This thesis examines the language of pain/suffering in Ancrene Wisse, the Wooing Group, and the Katherine Group, arguing that the anchoress nourishes an acute but discriminating sensitivity to pain. It seeks to demonstrate that the anchoress uses these early Middle English texts to cultivate sophisticated affective stirrings. Chapter 1 foregrounds the multidimensional penitence in Ancrene Wisse, situated in the context of Latin and vernacular penitential and homiletic material. The anchoress’ penitential processes demand not only physical pain, but also affective pain and intensive cognitive processes of self-examination. Chapter 2 argues that the Wooing Group meditations are tools of pain-cultivation, which the anchoress uses to nurture her affective pain as she develops her intimacy with the Spousal Lamb and his Mother. Chapter 3 assesses imagery of physical and affective woundedness. This chapter examines the anchoress’ use of imagery of Christ’s wounds, sin-wounds, and penitential wounding in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group, and then studies her use of the saints’ wounding in the Katherine Group. Chapter 4 contends that spectatorship and performance of suffering are not separable acts for the anchoress. The chapter assesses: the anchoress’ spectatorship in the Katherine Group hagiographies, a spectatorship based on defamiliarization; the anchoress’ participation with the pain of Christ in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group, including an examination of her potential use of church wall paintings; and the female reader of Hali Meiðhad, who immerses herself in the suffering of a married and child-bearing woman. Chapter 5 examines the crucial affective phenomenon of compassion, arguing that compassion in Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group is not a distanced ‘pity’, but a complex ‘co-feeling’ (using Milan Kundera’s (1984) term). The thesis concludes by underscoring the fact that the anchoress’ painful existence is not pathological; it is an existence characterized by agency and emancipation.

"In Silence My Tongue is Broken": The Social Construction of Women's Rhetoric Before 1750 examines the rhetorical strategies that Sappho (c. 600 B.C.E.), Christine de Pizan (1364-1430?), Lady Elizabeth Cary (1585-1639), and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) used to speak for the female experience. These women became autonomous subjects of discourse by adapting the language of the dominant Western tradition to speak from the position of women. In appropriating the masculine language that defined them, they were able to construct personal identities that could respond to and renegotiate male-defined reality to articulate female experiences and reconstruct feminine identities. The silencing of women's voices usually accompanied the strengthening of patriarchy through institutionalized misogyny and the domestication of women during periods of bourgeois ascendancy, which affected the latter two women more than the former. The introduction explains the epistemological reasons why social constructionism is the critical lens for this analysis. The four discussion chapters treat the rhetorical context in which each woman wrote, including a discussion of Aristotelian misogyny; the ways each woman justified her authorial voice to express peculiarly female experience; and the rhetorical choices each made at the register, genre, and discourse levels, which reveal their degree of authorial confidence. The conclusion illustrates how these authors spoke from the margins of male experience by becoming culturally multilingual.

The success of the First Crusade by the Christian armies caught the interest and arrested the imagination of contemporaries, stimulating the production of a large number of historical narratives. Four eyewitness accounts, as well as letters written by the crusaders to the West, were taken up by later authors, re-worked and re-fashioned into new narratives; a process which continued throughout the twelfth century and beyond. This thesis sets out to explore why contemporaries continued to write about the First Crusade in light of medieval attitudes towards the past, how authors constructed their narratives and how the crusade and the crusaders were remembered throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It will analyse the development in the way the First Crusade was recorded and investigate the social, religious, intellectual and political influences dictating change: How, why and under what circumstances was the story re- told? What changed in the re-telling? What ideas and concepts were the authors trying to communicate and what was their meaning for contemporaries? The thesis will also aim to place these texts not only in their historical but also in their literary contexts, analyse the literary traditions from which authors were writing, and consider the impact the crusade had on medieval literature. The focus will be on Latin histories of the First Crusade, especially those written in England and France, which produced the greatest number of narratives. Those written in the Levant, the subject of these histories, will also be discussed, as well as texts written in the Empire and in Italy.

This study investigates what literature, drama, the visual arts, and music may reveal about the place of dance in society through the early sixteenth century. Its emphasis is on attitudes, emotions, and beliefs connected with dance, rather than on dance history. For purposes of this investigation, dance is examined as the subject of works of art and the symbol of human values rather than the primary object of study. / Dance music and manuals through the fifteenth century are examined to determine the state of scholarly consensus regarding performance practice prior to the sixteenth century. The study of musical instrumentation is shown to be a particularly rich source of material concerning the behavior supposedly encouraged by the loud, wind instruments often used to play for dances. / Preaching manuals of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and other moralizing materials are surveyed for references to dance; they reveal a generally negative attitude toward dance, and specifically warn against the wiles of dancing women. Other religious writings of the Middle Ages, including poetry such as Dante's Commedia, refer to the dance of souls into and in Heaven. / Literature and the visual arts from the period between 1250 and 1525 have been surveyed for references to dance. Those references illustrate the role of dance in social institutions, as entertainment, emotional expression, and communication. Dance in literature and the visual arts before 1530 is found to represent the drive of sexuality, the compulsion to sin, inescapable death, the harmonious order of good government, and the active love of Heaven. / The results of the analysis and comparison among the arts reveal a rich variety of conflicting attitudes toward dance. Dance was an indispensable social skill and, at the same time, an activity dangerous for the soul. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-01, Section: A, page: 0010. / Major Professor: S. Douglass Seaton. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1992.

Christine de Pizan, in several of her works, showed her effort to create a community of women which is the symbol of the united force from all women. In Le Livre des Trois Vertus, the community of women has the image of fortress where the members of the Cite are well protected against the attacks from anti-feminists. / In "La communaute des femmes dans Le Livre des Trois Vertus de Christine de Pizan", I first analyze the historical and literary context in which Christine decided to defend women's interests in her writing. In this context we see the origin of her idea of the community of women. / The second chapter demonstrates Christine's effort to establish her authority as well as that of the community of women. As a woman writer, she had to establish her authority in literary tradition dominated by male writers. Christine appealed to divine authority by following the example of Saint Augustine, author of the Cite de Dieu (c. 427), and by obeying the three goddesses who gave her the right to use her pen to educate women and to create the community of women in Le Livre des Trois Vertus (1405). / In the third chapter, I examine how Christine, by redefining the role of women in society, and by reorganizing relationships between women, succeeded in reinforcing the union of the community of women. / In chapter four, the study of the transplantation of the letter of Sebile de la Tour (originally composed in Le Livre du Duc des Vrais Amans 1405) into Le Livre des Trois Vertus supports the contention that Christine de Pizan, by combining two different genres (romance and essay), established a connection between literature and real life, made the courtesy lyric useful for women's moral education. Christine practiced the genre of romance (which had been always dominated by male writers) to defend women's interest in love and to provide a mirror for the community of women. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-01, Section: A, page: 0180. / Major Professor: Lori Walters. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.

This dissertation explores the representation of maternity in two of Boccaccio's works, the early idyllic poem, the Ninfale fiesolano, and the author's later magnum opus, the Decameron, through readings in the social history of women and the family and medieval medical literature of obstetrics and gynecology. I create a dense historical context from which to examine the depiction of generative processes, maternity, and mother-child interactions in these works, allowing us to better understand the relationship between Boccaccio's treatment of these subjects and the author's larger stance on women and gender. In Chapter One, I explore Boccaccio's uncommon interest in the events between conception and birth in the Ninfale fiesolano; I demonstrate the conformity of the Ninfale's literary depictions of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth to the medical literature of obstetrics and gynecology and social practices in the late Middle Ages. In the second chapter, I explore how the Ninfale, traditionally seen as an idyllic, mythological poem, reflects the practices and ideologies of the normative form of family structure in fourteenth-century Tuscany, the patrilineage. I first show how the poem's pervasive discourse on resemblance exposes, and undercuts, the importance of the paternal line; I then consider how Mensola's joyful maternity - her beautifully rendered interactions with baby Pruneo - contains an implicit critique of the role and function of maternity in patrilineal society. With Chapter Three, I turn to Boccaccio's prose works; I explore how Boccaccio incorporates specific and historicized beliefs about generative physiology - the biological pre-conditions for maternity - into commonplaces of the misogynistic tradition in the Corbaccio and Decameron V.10. Chapters Four and Five focus specifically on the Decameron. In the fourth chapter, I consider how Boccaccio uses a distinctly gendered language of generation in Decameron III.8, V.7, X.4, and, most spectacularly, X.10 to underscore the marginality of women to family and line. In the fifth, and final, chapter, I explore the profound cultural embeddedness of Boccaccio's treatment of maternity by placing the Decameron's depictions of motherhood - whether unwanted, farcical, or affective - within the greater social context of Renaissance natalism. Throughout this project, I consider how representations of maternity and generative processes in Boccaccio's texts comment on the realities of motherhood - and womanhood - in the patrilineal society of fourteenth-century Tuscany.

This dissertation explores the representation of maternity in two of Boccaccio's works, the early idyllic poem, the Ninfale fiesolano, and the author's later magnum opus, the Decameron, through readings in the social history of women and the family and medieval medical literature of obstetrics and gynecology. I create a dense historical context from which to examine the depiction of generative processes, maternity, and mother-child interactions in these works, allowing us to better understand the relationship between Boccaccio's treatment of these subjects and the author's larger stance on women and gender. In Chapter One, I explore Boccaccio's uncommon interest in the events between conception and birth in the Ninfale fiesolano; I demonstrate the conformity of the Ninfale's literary depictions of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth to the medical literature of obstetrics and gynecology and social practices in the late Middle Ages. In the second chapter, I explore how the Ninfale, traditionally seen as an idyllic, mythological poem, reflects the practices and ideologies of the normative form of family structure in fourteenth-century Tuscany, the patrilineage. I first show how the poem's pervasive discourse on resemblance exposes, and undercuts, the importance of the paternal line; I then consider how Mensola's joyful maternity -her beautifully rendered interactions with baby Pruneo - contains an implicit critique of the role and function of maternity in patrilineal society. With Chapter Three, I turn to Boccaccio's prose works; I explore how Boccaccio incorporates specific and historicized beliefs about generative physiology - the biological pre-conditions for maternity - into commonplaces of the misogynistic tradition in the Corbaccio and Decameron V.10. Chapters Four and Five focus specifically on the Decameron. In the fourth chapter, I consider how Boccaccio uses a distinctly gendered language of generation in Decameron III.8, V.7, X.4, and, most spectacularly, X.10 to underscore the marginality of women to family and line. In the fifth, and final, chapter, I explore the profound cultural embeddedness of Boccaccio's treatment of maternity by placing the Decameron's depictions of motherhood - whether unwanted, farcical, or affective - within the greater social context of Renaissance natalism. Throughout this project, I consider how representations of maternity and generative processes in Boccaccio's texts comment on the realities of motherhood - and womanhood - in the patrilineal society of fourteenth-century Tuscany.

This dissertation analyzes aural literacy, or learning by hearing, in late medieval English literary works by Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Usk, and Margery Kempe. Aural literacy enabled late medieval people to engage with the literate tradition by adopting short, formulaic phrases such as proverbs, parables, and sermon stories. These phrases, or shared sayings, became part of a common hoard of aural resources widely available to many due to the late medieval practice of reading texts aloud. Shared sayings' conventional uses joined their speakers together into rhetorical communities, or groups of people with similar ideas as to how these sayings functioned in the world. Rhetorical communities offered a platform for contested and divergent ways of speaking that threatened these conventional uses, as late medieval speakers turned shared sayings to their own purposes, provoking angry resistance in their attempts to change their positions within their societies.

This dissertation explores the relationship of the act of singing to being a human in the lyric poetry of the troubadours, traveling poet-musicians who frequented the courts of contemporary southern France in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In my dissertation, I demonstrate that the troubadours surpass traditionally-held perceptions of their corpus as one entirely engaged with themes of courtly romance and society, and argue that their lyric poetry instead both displays the influence of philosophical conceptions of sound, and critiques notions of personhood and sexuality privileged by grammarians, philosophers, and theologians. I examine a poetic device within troubadour songs that I term ‘personified song’—an occurrence in the lyric tradition where a performer turns toward the song he/she is about to finish singing and directly addresses it. This act lends the song the human capabilities of speech, motion, and agency. It is through the lens of the ‘personified song’ that I analyze this understudied facet of troubadour song. Chapter One argues that the location of personification in the poetic text interacts with the song’s melodic structure to affect the type of personification the song undergoes, while exploring the ways in which singing facilitates the creation of a body for the song. Chapters Two and Three examine specific types of body formation located in the tornadas of the personified songs. In Chapter Two, I argue that the troubadours exploit pedagogies of singing and philosophical conceptions of sound to undercut the privileging of heterosexual relationships as the only, “natural” form of sexual relationship. In Chapter Three, I argue that troubadour lyric poetry engages with Latin grammatical treatises to undermine the primacy of a binary gender system, and open up space within the lyric for a third gender. I examine songs whose tornadas include both of the differently gendered (masculine and feminine) versions of the Old Occitan noun for “song,” exploring the complicated (and often contradictory) way in which multiple subject positions were expected to inhabit a single person, and suggesting a fluidity of gendered constructs that permeates the lyric corpus as a whole. In my final chapter, I argue that the troubadours continue to act as social critics even after their poetic tradition comes to an end, as the songs form different types of bodies through their contact with the parchment page of the manuscripts in which they are preserved. I analyze the songs’s lives as objects of literary transmission, exploring how the concept of the personified song changes when its audience no longer encounters it in performance. I argue that, although the personified songs do not make explicit reference to the parchment on which they come to be written, they are similarly embodied with parchment-skins that simultaneously serve as body and body-covering.

This dissertation is a study of spatial allegorical representations of inwardness in late medieval devotional texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, with a focus on the topos of the garden of the contemplation of the Passion as a landscape of the heart. These representations of the self do not follow the temporal logic of autobiography but are instead organized around matrix spaces: architectures or gardens of inwardness. Named by Beaujour in opposition to life-narratives, these miroirs d’encre or literary self-portraits rely on topoï to express the most intimate contours of the individual. The first part of this dissertation considers how identity is negotiated with respect to the devotional norm in two private devotional exercises penned by cultured aristocrats. The abject vision of the penitential self in Henry of Lancaster’s Livre des Seyntz Medicines is rooted in the requirement to describe a deep self ontologically opaque to consciousness, while in René d’Anjou’s Mortifiement de Vaine Plaisance, the sinfulness lodged in the heart is considered through the lens of an anthropology focused on affect. Because of their intertextual nature, locative tropes of interiority constitute an arena in which the individual constitutes himself in relation to foundational texts. Topical representations of the self borrow their form from the setting of a particular text or reference an entire textual tradition, inviting the question of the role of reading practices in self formation. The second part of this dissertation focuses on reading as a spiritual exercise, considering how the literary setting of the Roman de la Rose came to be associated to a devotional representation of the self in the late Middle Ages. In response to the debates on language and allegoresis unfurling in the Quarrel of the Rose, Pierre d’Ailly transforms its garden into an inner Jardin Amoureux de l’Ame Devote, subjecting the infamous secular text to a reading inspired by devotional meditative reading practices. Later on, Jehan Henri mobilizes the topography of the Rose to describe the collective identity of reformed nuns in a series of texts promoting the agenda of monastic reformation ( Le Livre de réformation utile et profitable pour toutes religieuses, Livre de la vie active and the Jardin de Contemplation). Finally, Molinet’s Roman de la Rose Moralisé proposes a spiritual reading of the Rose that testifies to a paradigm shift in the status of secular literature under the influence of devotional reading modes, and which, like Pierre d’Ailly, assimilates the setting of the Rose to an inner garden of the contemplation of the Passion. No longer an innocuous pastime, literature comes to carry high societal stakes because of being invested with a definite role in self-fashioning. The race for controlling the meaning of foundational texts leads to the proliferation of late medieval literary quarrels. An edition of Jehan Henri’s Jardin de Contemplation is provided in the appendix.