The Liber Uricrisiarum of Wellcome MS 225 is a fifteenth-century treatise on uroscopy, the science of diagnosing illness by examining a patient's urine. The manuscript is previously unpublished; furthermore, the dissertation provides scholars with the first major text in Middle English on the subject. Uroscopy was ancient and was widely used: for nearly sixteen centuries it was the principal means of diagnosis. Moreover, in Middle Eastern and Western civilizations, uroscopy was synonymous with and emblematic of the medical profession According to the manuscript itself, the Liber Uricrisiarum is a translation, nearly 'word for worde,' of the treatise De Urinis by Isaac Judaeus, a Hebrew physician of the late ninth and early tenth centuries. The Liber Uricrisiarum is in fact not simply a translation but an elaboration of Isaac's text. There is, for example, a long digression on the planets and on astrology, as well as discussions of the humors, digestion, circulation, anatomy, and reproduction, making the Liber Uricrisiarum a relatively compact compendium of medieval medicine The existence of this text and others like it in Middle English demonstrates the emergence of vernacular texts, generally translations from Latin or Greek, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. These vernacular texts made medical and scientific knowledge available to the lay medical practitioner, the leche (healer) who was not educated at a university as was the physician and who therefore knew little Latin or Greek. Accordingly, Wellcome MS 225 does not discuss the philosophy of diagnosis, suggesting a text made for medical practitioners rather than medical theoreticians The introduction accompanying the edited text places the manuscript in its historical context and also discusses, among other subjects, sources and analogues, scribal hands, the dialect in which the manuscript was written, and editorial principles. Textual notes describe individual features of the manuscript in detail, and explanatory notes identify medical terminology and Latin words, as well as Middle English vocabulary The manuscript has been ascribed to Henry Daniel, a Dominican friar who flourished around 1379. But the ascription, though plausible, remains doubtful / acase@tulane.edu

Although the word 'hero' does not occur in Old English, the concepts of heroism and heroic virtue in Old English and early Middle English poetry have inspired a long and rich critical history. Indeed, these concepts have in many ways defined much of the criticism, particularly of the early period and specifically of Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon. Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholars such as Levin L. Schucking and Friedrich Klaeber recognized heroism as central to the literature, and in 1958, R. E. Kaske defined heroic virtue according to the formula sapientia et fortitudo, as the 'controlling theme' of Beowulf. These concepts, however, are not static, but rather they change throughout the period and even within individual texts In each of the four texts that I analyze in this dissertation--- Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, AElfric's Maccabees, and Layamon's Brut---crises arise to test the respective heroes. How the reader judges the hero depends largely upon how the writer responds to the sometimes problematic ethics of heroic action. Not only is heroic virtue an elusive concept to define, it also conflicts often with other ethical, theological, or political paradigms present in the texts. It is difficult, for example, for a poet to reconcile in a single text a martial ethic and a Christian ethic, or heroic pride and the Christian sin of pride, or heroic autonomy and the centralized power of kingship. This difficulty can create an ethical problem for the writer or an interpretive problem for the reader or the critic. A writer may encode in the text such ethical complexity, which will make it difficult for the reader to arrive at a consistent or comprehensive interpretation; however, the more didactic writer may wish to resolve any ethical problems and to guide the reader towards what he or she considers a proper or orthodox interpretation / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation deals with the influence of the thirteenth-century narrative poem Libro de Alexandre in medieval Spanish literature and various types of imitation of it by other medieval poets. The two texts chosen for comparison, analysis and interpretation are the thirteenth-century Libro de Apolonio and the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor. The Spanish Alexander poem is believed to be the earliest work of the poetic school 'mester de clerecia;' and its relations with other medieval Spanish poems have been treated by several scholars such as Ramon Menendez Pidal, Maria Rosa Lida de Malkiel, Dana Nelson, and Jorge Garcia Lopez. However, my scope, perspective and interpretative strategy in the present study are different from those of most of the previous scholars. Through a close scrutiny, a considerable number of new thematic, linguistic and stylistic parallels are retrieved between the Alexandre and the Apolonio, and between the Alexandre and the Buen amor. Theories of literary imitation, intertextuality, literary influence, and plagiarism are introduced to guide the interpretation of these new data Chapter One examines the relations between the Alexandre and the Apolonio, which are organized in thematic terms: moralization, wedding and festival celebration, medieval erudition, and knowledge of music. Other parallels are included in a section 'paralelismos narrativos aislados'; more singular parallels which affect no more than one or two verses are made into a appendix. What the author of the Apolonio learned from the Alexandre is mainly the art of descriptio and the formulaic mechanism of the 'cuaderna via' verse form; his basic approach is that of abbreviation. He may also have relied on his poetic model for his knowledge and treatment of medieval music performance. His imitation of the Alexander poem varies from the reproductive mode to transformative and heuristic absorption Chapter Two examines the relations between the Alexandre and the Buen amor. The influence of the Alexander poem affects Juan Ruiz's poem from single verse borrowings to the configuration of one of the major sections of the Buen amor, sequences covering the battles between Lady Lent and Sir Carnal and the tent of Sir Love. Ruiz's modes of imitating his Alexander model are more complex than those seen in the Apolonio. Judging from his hilarious treatments of the ideal personal portrait, the Serranilla, the lamentation on Death, and the epitaph of Trotaconventos, it is probably true that his imitation is by no means reverent or sincere, although we are not absolutely sure that he parodies the Alexandre in all these treatments. Many remote European, Islamic or Jewish parallels or sources for Juan Ruiz's poem have been claimed by scholars, but no important and probable native Spanish antecedent has been found. This study recognizes the Alexandre as the most important Spanish model for the Buen amor. It, in turn, also affects the place of the Alexandre in the history of medieval Spanish literature. Overall, through an examination of the influence of the Alexander in the Apolonio and the Buen amor , this study shows the great impact of the Spanish Alexander poem in thirteenth-century and fourteenth-century Spanish literature and its proper place in the history of the Spanish literature / acase@tulane.edu

Until recently critics have treated medieval monsters as embarrassments, evidence of the decline of science during the 'Dark Ages' or as sensationalism. My dissertation contributes to the literary redemption of monsters by investigating how the symbolic meanings of the monster reflect larger changes that took place from late antiquity through the fourteenth century. A system in which the monster indicated the presence and did the bidding of God through its ontological stability yielded to a fluid system in which a monster could signify on the spiritual, moral, and secular planes. Despite such changes the monster remained symbolic and literary rather than becoming scientific and objective Chapter one reviews the classical source for the medieval monster, Pliny's Natural History, and examines how early Christian thinkers made the monsters they inherited acceptable and useful to their fledgling religion. Pliny stabilized knowledge by reporting facts; the Physiologus substitutes God and scripture for the physical world as the stable referent while Isidore of Seville's Etymologies substitutes divine intention as revealed in words themselves Chapter two considers the monster tracts of the Anglo-Saxon age to see how stability remains while the works under consideration become more rhetorically sophisticated. Chapter three investigates the twelfth-century phenomenon of the Bestiary, a transitional text between the stability of origins and the relativity of movement. Secular morality and practical advice appear in Bestiary entries beside the traditional spiritual interpretations of animals and monsters. Divinely determined, fixed interpretations coexist with opportunistic, individualized interpretations Chapter four examines the fourteenth-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a work in which stable reference has almost disappeared. The monsters no longer have fixed meanings but possess a variety of arbitrary functions, many of which are religious, but some of which appear areligious or anti-Christian. Monsters function politically, commercially, empirically and ethnographically, autonomously within these areas. My conclusion reviews the changes undergone by the monster but considers their consistent use as symbols within literary endeavors. The changes that take place within the monstrous symbolic alongside the stability of the concept of the monster as necessarily symbolic reveal a mindset that progressively welcomes diverse and individualistic interpretation without questioning the necessity of interpretation / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation examines representations of the lion in Old French literature by focusing on four literary discourses in which the 'king of beasts' reigns supreme: religious, socio-political, chivalric and courtly. The first chapter examines two influential sources of medieval animal lore: the Bible and the bestiaries. In the second chapter, lions in the hagiographic tradition are examined. In these texts, lions are non-carnivorous, a trait shared with the holy men and women they encounter. In depriving the lion of one of its most fundamental identities, that of predator, these texts transform its character into a more symbiotic relationship with saints. The third chapter, deals with 'beast literature'---specifically, fables and the 'beast epic.' In these genres, the lion has evolved into a human in a lion's skin. Indeed, it is the anthropomorphized lion-figure which suffers the greatest at the hands of its authorial creators. The more medieval authors shape the lion in man's image, twisting the animal into a 'manimal,' the more violent the affronts on its bestiality and its very body. In the last two chapters, the notion of 'motif transfer' as it applies to the lion in Old French romances will be studied, notably in Yvain and Floire et Blancheflor. Yvain provides the motif of a lion fighting a serpent, which is consequently reconfigured in the Queste del Saint Graal and other texts. While Chretien takes pains to subvert any religious implications in his representation of the scene, the author of the Queste deliberately emphasizes the religious symbolism of the two animals. Whereas the progression from Yvain to the Queste is from secular to ecclesiastical, the motif transfer that occurs within the surviving manuscript versions of Floire et Blancheflor is from Biblical to profane. The Old Testament story of Daniel provides the original motif that is recycled in the young pagan lover's humorous encounter with two lions. The motifs in these chapters are changed and subverted, a process which embodies the medieval concept of authorship, a pairing of imitatio and inventio / acase@tulane.edu

The intent of this dissertation is to provide an in-depth study of the phenomenon of jealousy in the courtly love literature of Occitania, with particular emphasis on three novas of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Castia-Gilos, Las Novas del papagay, and Flamenca The introductory chapter presents an overview of the terminology and ideology of fin'amors and illustrates the courtly triangle (lady, lover, and obstacles to their love) as it appears in the cansos of selected troubadours. There follows a consideration of the vidas and razos of the troubadours and the light which these works shed on the biographical and poetic background of the treatment of jealousy The Castia-Gilos is studied as the model for the presentation of the punishment of the jealous husband; its structure reveals that the lady, much more so than her chevalier, is the active agent in overcoming obstacles and reestablishing order in the courtly universe. The theme of the jaloux cache, introduced comically in the Castia-Gilos, dominates Las Novas del papagai in that the husband is never presented; his existence is suggested by the presence of gardadors who might function as lauzengiers. Las Novas del papagai appears to be primarily an esthetic expression of the lovers' ability to overcome apparently insurmountable obstacles to their union Flamenca, the longest and most complex of the novas, presents a study of jealousy that approaches modern concepts of paranoia, while simultaneously exploiting all of the literary possibilities of the theme, including jealousy's complete invasion of the courtly universe and its alteration of the concept of love itself. It presents the first well-defined lauzengier, the Queen of France herself; it carries the theme of the jaloux cache to the extreme of the gilos' complete loss of humanity; it reveals the psychological depths of the courtly triangle, and it displays a profound sense of characterization Our study leads to the conclusion that the theme of jealousy is necessary to the universe of courtly love and that previous critical studies have generally understated its importance and, most particularly, its multiple complex manifestations throughout the corpus of the medieval literature of Occitania / acase@tulane.edu

The tournament was one of the great social phenomena of medieval civilization. It became such a standard chivalric event that it was assimilated as a widespread theme into literature. The purpose of this study is to discuss the representation of the tournament as it appears in a select corpus of medieval French texts from 1150 to 1226. The choice of works allows for a comparison of the representation of the tournament in both fictional and biographical verse narratives, from which salient conclusions can be drawn, such as to what extent, if any, genre influenced the way in which the tournament was treated. The work that provides the largest number of tournaments for study is the anonymous Histoire de Guillaume le Marechal. Among the remaining works are romances by Chretien de Troyes and Hue de Rotelande, and lais by Marie de France Existing scholarly contributions concerning the sport concentrate on its technical and regulatory aspects, whereas this study focuses on a limited set of elements that make up its literary re-creation. The study opens with brief background information on the tournament and its supposed origins, plus a short discussion of the bans against it. The remaining chapters treat the preparations and opening and closing practices; the waiting period, the announcement, and heraldry; the participants; the involvement of women; the location and duration; the gains, prizes, and victors; the casualties; and the weapons and techniques. This research further proposes to clarify the problematic nature of the early term for the sport (e.g., tornoi versus ahatine, an apparent synonym), and investigates the function of the tournament in the works This dissertation ultimately shows that fictional representations of the tournament are sometimes more realistic than 'historical' ones, that there is a certain rhetoric applicable to the depiction of the tournament regardless of the genre in which the medieval author chose to work, and, that the question of genre cannot be separated from that of the intended audience The study includes six pages of charts, schematically illustrating eight of the outlined elements with their corresponding works and line numbers / acase@tulane.edu

The pastourelle is a genre of medieval lyric poetry which existed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries in Northern France and Occitania. Most pastourelles recount dialogues between knights and shepherdesses in which the knight attempts to seduce the shepherdess and detail their ensuing encounter. This genre has been called monotonous, most notably by Alfred Jeanroy in his 1889 Les Origines de la poesie lyrique en France au moyen age because the characters are archetypal and there are few significant plot twists. There were variations on this prototype, however, both formally and thematically. The most significant of these were Guiraut Riquier's pastorela cycle and Adam de la Halle's thirteenth century play, Le Jeu de Robin et Marion. This dissertation consecrates two chapters to the analysis of these variations, both as individual works and in the context of pastourelle and lyric poetry production This dissertation studies the permutations on the paradigm of the pastourelle which occur both with regard to the individual texts and to the genre using Old French and Occitan texts from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. This examination calls into question the nature of genre itself and shows that the pastourelle occurred as part of a system of lyric genres within a complex socio-historic dynamic. The pastourelle was in fact essential to the existence of this system and to other forms of medieval lyric poetry, most notably the canso. In fact the pastourelle is not monotonous at all, but rather a genre rich in variety. The repetitiveness of characters and situation existed in order to propagate this system and allow the canso and other genres to flourish. In the course of this dissertation the major avatars of the genre in Northern France and Occitania are studied. Appendices detailing the major plot variations of the individual Old French and Occitan texts and listing the titles of the concerned texts follow the dissertation / acase@tulane.edu

The 'Mare amoroso' has been the subject of sporadic critical interest for the last two centuries. Containing 334 verses, this anonymous love poem exists in a single manuscript, the Riccardiano 2908, located in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence, Italy. Considered to be of the late thirteenth century or early fourteenth century, it is the third work in a bound codex which begins with two poems of Brunetto Latini (1220?-?1294), the 'Tesoretto' and the 'Favoletto,' and includes a sonnet of Cecco Angiolieri (1250?-?1312) on the recto side of the last folio. All four poems were copied by a single hand The poem is conventional in its content, yet unusual in its form. Although largely hendecasyllabic, its verses present a wide variation of meter. There is no rhyme scheme to the poem other than twelve isolated final rhymes and several internal rhymes, a fact which has led some scholars to call the 'Mare amoroso' the first example of hendecasyllabic free verse, or 'endecasillabo sciolto.' In modern collections, the poem is sometimes grouped with bestiaries because of its extensive use of animals to describe by way of metaphors and similes either the author or his beloved. It is also a treasury of references to European literary works and characters, both contemporary and classic, including many Arthurian allusions The most comprehensive research on this poem and the previous criticism dealing with it was done by Emilio Vuolo. His findings first appeared in installments in Cultura Neolatina from 1952 to 1958 and were subsequently compiled in a diplomatic edition in 1962 I summarize past and more recent criticism of the work, provide an English translation and detailed analysis of the poem, and elaborate my reasons for asserting that this poem is the work of Brunetto Latini / acase@tulane.edu

Rene d'Anjou's Livre du Cuer is a romance allegory, set up as a dream narrative, recounting the failed quest of the knight Cuer (the personified heart of the narrator), who seeks to conquer the lady Doulce Mercy, held prisoner by the enemies of Love. The Mortifiement de Vaine Plaisance is a didactic religious allegory concerning the Soul, who desires heaven, distressed by her heart's yearning for worldly things ('vaine plaisance'), and the heart's subsequent purification by crucifixion The surviving illuminated manuscripts of these two fifteenth-century texts provide an interesting case study of the relationship between text and image, serving as impetus to a larger investigation of a more general and theoretical understanding of such a relationship. The first order is a thorough comparison of the miniature cycles and their visual interpretation of the details of the text. Subsequent chapters develop a semiotic approach to manuscript illumination as two sign systems interrelated in a single space, and discuss the particular case of allegory, represented both verbally (in the text) and visually (in the miniatures). The allegorical heart is the sign that connects the two texts, but the miniatures serve different purposes in each: in the Mortifiement, the miniatures amplify the text's lessons and its attempt to excite intense religious emotion; in the Livre du Cuer, they largely exalt the chivalric quest, which is fundamentally questioned by the text / acase@tulane.edu