Focusing on a small number of richly illuminated manuscripts produced in Cologne around the year 1000—and known to scholars since the early twentieth century as the so-called "painterly" group of manuscripts—this dissertation takes the close study of a well-defined group of objects as the starting point for an examination of issues central to broader histories of medieval art. A diptych-like pairing of miniatures with inscriptions, each of which is given a full page, constitutes a characteristic feature of these manuscripts. Because these inscriptions were written specifically to accompany the facing images, the manuscripts from Cologne afford us a rare glimpse of a discourse on art and image making in the tenth and eleventh centuries, as well as providing insights into how such miniatures were meant to be viewed. The first chapter establishes a theoretical framework for the project, which examines both the historical and the scholarly origins of the Cologne School. Moreover, the concept of a "painterly" style is scrutinized and its use is traced back to significant developments in German art-historical writing of the late nineteenth century. The second chapter—devoted to a remarkable, yet relatively unknown tenth-century gospel book in Milan—demonstrates how the manuscript's carefully-crafted pictorial program draws upon an impressive tradition of Carolingian poetry and epigraphy in order to instill a pointed moralizing lesson on its recipient. A closely related sister-manuscript, preserved today in Paris, forms the subject of the third chapter, which demonstrates how the designer of its program employed philosophical and dialectical terms—taken from the school texts of the day—in order to devise an ambitiously complex set of miniatures and inscriptions, centered on a contemplative engagement with the paintings. The dissertation concludes with a chapter on the more famous Hitda Codex, illuminated at the behest of a powerful abbess in the early eleventh century. Through an analysis of the manuscript's narrative program, the chapter details how both image and inscription coordinate the active engagement of the viewer—prompting a consideration of the ways in which the pairings function as allegories of introspection. Throughout the dissertation I aim to reconcile the innovative formal qualities of the miniatures with the unusual complexity of their accompanying inscriptions. As a consequence of this study, it can be demonstrated that in the painterly manuscripts from Cologne, the close intertwining of image and inscription results in sophisticated programs of illumination, which elucidate an unprecedented contemporary reflection on the nature of painting in age otherwise known for its scarcity of written sources on art. / History of Art and Architecture

Repenting Roguery: Penance in the Spanish Picaresque Novel and the Arabic and Hebrew Maqāma, investigates the significance of conversion narratives and penitential elements in the Spanish picaresque novels Vida de Guzmán de Alfarache (1599 and 1604) by Mateo Alemán and El guitón Onofre (circa 1606) by Gregorio González as well as Juan Ruiz’s Libro de buen amor (1330 and 1343) and El lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the Arabic maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī of Basra (circa 1100), and Ibn al-Ashtarkūwī al-Saraqusṭī (1126-1138), and the Hebrew maqāmāt of Yehudah al-Ḥarizi (circa 1220) and Isaac Ibn Sahula (1281-1284). In exploring the ways in which Christian, Muslim, and Jewish authors from medieval and early modern Iberia represent the repentance of a rogue, my study not only sheds light on the important commonalities that these religious and literary traditions share, but also illuminates the particular questions that these picaresque and proto-picaresque texts raise within their respective religious, political and cultural milieux. The ambiguity that characterizes the conversion narrative of a seemingly irredeemable rogue, I argue, provides these medieval and early modern writers with an ideal framework to address pressing problems such as controversies regarding free will and predestination, the legitimacy of claims to religious and political authority, and the understanding of social and religious marginality. / Comparative Literature

The so-called Crusader States established by European settlers in the Levant at the end of the eleventh century gave rise to a variety of Latin literary works, including historiography, sermons, pilgrim guides, monastic literature, and poetry. The first part of this study (Chapter 1) critically reevaluates the Latin literary texts and combines the evidence, including unpublished materials, to chart the development of genres over the course of the twelfth century. The second half of the study (Chapters 2–4) subjects this evidence to a cultural-rhetorical analysis, and asks how Latin literary works, as products by and for a cultural elite, appropriated preexisting materials and developed strategies of their own to construct a Frankish cultural identity of the Levant. Proceeding on three thematically different, but closely interrelated, lines of inquiry, it is argued that authors in the Latin East made cultural claims by drawing on the classical tradition, on the Bible, and on ideas of a Carolingian golden age. Chapter 2 demonstrates that Latin historians drew upon classical traditions to fit the Latin East within established frameworks of history and geography, in which the figures Vespasian and Titus are particularly prevalent. Chapter 3 traces the development of the conception of the Franks in the East as a “People of God” and the use of biblical texts to support this claim, especially the Books of the Maccabees. Chapter 4 explores the extent to which authors drew on the legend of Charlemagne as a bridge between East and West. Although the appearance of similar motifs signals a degree of cultural unity among the authors writing in the Latin East, there is an abundant variety in the way they are utilized, inasmuch as they are dynamic rhetorical strategies open to adaptation to differing exigencies. New monastic and ecclesiastical institutions produced Latin writings that demonstrate an urge to establish political and religious authority. While these struggles for power resemble to some extent those between secular and ecclesiastical authorities and institutions in Western Europe, the literary topoi the authors draw upon are specific to their new locale, and represent the creation of a new cultural-literary tradition. / Classics

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This dissertation is concerned with both the way vernacular religious texts were written, and the way they were read, in late medieval England. The context for this discussion is the growth in lay readership and the increasingly ambitious spiritual aspirations of sections of the laity. This dissertation argues that awareness of this wider audience profoundly shaped the way writers presented their texts. Regardless of theological perspective or general intent, medieval writers reveal a common tendency to try and identify "right" readers for their texts, invoking specific interpretive communities, and guiding reader response by establishing parameters for interpretation. The first half of the study draws attention to this engagement with hermeneutics as it is found in Lollard tracts, The Cloud of Unknowing, Nicholas Love's Treatise on the Sacrament, Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love, and the anonymous works, Book to a Mother and The Recluse. Shifting attention on to the reader in its second half, the dissertation uses the evidence of two early fifteenth-century collections of religious texts to demonstrate how lay readers could and did fit their reading material around their own concerns and interests, and that these interests could be extremely diverse. Following Nichols and Wenzel's approach of studying the "whole book," I argue that by choosing to read certain texts together, readers were able to fundamentally alter the interpretation of those texts. Taken as a whole, this study demonstrates connections between contemporaneous works which have rarely been dealt with together because of the tendency to divide medieval religious literature into discrete generic categories ("devotional," "mystic," "pastoral") or discrete doctrinal categories ("Lollard," "orthodox"). Its discussion of religious texts and manuscripts exposes the inadequacy of such categories given the depth, complexity, and range of religious opinion in late medieval England.

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. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate