This dissertation analyzes the manuscripts and incunabula of the Processus Sathane, a fourteenth-century text frequently attributed to the famed Italian jurist, Bartolo of Sassoferrato, which portrays Mary as humanity's advocate before the court of Christ, defending humankind against Satan's lawsuit to recover possession of the human species. It concludes that the Urtext is not the version most popular in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but an older version, which dates to the first half of the fourteenth century and was itself translated into low-Norman verse in the mid-fourteenth century; and that the text usually attributed to Bartolo is a fifteenth-century redaction. This work then examines why the original Processus Sathane may have been revised, examining both precursors and progeny of the text to demonstrate how its imagery is part of a larger tendency for metaphor to reify, by charting the transposition of this trope from theological type to legal exemplar to popular exempla. In particular, this dissertation reviews the theological background pertinent to the use of Satan's suit as a vehicle for discussing divine justice and mercy in the redemption, and discusses two direct predecessors of the Processus Sathane. It then provides an extended precis of the Processus Sathane itself, analyzing how the image of Satan's suit, reappropriated by the legal profession, serves the classroom as a sample of courtroom technique; but concludes that the Processus, to make legal sense, necessarily presupposes that humanity is sui juris and the possession neither of Satan nor Christ. It proceeds to locate the text in the history of European drama and comic literature, advancing reasons for the popularity outside theological and legal circles of the text and Mary's breast-baring forensic antics. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of why the Processus and its progeny ultimately lost popularity or were suppressed; and why the vivid imagery was discarded, though like metaphor generally, it survived through reappropriation in new guises.

This study investigates the relationship between apocalypticism, criticism of the church and ecclesiastical reform at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It focuses on Berthold Purstinger (1465-1543), bishop of Chiemsee (reg. 1508-1526), and forms a commentary on his apocalyptic treatise Onus ecclesiae (1519, 1524, 1531), about a demon-infested world in perilous times. Apocalypticism was more than a theological doctrine about the end of the world. It was a terrifying reality, the vestiges of which appeared in monstrous births, blood-red comets and horrific fires. Historians are only beginning to recognize the significance of apocalyptic thinking in late-medieval and early-modern Europe. This study challenges the assumption that apocalypticism grew deepest on the margins of society among radical sectarians. Purstinger was a conservative theologian and a respected bishop, at home in the heart of the church yet convinced of his place in the last days. Secondly, it shows that Purstinger's idea of reform was different from its late-medieval antecedents. He did not think of reform as the dawning of a "new era" before the end of time, nor as the healthy transformation of Christendom "in head and members." For Purstinger, reform and apocalypse were one an the same. He awaited the return of Christ, who, at the end of time, would reform the militant church as the triumphant church. Thirdly, this dissertation argues that anticlericalism in Purstinger's apocalyptic world was a preparation for reform, not only, as hitherto conceived, a manifestation of discontent that sparked reform efforts in reaction. Purstinger criticized the world because Christ was coming to judge it, and because God directed the faithful during the last days to criticize the abysmal lapse. The watchword admonition on the title-page of Onus ecclesiae is the bellicose statement from Ezekiel: "Go make war ... and start at my sanctuary" (Ezek. 9:5). That is to say, on the eve of the apocalypse, anticlericalism fed in part on God's injunction to the forerunners of Christ. Their criticism was a prelude to judgment--to the reformatio Christi.

Mamluk equestrian expertise in Egypt and Syria from mid-thirteenth to early sixteenth century reflects skills derived from a variety of sources incorporated artfully into their military institution, and which exerted influence beyond the period and the region with which it is directly concerned. With a thorough examination of its various vocations including Furusiyah and equestrian-related activities, a reconstruction of the Mamluk military society leads to the inescapable conclusion that the mounted military sector was absolutely essential to the operation and defense of the State. Maintaining a top-notch cavalry fluctuated at different periods in Mamluk history but seems to have been especially crucial in the first twenty years in the wars against the Crusaders and Mongols. The Mamluk's armies are credited with having cleared the remnants of the Crusaders out of the Levant region, checked the westward advance of the fearsome Mongol hordes into Syria and Palestine, and carved out an empire that extended northwards as far as eastern Turkey. How and where the Mamluks acquired the tactical and riding expertise to accomplish these feats is examined in this dissertation along with the legacy they passed on to later Egyptian and French horsemen. Classical equitation's origins trace to a period of progressive development in horsemanship's history stimulated by Mamluk preoccupation with furusiyah as well as the French Knights' chivalric tournament and battle honor code. Mamluk horsemanship literature left in manuscript form contains systematized military games and tactics patterned after the ancient Greco-Roman world's military, joined with Mamluk cavalry training experience. The main corpus of surviving horsemanship treatises from the Mamluk period awaits translation and/or remains unpublished.

After the comunero revolution of 1520-1521, Charles I (1516-1555) defended Castilian constitutional law and institutionalized executive and judicial platforms that the Cortes and comuneros formulated in order to transform royal government into a meritocracy. Charles centralized the Spanish executive and judiciary, and he established a bureaucracy that functioned to secure municipal liberties and to supervise judicial procedures and management reforms. He did not change the structure of Spanish government and he did not introduce administrative categories. He transformed government---an executive of councils and a judiciary of chanceries, audiencias, and over sixty corregimientos---into a dependable mechanism for litigation and for contesting royal policies. In his negotiations with the cities, Charles learned how to execute five strategies of state formation: preserving the assets of the nobility; defending municipal privileges and constitutional law; rationalizing and hispanicizing the executive; overhauling the judiciary and establishing appointment and management standards and auditing procedures; and restructuring and hispanicizing the royal household. Between 1522 and 1528 (and before he could be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope), Charles used his absolute power in order to reward subjects, to pardon the majority of the comuneros, to change parliamentary agenda for the benefit of the cities, and to institutionalize procedures of recruitment and audits. The Empress and Juan Tavera, president of the Council of Castile from 1524 to 1539, governed the Castilian empire according to the principles devised by the Cortes, made merit-based recruitment and auditing procedures routine, and forged a network of reformists. The Cortes compensated the monarchy with revenues in return for the implementation of parliamentary accords affecting the bureaucracy. Charles gained the trust of the Castilian cities, incorporated Castilian elites into his judicial and executive administration, and digested the cultural and civic traditions of Castile. With Castilian financial support, the military assistance of the nobility, and the judicial expertise of ecclesiastics and university graduates, Charles secured domestic peace throughout the Spanish empire, especially after 1522, becoming the founder father of Hispanic town councils in Spain and the Americas, while seeking to reform the institutions of the medieval church.

<p>This dissertation examines the role of Gregory I (r. 590-604 CE) in developing permanent ecclesiastical institutions under the authority of the Bishop of Rome to feed and serve the poor and the socio-political world in which he did so. Gregory's work was part culmination of pre-existing practice, part innovation. I contend that Gregory transformed fading, ancient institutions and ideas&mdash;the Imperial <i>annona</i>, the monastic soup kitchen-hospice or <i>xenodochium</i>, Christianity's "collection for the saints," Christian <i>caritas</i> more generally and Greco-Roman <i> euergetism</i>&mdash;into something distinctly ecclesiastical, indeed "papal." Although Gregory has long been closely associated with charity, few have attempted to unpack in any systematic way what Gregorian charity might have looked like in practical application and what impact it had on the Roman Church and the Roman people. I believe that we can see the contours of Gregory's initiatives at work and, at least, the faint framework of an organized system of ecclesiastical charity that would emerge in clearer relief in the eighth and ninth centuries under Hadrian I (r. 772-795) and Leo III (r. 795-816). Gregory's efforts at caritative organization had significant implications. This dissertation argues that Gregory's response to poverty and want in Rome from 590 to 604 CE permanently altered the trajectories of both ecclesiastical charity and the office that came to oversee its administration. </p>

The imagery of Jan van Eyck's The Stigmatization of St. Francis, looked at in the context of contemporary illustrated manuscripts, devotional images, and prayer manuals, suggests that the artist was using the Agony in the Garden theme to portray St. Francis as a type of Christ. The viewer would be able to identify certain mnemonic images within the painting as "markers" to instances in Christ's life and death. This led to a mental visualization of Christ's entire ministry, from the Annunciation to the Cross, as called for in Pseudo-Bonaventure's Meditations on the Life of Christ, a Franciscan prayer manual for Christocentric meditation.

In the fall of 1971, this writer undertook a creative project in costume design for the play Macbeth and met with the director to discuss the production concept. The director specified his particular costume requirements, and the designer researched the late eleventh and twelfth centuries to determine salient features of the historic dress. The designer again conferred with the director, and a collaboration of ideas resulted in costumes primarily reflective of the late eleventh and late twelfth centuries. During production in April of 1972, a committee of faculty members and students evaluated the costumes, which were judged favorably. Specific reference has been made to the validity of costume evaluations in general, and recommendations for future projects in costume design have been discussed.

<p> This study seeks to discover what Carolingian monastic hagiography can tell us about monastic rules and customs in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, a time when a court-sponsored reform movement was shaking the foundations of traditional monastic practice. Reform legislation was trying to impose one rule&mdash;the Rule of Benedict&mdash;and one set of customs&mdash;written by the reformers&mdash;upon all monasteries of the realm, rejecting the other rules and customs by which monks had lived for centuries. Hagiography is one of the most important sources that monks produced to reveal the aspirations and self-identity of their order, but scholarship has never systematically used it to examine whether such radical reforms affected the way hagiography defined monastic perfection and the way it discussed rules and customs. This study bridges that gap, to find that hagiography provides a helpful counterbalance to the overly court-centric, legalistic approach to the reforms. Hagiographical evidence shows great continuity between Carolingian monastic ideals and those of earlier centuries, thus proving and contextualizing the fundamental failure of the reforms. Instead of discarding their past traditions to make room for a new, exclusively Benedictine tradition, Carolingian hagiographers portray a pluralistic monastic world in which many monastic rules and traditions can comfortably coexist, in which their own holy founders' customs are as valuable to their communities' spiritual development as the Rule of Benedict is. From the perspective of these monks, the Rule of Benedict is praiseworthy and can be used to legitimize their hagiographical heroes, but it remains merely one rule among many.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2001. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-275).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1939. Adviser: M. Megan McLaughlin. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 210-238) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.