawane and Rauf Coilyear, the Scottish Troy Book, and Clariodus. The conclusion assesses and evaluates the most significant and recurring features of these chapters and reveals how they cumulatively deepen our understanding of the book-producing and book-owning culture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland. The conclusion also looks forward to new witness- conscious editions of Older Scots romance that endeavour to represent as far as possible a text’s unique and idiosyncratic manuscript and print contexts. In each chapter I examine the set romance’s primary contexts of composition, including authorship, date, and first audience, as well as its secondary publication contexts. A full palaeographical, codicological and bibliographical description of each manuscript and print is provided, with details of when, where and by whom each witness was produced. Information about when and where that witness was read is also given, with details of the owners and readers where known. Significant attention is paid to the use of titles, rubrication and mise-en-page to reveal the trends and bibliographical codes in copying and presentation. Where appropriate, the compilation choices made by scribes and readers are also analysed. Careful assessments of these are shown to aid modern thematic and comparative literary interpretation. Most notably, each chapter of this thesis also provides much-needed new information about fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scottish literary communities. Several significant and often-overlapping circles of scribes, readers and owners are revealed. The familial, professional and geographical associations between these groups of producers and consumers are traced and consequently new book- publishing and book-owning networks are documented. In further original work, a number of hitherto unknown texts, scribes and readers are also successfully identified.

This thesis, ‘Fairy in Middle English romance', aims to contribute to the recent resurgence of interest in the literary medieval supernatural by studying the concept of ‘fairy' as it is presented in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English romances. This thesis is particularly interested in how the use of ‘fairy' in Middle English romances serves as an arena in which to play out ‘thought-experiments' that test anxieties about faith, gender, power, and death. The first chapter considers the concept of fairy in its medieval Christian context by using the romance Melusine as a case study to examine fairies alongside medieval theological explorations of the nature of demons. The thesis then examines the power dynamic of fairy/human relationships and the extent to which having one partner be a fairy affects these explorations of medieval attitudes toward gender relations and hierarchy. The third chapter investigates ‘fairy-like' women enchantresses in romance and the extent to which fairy is ‘performed' in romance. The fourth chapter explores the location of Faerie and how it relates as an alternative ‘Otherworld' to the Christian Otherworlds of Paradise, Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell. The final chapter continues to examine geography by considering the application of Avalon and whether Avalon can be read as a ‘land of fairies'. By considering the etymological, spiritual, and gendered definitions of ‘fairy', my research reveals medieval attitudes toward not only the Otherworld, but also the contemporary medieval world. In doing so, this thesis provides new readings of little-studied medieval texts, such as the Middle English Melusine and Eger and Grime, as well as reconsider the presence of religious material and gender dynamics in medieval romance. This thesis demonstrates that by examining how fairy was used in Middle English romance, we can see how medieval authors were describing their present reality.

As historicist as it is materialist, my dissertation both reads the fictional queens portrayed in romance against the fraught positioning of historical queens such as Isabella of France, Anne of Bohemia and Margaret of Anjou, and traces the ambivalent function in late medieval English society of objects including the sacring-bell, the Lollard bible and the royal sword. Merging the traditionally historicist field queenship studies with typically postmodern fields like thing theory and sound theory, I investigate how queens in late medieval romances coopt, queer and reconfigure material objects of masculine power. Each chapter examines a literary queen typically dismissed by subject-oriented ontologies as insubstantial. Analyzing romances that include Richard Coer de Lyon, Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, Malory's Morte D'Arthur and the Marian romance of "The Child Slain by Jews" from the Vernon Manuscript, I argue for the overlooked significance of literary queens as figures whose circulation illuminates the construction of medieval masculinities. Through contact with charged material objects that are pivotal to romance plots, queens query patriarchal materials, exposing their underlying "thingness" and malleability. Whether tracking the disturbing afterlife of a church bell used to exorcise the hero's queen mother in Richard Coer de Lyon, or analyzing links between the "Britoun book" that rescues Chaucer's Custance and Anne of Bohemia's vernacular books, my chapters tell a new story about the foreign queens of late medieval English romances by showing how they blur boundaries between male and female, subject and object, West and East, priest and parish, Christian and Jew, orthodox and heterodox, mother and child.

abstract: In this study, I explore to what extent an erotic orientation toward others’ spiritual characteristics, specifically with regard to “clean” souls, was strongly idealized in at least two medieval English locales, the central Midlands and the North Riding of Yorkshire. Where a hetero-genital orientation was pervasively considered proper with regard to erotic attraction then as today, I propose that, additionally, a desire to associate on a spiritual level with not only those of the same religion but also of like spiritual purity governed desire. As I will argue, this orientation to a spiritual sameness stemmed from a meme of preferred association in life with other Christians with clean souls. I refer to this desire for association with Christian sameness as a homo-spiritual orientation. As I will argue, this homospirituality was the primary basis of erotic desire portrayed and prescribed in the evidence considered in this study. In sum, I argue that fifteenth-century English ways of knowing and feeling desire, reflected in models of desire in romance poetry in these two locales, evidences an erotic orientation based on homospiritual lines of attraction. Moreover, in each area, the models of lay homospiritual erotics were preceded by and coincided with religious writings on the subject that contributed to an overall intellectual current. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2017

No description available.

No description available.

Cette étude lexicologique prospective s'inscrit dans la didactique des L3. L’objectif est d’élaborer un interlexique anglais-espagnol-français-italien-portugais composé des adjectifs, noms et verbes anglais fréquents dans les écrits scientifiques de la santé, et de leurs équivalents de traduction analogues en espagnol, français, italien et portugais. Deux mots sont analogues s’ils ont le même sens et une forme similaire.Les rapports entre les concepts d'analogie, de similarité et d'identité sont examinés, les types d'analogies intralinguistiques et interlinguistiques illustrés et les principales analogies et dissemblances entre l’anglais, le français et les langues romanes exposées. L'existence de celles-ci est justifiée par les origines indoeuropéennes et surtout d'intenses contacts de langues. Après avoir rappelé l’importance de l’analogie dans l’apprentissage, nous montrons le lien entre notre recherche et deux types d’approches didactiques des langues : l'intercompréhension, qui développe la compréhension de langues voisines, et les approches sur corpus qui permettent de mieux connaitre et faire connaitre la phraséologie scientifique.Les 2000 lemmes anglais les plus fréquents ont été extraits du corpus scientifique anglais de ScienText, leurs 2208 acceptions fréquentes délimitées sur la base du profil combinatoire et triées en deux catégories sémantiques : lexique de spécialité et lexique scientifique transdisciplinaire. Les lemmes anglais ont été traduits dans les quatre langues romanes, et la similarité mesurée en fonction de la sous-chaine maximale commune (SMC).L’interlexique contient 47 % des acceptions fréquentes. Par couples de langues, l’analogie est encore plus élevée : anglais – français, 66 %, anglais-italien, 65 %, anglais-espagnol, 63 %, anglais-portugais, 58 %. Ce lexique analogue pourrait donc servir comme base de transfert dans des activités de FLE L3 pour des professionnels de la santé, et l’anglais L2 semble être une passerelle possible vers les langues romanes. Des activités plurilingues sont construites sur des concordances extraites des corpus multilingues alignés EMEA et Europarl. Un questionnement métalinguistique en anglais sensibilise à des traits (morpho)syntaxiques du français ; les analogies des deux langues sont systématiquement mises en relief, et dans les cas d'opacité, celles des autres langues romanes avec l’anglais. / This prospective lexicological investigation belongs to the field of L3 French didactics. The purpose is to elaborate a French-Italian-Portuguese-Spanish interlexicon out of the frequent adjectives, nouns and verbs of the healthcare scientific writings, and their analogue translation equivalents in French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Two words are analogue if they have the same meaning and a similar form.Related concepts of analogy, similarity and identity are discussed, types of intralinguistic and cross-linguistic analogies reviewed, and the main analogies and differences between English, French and Romance languages detailed. Their many analogies are justified by Indo-European origins and mostly by intense language contacts. Once the importance of analogy in learning procedures has been highlighted, we show how this research and two types of didactic approaches connect together: intercomprehension, which develops comprehension skills in neighbor languages, and corpus approaches which enable to get a closer insight into scientific phraseology.The 2000 most frequent English lemmas were extracted from the ScienText English scientific corpus, their 2208 frequent acceptions explored from their combinatory profile and sorted out in two semantic categories: healthcare subject-specific vocabulary and science specific trans-disciplinary vocabulary. The English lemmas were translated into the four Romance languages, and similarity measurements were carried out with the longest common substring method.The interlexicon contains 47% of the frequent acceptions. Analogy is even higher by language pairs: English – French, 66%, English – Italian, 65%, English - Spanish, 63%, English – Portuguese, 58%. Consequently, this analogue vocabulary could form a transfer basis in learning activities of L3 French for health care providers, and L2 English seems to be a possible bridge language toward Romance languages. Plurilingual activities are built on concordances extracted from multilingual aligned corpora (EMEA, Europarl). Metalinguistic questions in English point out (morpho)syntactic features of French; the analogies between both languages are systematically enhanced, and in case of lexical opacity, those between English and the other Romance languages.