There are, no doubt, aspects that suggest a continuity between the Poema del Cid and the Poema de Fernan Gonzalez, and these must be recognized before attempting more narrow determinations that can serve to distinguish the two poems. This sense of continuity between the juglaria and the clerecia traditions is attributable to the practice of the literate clerics who borrowed from the juglaria poets. But in the oral-based society in which these poets functioned, few people knew the written word, and the literate mentality of the clerics produced works which were essentially distinct from a poem like the Cid The purpose of this study is to describe the peculiar expression of the Cid, particularly in the ways it differs from the PFG. The focus is on the syntactic traits of the two poems in relation to formula, lexis, and poetic form. The many examples of syntactic differences between the two poems dissipate the initial impression of continuity. The Cid is the product of a long oral-tradition by which the poet of the PFG was influenced, but the language he employs, full of metaphors and abstractions, his inability or unwillingness to portray Fernan Gonzalez as an epic hero free of faults, the more extensive vocabulary at his disposal, and the replacement of a feudal hierarchy by an ecclesiastical one all point to a learned cleric, far removed from the one-dimensional view of society that permeates the Cid / acase@tulane.edu

Relatively little is known of Gomez Manrique (c. 1415-1490), warrior, statesman and author of a significant corpus of cancionero poetry. His poetic and dramatic works were first published by Antonio Paz y Melia, Cancionero de Gomez Manrique (1885-6) in an edition that is at variance with current established norms and includes only a brief, thirty-two-page biography. In the 116 years since Paz y Melia's study, a significant amount of new historical material has been published on fifteenth-century Spain, much of which bears directly on the life and times of Gomez Manrique. Despite Manfque's close alliance with Isabel I and Fernando V and his extensive involvement in the political events of the day, we do not find him mentioned as frequently as we might expect. This dissertation analyzes the historical evidence that exists in order to construct Gomez Manrique's biography and incorporates Manrique's poetry as testimony to the influence that he had on many of the eminent poets and politicians of his day. Manrique's verse dedicated to many of the statesmen and troubadours of the fifteenth century links him to the historical context in which he functioned as author, statesman and soldier. Part One details the formative years of Manrique. The many events and issues that occurred during this turbulent period of Castilian history are presented to show how they affected Manrique's development as a poet and knight. Part Two portrays Gomez Manrique's adulthood and development from an obscure soldier to a chief defender of the Catholic Monarchs. His poetry and his actions as documented in the chronicles reveal his important contributions to Isabel's and Fernando's successful accession to the throne of Castile. Part Three offers a profile of the knights, prelates, family members and royalty to whom Manrique dedicated poetry, many of whom are significant historical figures despite their relative obscurity. Finally, the Appendix offers an annotated selection of Gomez Manrique's poetry, newly transcribed to conform to current norms.

La intencion de esta disertacion titulada, "El Papa y la Princesa: Eneas Silvio Piccolomini e Isabel La Catolica en la evolucion de la literatura sentimental espanola durante el siglo XV," es ofrecer una nueva interpretacion en cuanto al genesis del genero sentimental. Varios eruditos han tratado de redefinir el genero pero han fallado en poner enfasis en la importancia que tuvo la obra de Piccolomini, Historia de duobus amantibus (1444), para el desarrollo del novel genero en Espana que comienza con la obra de Juan Rodriguez del Padron, Siervo libre de amor, composicion que segun mis investigaciones fue compuesta hacia 1444, es decir, posterior a la obra de Piccolomini. Dado que Piccolomini es de suma importancia para el desarrollo del genero sentimental, he reservado el primer capitulo de mi disertacion para un estudio biografico de este hombre renacentista. En el transcurso de esta exploracion de su vida, puntualizo en el capitulo segundo las importantes huellas clasicas que se encuentran en su Historia de duobus amantibus. El tercer capitulo esta consagrado al estudio de diez premisas paralelas que encontramos en la Historia de duobus amantibus y las siguientes siete obras sentimentales: (1) Siervo libre de amor, (2) Triste deleytacion , (3) Arnalte y Lucenda, (4) Carcel de amor, (5) Grisel y Mirabella, (6) Grimalte y Gradisa, (7) Coronacion de la senora Gracisla. El cuarto y ultimo capitulo, abarca los acontecimientos historicos durante el siglo XV que ocasionan la aparicion del genero sentimental: (1) el debil reinado de Juan II (1406-1454); (2) el surgimiento de una nueva clase docta con una percepcion mas benigna de la mujer; (3) tres reinas que abogaron por los derechos de las mujeres, Maria de Aragon (1419-1445), Isabel de Portugal (1447-1454), e Isabel de Castilla (1474-1504); (4) la publicacion del Corvacho (1438) por el Arcipreste de Talavera, provocando la ira de la reina Maria y una decisiva reaccion literaria de parte de sus defensores; (5) la enorme popularidad de la Historia de duobus amantibus, obra que serviria de modelo para la primera novela sentimental espanola.

This dissertation presents a critical edition of the Entremes de Melisendra. This entremes has been attributed to two talented writers of the Golden Age theater: Lope de Vega Carpio and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The first part of this work is an introduction to the important role that the entremes , as a sub-genre, played during the period. The work then provides a structural analysis of the Entremes in detail, including versification and vocabulary. Bakhtin's fundamental work on carnaval, complemented by that of other critics, provides the framework for the analysis of the bawdy, at times grotesque, humor of the play. Chapter III explores the influence of the Romance de don Gaiferos , whose plot derives from the Emperor Charlemagne's era. Through a detailed comparison, it becomes clear that the Romance de don Gaiferos strongly influenced the creation of the Entremes de Melisendra. Moreover, examples of parody abound. Instead of calling the play Entremes de don Gaiferos, the author parodies the title and changes it to Entremes de Melisendra, indicative of the carnavalesque inversion found throughout the text. Chapter IV then analyses the complex intertextuality between the Entremes de Melisendra and Cervantes's "Retablo de maese Pedro." The theoretical background employed for the consideration of this extensive parody draws from Linda Hutcheon's work A Theory of Parody as well as that of others theorists. The edition that comprises the fifth chapter has been modernized using the rules suggested for editing comedias by Frank P. Casa and Michael D. McGaha in Editing the Comedia. It has been annotated to help readers understand some of the more complex passages. The brief conclusion then underscores the significance of this piece for understanding the artistic evolution of a Medieval romance. The transformations in plot and presentation from romance, to entremes and then to a prose recreation of a theatrical "retablo" reflect the ever-changing relationships between art and society. A series of appendices offers additional information that supports the analysis presented.

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 dissertation is a partial translation of the thirteenth-century Islamic physician, Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah's biographical dictionary, the 'Uyun al-anba' fi tabaqat al-atibba' ( Sources of Information on Classes of Physicians) and an historical analysis of the 'Uyun. The 'Uyun is a biographical dictionary which encompasses the biographies of physicians from the ancient Greek period through the author's time, the thirteenth century. It contains the lives and works of the most elite physicians of these periods. The translation portion of the dissertation is of the fourteenth chapter of the 'Uyun which is the chapter on physicians of Egypt from the 'Abbasid period to the early Mamluk period. The historical analysis of this dissertation is an examination of the contents of the 'Uyun to see what it reveals about the status of physicians during this period and about the author's intentions in writing this book. Since the author was from Syria and studied in both Syria and Egypt, I have based my analysis mainly on the translation of the chapter on Egypt and also on evidence found in the fifteenth chapter on Syria. Thus, this dissertation serves to give modern scholars incite into the mentality of the author and his class during this time period in the Islamic world.

This thesis examines the use and function of the human body as a surface that is inscribed with a number of socially significant meanings and how these inscriptions operate in the specific late medieval cultural production. Drawing on Jauss's notion of the social and political significance of medieval narrative, I seek to determine how specific texts contribute to a regulatory practice by thematizing bodies that are perceived as "other," that resist or defy an imagined social norm or stereotype. Each of the dissertation's four chapters treats a different set of notions about the human body. The first one examines Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale and The King of Tars as representations of ethnographic difference. I argue that the late Middle Ages did not have the notion of "race" as a signifier of ethnic difference: instead there is a highly unstable system of positions that place an individual in relation to Christian Salvation History. Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid is at the centre of chapter two that examines the moral issues surrounding leprosy as a stigmatized disease. Reading the text as a piece of medical historiography, I argue that one of the purposes of the narrative is to establish the link between Cresseid's sexual behaviour and her disease. A discussion of the homosocial underpinnings of late medieval feudal society, particularly in light of Duby's notion of "les jeunes," forms the basis of the final two chapters. Chapter three discusses Chaucer's Legend ofLucrece and the narrative function of rape as a pedagogical instrument with the aim to ensure the availability of untouched female bodies for a "traffic in women" between noblemen. Chapter four examines transgressive sexual acts as the objects of jokes in fabliaux, such as Chaucer's Miller's Tale. By using shame and ridicule as their main strategy, these texts, I argue, fulfil an exemplary function and act as a warning to young noblemen to maintain an erotic discipline as future heads of feudal houses and as an upcoming political elite.

<p>The poem <i>B&emacr;owulf</i> has been translated hundreds of times, in part or in whole. In past decades translators such as Howell Chickering and E. Talbot Donaldson firmly adhered to formal equivalency, following the original text line-by-line if not word-by-word. Such translations are useful for Anglo-Saxon students but cannot reach a larger audience because they are unwieldy and often incomprehensible. In the past fifty years, though, a group of translators with different philosophies has taken up the task of translating the poem with greater success. Translators such as Marc Hudson, Edwin Morgan, and Seamus Heaney used dynamic equivalency for their versions, eschewing strict grammatical accuracy and literal diction in order to recreate the sense and experience of the poem for a modern audience. How two translators, E. Talbot Donaldson and Seamus Heaney, treat the queens in the poem as revealed by a close textual analysis proves to be an excellent example of the two methodologies; formal equivalence translators do not endow their female characters with the agency and respect present in the original text, while dynamic equivalence translators take liberties with the language to give their readers a strong sense of the powerful but tragic queen figures. Harold Bloom&rsquo;s theory of the development of poets in <i>The Anxiety of Influence</i> can help explain this shift from formal equivalency to dynamic equivalency. Translators of <i>B&emacr;owulf</i> necessarily react against their predecessors, and since translators usually explain their process and philosophy in forwards or introductions, their motivations for &ldquo;swerving away&rdquo; are clear. Formal equivalence translators misrepresented the original text by devaluing the literary merit of the original poem and dynamic equivalence translators seek to remedy the misrepresentation by elaborating and expanding the language of the original to reach a wider audience. Each generation must continue to translate against the grain of its predecessors in order to keep the poem alive for a larger audience so that the poem will continue to be enjoyed by future audiences. </p>

The Old English poem The Phoenix and its fourth century source, De Carmen de Ave Phoenice, have traditionally been read together as allegories on Christian resurrection. I read these poems against each other to show how they engage tantalizing debates about gender distinction, which raged in phoenix mythological commentaries and within the Christian church during the first millennium ACE. I consider the Old English poem not merely a translation of the Carmen, but a conversion. First, the Old English author "converts" a predominantly pagan poem, which, I posit, may be linked to the Egyptian cult goddess, Isis, into a resurrection allegory, placed squarely within the Germanic mythos. But more importantly, the Old English author makes the text "male," converting a text that offers the possibility of a world without gender categories into a text that not only preserves gender categories, but appropriates "female" reproductive power into a male, homosocial sphere.

El objetivo de la presente tesis es aportar un mayor conocimiento sobre la tradicion misogina de la poesia castellana del siglo XV y su configuracion literaria especifica a traves de una atenta lectura de los textos que componen el Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a risa, impreso por vez primera en 1519. A tal fin, se procede previamente a trazar sendas panoramicas acerca de la difusion de la lirica cancioneril y los estudios consagrados a la investigacion sobre la mujer en la literatura espanola. A continuacion se desarrolla un analisis de las diversas tipologias y del tratamiento satirico a lo largo de la obra: las piezas procedentes del Cancionero General de Hernando del Castillo (1511 y 1514) y la Carajicomedia, extenso poema cuyo primer testimonio es justamente el conservado en esta impresion.