Recognized as the first medieval instances of the romance genre, the Roman de Thebes, Roman d'Enéas, Roman de Brut and Roman de Troie (ca. 1150-1165) are based on the rewriting of Latin texts deeply rooted in history. Yet few studies have explored the relationship between these romans d'antiquité and medieval historiography, as a literary genre (estoire and historia). There has indeed been a tendency amongst critics to focus on a thematic analysis of the links between the "first romances" and history, at the expense of a more generic approach. Our task, therefore, is to show that this corpus can be defined by its conscious – and subversive – relationship with medieval historiography. By combining the Jaussian approach of the theory of genres with the methods of "New Philology", we shall first establish that the medieval readers interpreted romans d'antiquité not only as romance, but also as works of historiography. This double interpretation, confirmed on various accounts by the manuscripts, will then be explained by a poetic structure that playfully blurs the line between generic distinctions. Hence it will appear that the "first novelist" deliberately use the conventions of historiography in order to lay the foundation of a genre that will maintain a close, yet complicated, relationship with history. / Fondés sur la réécriture d'ouvrages latins et médio-latins à forte teneur historique, les romans de Thèbes, d'Éneas, de Brut et de Troie (ca. 1150-1165) signent la « naissance du roman » en empruntant leur sujet à l'histoire. Pourtant, peu d'études ont été consacrées aux liens qui se tissent entre ces romans d'antiquité et la tradition historiographique en tant que genre littéraire (« estoire » et « historia »). La critique tend en effet à approcher les rapports entre l'historiographie et le genre romanesque naissant d'un point de vue strictement thématique de sorte qu'elle néglige souvent d'interroger leurs interactions génériques. Il s'agira donc de démontrer que les premières œuvres romanesques peuvent se définir par leur rapport conscient – et subversif – au genre historiographique médiéval. En conjuguant l'approche jaussienne de la théorie des genres aux méthodes de la « nouvelle philologie », il faudra d'abord établir que la réception médiévale du corpus se laisse infléchir par une double lecture historiographique et romanesque. Cette confusion typologique, diversement relayée par le témoignage des codices, pourra ensuite s'expliquer par une contexture poétique qui se joue des distinctions génériques. Il apparaîtra ainsi que les premiers romanciers convoquent délibérément les conventions de l'historiographie pour poser un geste fondateur dans l'histoire du genre romanesque : ils érigent une frontière – poreuse – entre roman et histoire.

This study posits an intertextual paradigm of governance, modelled on the interdependent nature of late-medieval Anglo-Scottish cultural relations, for interpreting Chaucerian reception by Scots poets of the long fifteenth century. These poets use Chaucer to enrich their own works in ways that advance an autonomous, self-governing Scottish literary tradition. Chapter 1, establishing context for the study, comprises two sections. The first analyses how Scottish chronicles (including Bower's Scotichronicon, Wyntoun's Original Chronicle and the anonymous "Scottis Originale") interpret selected details of English chronicles to suit Scottish interests; the second explores interdependency's importance to the eponymous heroes of Barbour's Bruce and Harry's Wallace, who defer to friends, monarchs and moral ideals in order to further their goal of Scottish autonomy. Chapter 2 explores the Kingis Quair's paradox of freedom through service, which applies not only to the narrator's liberation through service to his lady but also to the poet's literary emancipation through a transformation of motifs from Chaucer's Troilus and Knight's Tale. Chapter 3 examines how Robert Henryson's Moral Fables argue for a monarch's success through restraint; the Testament of Cresseid echoes this concept both in Cresseid's evolution from a slave of lust to a liberated penitent and in Henryson's creation of an alternative yet narratively consistent fate for Chaucer's Criseyde. Chapter 4 focuses on Gavin Douglas' Eneados and Palice of Honour; each depicts a dynamic in which Douglas' debt to Chaucerian works such as the Legend of Good Women and the House of Fame is matched by Chaucer's need for Douglas to perpetuate his legacy. Chapter 5 demonstrates how William Dunbar's philosophical, petitionary, occasional and courtly poems advocate self-governance as a condition for governing others; special attention is paid to poetry concerning James IV and Margaret Tudor's marriage, wherein Dunbar artic / Cette étude avance un paradigme intertextuel de "gouvernance," basé sur la relation interdépendante entre les cultures anglaises et écossaises pendant le Bas Moyen Âge, pour interpréter la réception chaucérienne des poètes écossais au quinzième siècle et au début du seizième siècle. Ces poètes emploient Chaucer pour enrichir leurs oeuvres propres afin de promouvoir une tradition littéraire écossaise autonome. Chapitre 1, établissant le contexte pour cette étude, comprend deux sections. La première section analyse comment les chroniques écossaises (telles que le Scotichronicon de Bower, le Original Chronicle de Wyntoun et l'anonyme «Scottis Originale ») interprètent les détails choisis des chroniques anglaises pour convenir aux intérêts écossais; la deuxième section examine l'importance vitale de l'interdépendance pour les héros éponymes du Bruce de Barbour et du Wallace de Harry, deux leaders qui déférent aux amis, aux rois et aux idéales morales pour réaliser leur but d'une Écosse autonome. Chapitre 2 explore le Kingis Quair et son articulation du paradoxe d'une liberté qui se trouve dans la servitude, un paradoxe qui s'applique non seulement à la liberté achevée par le narrateur dans son service pour sa dame, mais aussi à l'émancipation du poète dans sa transformation des motifs tirés du Troilus et du Knight's Tale du Chaucer. Chapitre 3 examine comment les Moral Fables du Robert Henryson soutiennent qu'un roi puissant, c'est un roi modéré; ce sentiment trouve un écho chez le Testament of Cresseid, qui suit non seulement Cresseid dans son évolution personnelle (d'une esclave du désir à une pénitente libérée) mais aussi Henryson dans sa création d'un destin pour Cresseid qui contraste mais complète le destin de Criseyde dans le Troilus. Chapitre 4 centre sur l'Eneados et le Palice of Honour de Gavin Douglas; ces deux oeuvres décrivent une dynamique dans laquelle la dette de Douglas aux oeuvres chauc

<p> My dissertation focuses on the intersection of the discourses of space and place, art, religion, and politics in poetical accounts of heaven. My study investigates how authors deploy these various traditions to create a heaven that accommodates the needs of a particular audience. Heaven is, according to Yi-Fu Tuan, a "mythical place," which cannot be located. To avoid the problems of a "mythical place," we represent that location with slightly-blurred experiential knowledge or communally-sanctioned practices. The creation of heaven, I argue, does not occur <i>ex nihilo</i> but through a refashioning of knowledge and practices to engage audiences with descriptions of heaven. To examine this concept, I primarily analyze the descriptions of place in <i>Pearl </i> and <i>Piers Plowman,</i> while providing discussion of <i>Paradiso, The Vision of Tnugdal,</i> and episodes from the writings of Hadewijch that offer competing and complementing visions. This study offers an opportunity to view heaven not as simply a consistent and monolithic feature of society but as a created site. Rather than examining heaven solely as art, or only through doctrinal concerns, heaven must be considered in terms of a variety of discourses. The layering of art, politics, religion, and space and place remind readers of the medieval religious project. God, for the medieval, was not an abstract ideal but an ever-present quality of their daily existences; as God could be seen in all facets of life, so too can heaven be seen through aspects of life that seem mundane and removed from ethereal experience. </p><p> The first chapter of <i>The Creation of Heaven in the Middle Ages </i> outlines the problem of considering heaven as a monolithic entity. By tracing the history of heaven, the chapter demonstrates that we cannot view heaven as outside of time and place; heaven responds to the needs of particular audiences. As such, heaven cannot be considered only a religious place; heaven is a place that depends upon the engagement of multiple ideas, including theories of space and place, art history, and politics. The second chapter investigates the places of the afterlife in <i>Pearl</i> and <i>Piers Plowman.</i> While similarities exist between the two, each text offers a striking vision of the afterlife; and while a cityscape, and a besieged church and tower evoke distinct impressions of heaven, the chapter examines how each of these visions forces the reader to wonder if heaven might be a viable end. The third chapter engages in how the aesthetic choices of heaven work to create meaning within the mind of the reader. The larger goals of medieval aesthetics, embodied in stained-glass windows, reflect the projects of <i>Pearl</i> and <i>Piers Plowman,</i> namely to teach through a series of highly colored and instructive scenes. The final chapter offers a view of heaven through the political atmospheres of Ricardian England, reflecting the various choices of that monarch that impacts not only earth but also the heavenly retinue. A brief postscript closes out the dissertation that asks how these medieval visions might allow us to view the current interest of heaven, which can be seen in the popularity and success of life after death accounts</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of French and Italian Studies, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4703. Adviser: Wayne H. Storey. Title from dissertation home page (viewed May 22, 2008).

This project examines medieval adaptations of the image of the New Jerusalem, an image of heaven drawn from the biblical book of Revelation. The book of Revelation was composed at a period of social and spiritual crisis for early Christians, when they were a persecuted minority in Asia Minor and expected imminent apocalypse. Their situation could not be more different from that of late medieval Christians in England, who constituted a cultural majority and lived long after the expected millennium. Late medieval English adaptations of the image of the New Jerusalem detach the city of God from its roots in agonistic cultural conflict and instead, relying on the theology of Saint Augustine, imagine a heaven interwoven with the temporal and flawed world. I examine seven medieval English poems: The Prick of Conscience, Sir Owayne, The Voyage of Saint Brendan, Pearl, The House of Fame, Sir Orfeo, and Saint Erkenwald. Some of these texts are overtly religious while others have been traditionally associated with secular discourse, but they share an intended lay audience. I show that when the heavenly city appears in literature designed for an increasingly urbanized laity, it emphasizes the spiritual imperative to discern truth from fiction, fantasy from fact, city of God from city of man. / English

The dissertation considers how the anonymous authors of six moral and religious pseudo-ballade refrain poems first attested in the late fourteenth-century Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. poet.a.1) manipulate devices such as speaking persona, word-play, and allegory in ways that support rhetorical strategies hitherto unrecognized in Middle English lyric. The study begins with stemmatic analyses that identify, as far as is possible from the physical record, the archetypal text, or "work," of each poem. Chapter One then provides an overview of scholarship that has focussed on two important technical devices used in the Vernon refrain lyrics-the speaking voice and the refrain---and articulates how the lyrics use those devices in hitherto unrecognized ways. Chapter One concludes by considering the kinds of word-play found in other Middle English literature, in order to define that found in the Vernon lyrics. In the next six chapters, each of the six "works" is considered as a communicative event. Using mainly historicist, formalist, and reader-response methodologies, I explore, for each poem in turn, how the poet moulds language to signify indirectly so that the message is communicated figuratively, and how the implied audience is cast into a specific role vis-a-vis the communicative action in a way that inflects the message. I also explore how the rhetorical strategies of the poems are informed by various theories of signification, which are defined in relation to the socio-linguistic circumstances and philosophical currents of the time, and consider the poems in relation to other medieval, mostly earlier Middle English, lyrics. In the Conclusion, findings are assembled to indicate how the recovery of the Vernon refrain lyrics' rhetorical art expands the parameters that currently define Middle English lyric. I also turn from considering the implied audience of the "works" to considering the historical audience of the Vernon manuscript, and suggest that the recovery of the Vernon refrain lyrics' rhetorical art bolsters theories that maintain the Vernon manuscript was intended, at least in part, for an upper gentry or aristocratic audience, and that its thorough Englishness is more of a polemic assertion of the strength of the English language than a reflection of socio-linguistic conditions.

The Old English Solomon and Saturn II has received virtually no extended critical commentary since Robert J. Menner's 1941 edition of it and its companion piece, Solomon and Saturn I. The few brief attempts made to explain the poem, moreover, have been without reference to the body of OE sapiential thought to which it belongs. This thesis offers a close structural and thematic reading of SS II as it appears against the background of general notions and concepts belonging to the body of OE wisdom. The thesis begins with a review of the poem's history and related literary criticism. Lexical and thematic material is then selected from the entire OE corpus to present those aspects of OE wisdom that bear on an understanding of SS II. The thesis addresses the conceptual and intellectual formulations of wisdom in the Anglo-Saxon period, rather than simply its literary forms, and it takes into account both pre-conversion and Christian views on human and divine wisdom. The thesis then illustrates how SS II reflects certain patterns that exist in the general OE wisdom tradition. The narrator's framework establishes a metaphysical context for the whole poem that is consistent with the Christian Anglo-Saxon concept of divine Wisdom. The epistemological premises of the debate itself, as well as a core of beliefs and implicit assumptions shared by the opponents, Solomon and Saturn, reflect the tensions and harmonies that appear in the broad view of OE wisdom. The interaction between Saturn and Solomon--the one a travelling Chaldean noble, the other the Old Testament King, is examined next. The competition between an epic rhetorical model, namely, the visit of a roving hero to the court of an established king, and the Christian typology that surrounds the wise King Solomon, is arguably a significant source of meaning in the poem. The tension between literary and figural patterns provides an interpretive matrix against which the audience can follow the discourse of the two men. Finally, the thesis turns to the structure of the SS II dialogue and demonstrates that far from being a simple contest of wit and "wisdom," the poem is a sophisticated process of education through dialogue whose central concern is the emancipation of the mind from the illusions of language. The dialogue shares several "habits of thought" with Boethius' Consolation Philosophiae and Augustine's Soliloquia in the process by which it restores to Saturn's infirm and misguided mind its natural wisdom and its power of interpretation.

Au Moyen Age, le bestiaire jouait un role fondamental en tant que cle interpretative du monde parallele des animaux. En France, ce genre a connu un succes enorme au Moyen Age. De tous les bestiaires, c'est le Bestiaire marial qui se distingue par son sujet et par son choix d'animaux. Ce bestiaire francais, le dernier du Moyen Age et qui nous reste dans un manuscrit unique, se singularise pour plusieurs raisons. D'abord l'auteur anonyme l'ecrit pour un auditoire specifique. Ensuite il y fait la comparaison avec Notre-Dame (non pas le Christ). Et enfin, il traite des animaux qui ne sont pas presents dans les autres bestiaires francais. Ainsi il s'agit d'une oeuvre unique de plusieurs points de vue. Dans cette these, nous donnons la premiere edition critique de cette oeuvre importante.

Like certain of his more reactionary religious contemporaries (most notably, Nicholas of Lyra, O.F.M., and John Wyclif), Chaucer concerns himself with critically reflexive literature. Through his various narrative and exegetical efforts, he produces--in The Canterbury Tales especially--what amounts to "Christian midrashim" or a literary tarqum as he, like Nicholas and Wyclif before him, directly addresses matters of textual and referential authority, of relational significances, and of the text's apparently intended personal effects. Reflecting the logic and concerns of the central Text of the age and apparently formulating their shared concept of the literal, of its signification, and of its function from Hebraic rather than Latin referential categories, each of these writers after his fashion and field calls for a return to ethical and social praxis based upon a responsible interpretation of the Divine Word according to its inherent logic and meaning. Being concerned to re-establish the pertinence of auctorite for the individual and the age, they thus present "right reading" as an intellectual endeavour under moral imperative. Involving both author and reader in the text, they clarify the sensus literalis (the essential significance of a text) as being not only "what the words signify" (Augustine), but what the words were intended to signify by their Author--as this is supported by the body of received ecriture and as it is accessible to those who approach the text in spiritual and moral readiness, prepared to engage actively the material (and its Author) by activating it in their own immediate experience. My use of such terms as midrashim and tarqum from the Jewish tradition to describe Chaucer's unique contribution to Fourteenth century literature is quite intentional, for it foregrounds the seminal--and Semitic--source, semiotic, and structural logic that underlies the particular theory of the sensus literalis which Nicholas develops from a marriage of rabbinical and patristic sources, which Wyclif gives a distinctively English expression and application, and which Chaucer seems to adapt to poetic forms. My thesis, attempting to deal in a fuller sense with referential meaning generally and with the sensus literalis specifically, explores the ways in which Nicholas, Wyclif, and, after them, Chaucer approach the deeper significance of the literal. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

The Ars Moriendi is a Mediaeval Christian death manual that appeared around the middle of the fifteenth century. Though no-one is certain who the author was, there is no doubt that Jean Gerson was the major inspiration through his Opusculum Tripartitum. The general consensus is that the text was written by a member of the mendicant orders, probably a Dominican, and it was through them that the text spread so rapidly across Europe. The text was originally written in Latin with translations into the various vernaculars coming later. The Ars Moriendi appears in almost every major European language. I choose to limit my study to those in Latin. Since there are two Latin traditions, the longer or CP, and the shorter or QS, I further narrowed the field of study and concentrated exclusively on the latter. The text seems to have been produced as a response to the devastation of the Black Death. With so many priests either dead or missing. The popularity of a manual that instructed how to die in a way that ensured one made it to heaven is easy to understand. Of the three hundred known manuscripts, only six are of the shorter version. Five of these I have studied. The sixth unhappily was destroyed in 1944 in Metz. This paucity is not surprising since the true appeal of this work is the woodcut. Of the five manuscripts, at least two were copied from printed editions. The text itself is not very impressive as it is comprised mostly of various quotations from the Church Fathers and the Vulgate. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)