When Geoffrey Chaucer depicts characters debating the flaws of his works in The Legend of Good Women, or when Marie de France tells histories of literary transmission to frame her Lais, these authors are writing what I describe as metapoetic narratives. By "metapoetic" I mean that their works are in part about the making of poetry, commenting on the authors' poetic activity and creative processes from within. My dissertation, "Revisionary Retelling: The Metapoetics of Authorship in Medieval England," examines how this self-conscious mode of writing enables certain vernacular authors to reflect on their positions as retellers of well-known narratives and established literary traditions. I argue that such self-reflection is central to the efflorescence of vernacular literatures in medieval England. In the last few decades, scholars have called into question the idea that the Middle Ages valued only established literary authority and had no interest in originality, with recent critics noting how medieval authors do make conscious use of the interpretive and distorting possibilities of translation and retelling. Although this line of criticism has been revolutionary, it still tends to view literary authority as inherently limited, so that newer authors must remain entirely subordinate to their sources or seek to replace them. This dynamic of limited authority would seem to be intensified for Anglo-Norman or Middle English retellers; long-standing scholarly narratives have similarly cast the English vernacular languages as competing for linguistic authority with Latin and French. "Revisionary Retelling" challenges these understandings of vernacular creativity by bringing to light the alternative conceptions of authorship and literary authority being invented and explored by writers working in both Anglo-Norman and Middle English. Rather than simply accepting or rejecting a subordinate status, authors such as Marie de France, the Orfeo poet, Thomas Chestre, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Lydgate take a revisionary view of the challenges inherent to translation and retelling: challenges such as intertextual dependencies, interpretive distortions, and the recombination of traditions. In their metapoetic narratives, these writers theorize authorship and literary authority by dramatizing those types of literary challenges, as well as their processes of revision more broadly. As these authors tell stories about the possibilities and problems of vernacular retelling, they simultaneously imagine and enact a type of authorship--and a type of authority--based in creative revision. The first chapter traces this metapoetic mode back to Marie de France's Anglo-Norman Lais, arguing that Marie offers a vision of authorship as an ongoing, trans-historic process of collaborative interpretation. Chapter Two examines how later Middle English lay authors consciously use their second-class status in relation to the French lays to leverage themselves into a position of critical distance from the traditions on which they draw. The third chapter argues that Chaucer willfully depicts his own canon as dependent and unstable in his catalogues of his works, and thereby takes ownership of the challenges of vernacular authorship and invents himself as an authoritative Middle English writer. In my fourth chapter, I suggest that the proliferation of literary authorities in John Lydgate's Fall of Princes, which might seem to constrain and subjectify the text, counter-intuitively asserts the equal value of writing across languages, time, and retellings. Together, these four chapters demonstrate the rich complexity of medieval critical retelling and the power of retold narratives to creatively revise not just their sources, but also literary history itself.

This dissertation is broadly concerned with the role of codices, or bound manuscript books, in the imagination of late medieval English authors. I am interested in exploring how the visual and physical features of medieval books inform the aesthetic vocabulary of reading and inspire a hermeneutic rooted in the sensory experience of reading. Reading a book in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—the time of Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporaries—demands that readers digest an array of information besides the written word: are the words placed in the center, in the margins, in a single column or in double columns? What colors of ink are used? How do illustrations and decoration—initials and borders in particular—guide the organization of the written word and engage readers in analyzing the contents? I use the term “codicology” to refer to such features as layout, page design, ink color, decoration, illustration, and the ordering of texts. Writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve each draw attention to the physical and material properties of medieval books as part of their narratives, and all three writers acknowledge the bound codex as an operative concept by utilizing the networks of visual and semantic relationships orchestrated by the manuscript page to deepen the reader’s engagement with their respective works. Therefore, these visual and physical features generate what I call a “codicological aesthetic,” a device that uses the sensory experience of reading medieval books to frame and characterize encounters with literary texts. By situating reading practices within narratives, the codicological aesthetic gives readers greater purchase on texts, and it allows them to reflect on the nature and the consequences of the reading that they perform.

This dissertation avers that the circulation of manuscript copies and printed editions of the works of Ramon Llull had a key role in Iberian cultural history and signaled a shift from a Christian logic of conversion to a universal key for organizing all the disciplines of knowledge. As copies of Ramon Llull’s manuscripts traveled from the Black Forest, Majorca, and Paris to be housed in the libraries of early modern institutions, such as the Colegio de San Ildefonso and the Monastery of El Escorial, they formed what I call portable archives of the Art. By reading the inventories of the libraries of these institutions, along with copies of the works of Ramon Llull preserved at the Escorial, the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, and the University of Freiburg, my dissertation combines the study of the place of Ramon Llull in the medieval history of ideas and the material features of said portable archives. My dissertation contributes to history of the book studies as it examines a unique case among medieval traditions and shows that the compilation of manuscripts and the elaboration of printed editions repurpose the original idea of the Art. I work with primary sources in Latin, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese, attributed to Ramon Llull and to other authors, to trace his influence on early modern authors, such as Pedro de Guevara, Juan de Herrera, Diego de Valadés, and João de Barros.

A study of late medieval apocalyptic literature and culture, this project examines the interdependence of economic and religious discourse in the Middle Ages and investigates the shift in social consciousness occasioned by demographic changes and the growth of England's profit economy in the fourteenth century. After exploring the growing dissonance between religious tradition and economic language, the study examines expressions of social dissatisfaction, including the actions and communications of the 1381 rebels, William Langland's moral objections in Piers Plowman, and the complaints central to the other 'plowman poems' of Langland's imitators. Contrasting regenerative agrarian metaphors and apocalyptic visions with eschatological, urban visions of paradise, this study argues that Langland and the 1381 rebels exhibit 'radical nostalgia'--a longing for agrarian Christian roots in the midst of social tension which projects the traditional social structure of the past onto a renewed, if not millennial, society / acase@tulane.edu

In the Chester cycle of medieval mystery plays, a character called the Expositor appears periodically to comment on events which have been depicted onstage. Because this character does not appear in other extant cycles, one should ask how his presence affects the Chester plays. My dissertation investigates this character's dramatic and interpretive function, arguing that he serves as chorus, preacher, and narrator and thus sheds light on the ways in which medieval audiences interpreted dramatic performances My introduction shows that, while critics have traditionally focused on either the religious or the dramatic aspects of the cycle, the Expositor shows us how the two intersect. Chapter Two analyzes this character's dramatic function through a close reading of his speeches and an examination of evidence for the staging of the plays. As a character who serves a structural function and provides additional information not depicted on stage, the Expositor resembles similar figures in other cycle and non-cycle plays. Chapter Three compares the Expositor to these other choric figures Few other characters have the interpretive duties that the Expositor has, however, and he thus speaks not only as a dramatic character, but also as a preacher. Chapter Four considers him in the context of homiletic theory c. 1350-1550. Like a preacher, the Expositor serves as objective point of view, moral voice, and spiritual guide. However, while the figure of the preacher would have been generally familiar to the reviser who added the Expositor to the cycle, it is also possible to identify a more specific model for him: the narrator in the Stanzaic Life of Christ. Chapter Five demonstrates correspondences between the Chester cycle and this text Chapter Six draws out the theoretical implications of the previous chapters. Though scholars have claimed that there was no dramatic theory in the Middle Ages, one can be extrapolated from characters such as the Expositor. Because the Expositor is modeled on both dramatic and non-dramatic figures, he has functions in common with both, and thus he illuminates the complexities of theatrical performance in the Middle Ages / acase@tulane.edu

The Esope, written around 1170 by Marie de France represents not only the first literary work by a French woman fabulist, but also the first collection of fables written in the vernacular in Western Europe. Scholars have paid some attention to the sources of the first forty fables of the Esope, believed to be ultimately derived from the Romulus Nilantii, but have tended to neglect those of the second half of Marie's collection, and particularly the ones drawn from Eastern fables and folklore. While acknowledging the influence of the Latin fable tradition on the Esope, in this dissertation I put forth and provide evidence for the theory that Marie de France followed a second model: the fable tradition of Indian origin which reached Europe through the Arabs Karl Warnke's valuable essay 'Die Quellen des Esope der Marie de France', published in the year 1900 in Festgabe fur Hermann Suchier, is the only scholarly attempt to unravel the sources of Marie's fables, including the non-Aesopic ones. His work is relatively comprehensive, in that it summarizes the variants of every fable and refers to analogies and parallels, but it does not offer any in-depth analysis. Moreover, since the publication of his essay, almost a century ago, several ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Indian, Jewish, and Arabic texts have come to light, thanks to the efforts of folklorists in various parts of the world. These texts and recorded tales provide new insights into the entire domain of fable-literature, including Marie's collection In this dissertation I intend to expand upon the work of Warnke. The omission of fables outside the Greco-Latin tradition from any study of the sources of Marie's work would result in an incomplete, distorted picture and the conclusions arrived at thereby would be misleading and fallacious. A thorough investigation of Marie's sources will prove that the Esope is not only indebted to Eastern literature and folklore but also occupies a significant position in the history of the dissemination of the tales to Europe / acase@tulane.edu

The leaves of the Kells manuscript retain an important place in the Wake, performing a vital role in the key given to the reader to unlock not only Joyce's work, but any text requiring the reader to consider the innumerable layers of significance present in the most accomplished forms of communication. The text by nature of its definition, being ineffable, cannot be expressed in any more reductive fashion than the complex design-motif which merely directs the reader toward the sacred, inclusive of its delineation here. What lies beneath the text, once the reader has traveled through the language and its form, resists the chosen medium with which Finnegans Wake and the Book of Kells require to communicate: yet, the sacred text, in either a spiritual or literary state of reverence, may only express the margins of meaning where the real significance remains profound and ineffable / acase@tulane.edu

The relationship between the works of Marie de France and ancient and medieval literary influences has been well documented in the critical literature. Few critics, however, have addressed the importance of nature, and specifically animal imagery, in the Lais. The twelfth century witnessed, in all realms of human intelligence and endeavor, an unprecedented effort to systematize knowledge and rationalize human experience. Animal imagery, a traditional form of representation, was prevalent in diverse treatments in the Bible, in the works of the ancients, in Ovid, and in the matiere de Bretagne that was so much in vogue during the time of Marie de France The present investigation proposes a critical analysis of the role of animal imagery in six lays. Depiction of animals varies throughout the lays, but one constant unites the images: they are all presented in a state of metamorphosis, either physical or profoundly symbolic transformation. Metamorphosis is intimately associated with metaphor, which is intrinsic to thought and generative of language and literature, therefore the metamorphic animal characters can be interpreted metaphorically on generic, textual and socio-cultural levels Because genre is by nature both representational and transformational, the textual metamorphic animal images are validated by Marie's choice of the lay, a flexible and evolving narrative form, as a basis for her artistic recreation of the oral Bretannic tales. Choices made by the author from the available literary, social, political and cultural paradigms of her era produce new metaphorical readings along the syntagmatic axis of metamorphic animal imagery. This transformative process becomes a literary metaphor for the medieval compositional theory of translatio studii plus inventio The dependence of metaphor upon the receiver makes the Lais especially open to re-creation, indeed co-creation, through the glosses of succeeding generations of readers who interpret the metaphors of metamorphic animal imagery in light of their own paradigmatic experience. The animal images reveal metamorphosis to be the governing metaphor of the lays / acase@tulane.edu

The Roman de Renart, probably composed between 1174 and 1205, has been rewritten many times in many different languages over the centuries. The Renart itself is made up of sixteen poems or 'branches' written by different anonymous authors. These branches recycle material from earlier texts and the stories within the Renart repeat each other. In my dissertation I examine the whole of the Renart as a repetition of earlier texts and stories within the Renart as repetitions of one another. I also survey briefly the imitations of the Renart appearing for centuries throughout Western Europe. I find that each time a story is retold, the author appropriates and manipulates it for his own purposes making it new and original In this dissertation, I study the material process of repetition and appropriation in the Renart and its imitations in order to show that the same material is recycled for very different literary purposes. This is accomplished by examining the Latin sources of the Renart stories and the activity of rewriting in the fourteen manuscripts of the Renart. More important, I also show how the narratives in the French branches borrow and appropriate material from each other in order to demonstrate that the authors of the foreign imitations are engaged in the same appropriative processes as the authors of the French branches. I argue that what Jean Scheidegger calls muance is present not only in the copying of the fourteen manuscripts of the Renart (as Scheidegger argues), but also in the recycled stories in the French branches and their foreign imitations. By the end of my dissertation, I Hope to show that the foreign imitations of Renart material should be considered no differently from the 'original' French branches of this work / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation examines space and gender in three medieval and early modern Mediterranean texts: the illustrated, anonymous, thirteenth-century Arabic manuscript from Seville, Bayad wa Riyad, the anonymous thirteenth-century Old French Romance Aucassin et Nicolette , and Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina (1499). In each text I examine how relations of power are affected by the presence, and in some cases the absence, of gardens. The garden in these three texts defies the binary opposition that has traditionally been used in the discussions of space and gender, since it is difficult, even impossible, to designate it an exclusively male or female space. As a domain of in-between, the garden in the three works operates as a place of both permissibility and prohibition, thus making it a safe stage for the manifestation of struggles and negotiations of power. Each of the three texts offers a unique, yet interrelated illustration of how the garden, because of its ambiguous nature, is transformed into a space for the emergence of subjectivity and the constant shift of identities. Most importantly, I argue that by reading the three texts against each other, one begins to see the medieval and early modern Mediterranean region as an interconnected network in which books, stories, plants, and motifs circulated from one geographical area to the other, defying today's national and linguistic boundaries / acase@tulane.edu