Relics and the Eucharist, powerful physical links between the divine and the human, sit at the heart of narratives about twelfth-century English religious conflicts. These conflicts centered around internal strife between Jews and Christians, prior to the Jews' expulsion from England in 1290, and external discord between English Christians and Ottoman Muslims in the Third Crusade (1189-1192). Relics and the Eucharist, though, do not tell the whole story, especially in literature about conflict such as saints' lives, crusade chronicles, and romances. In Christian cults, battles, and narratives, religious objects that are not relics function doubly: they are simultaneously "transformative objects," in bringing about miracles, and "remembering things," or memorative objects, in that they hold memory or identity within themselves for a community or group. As devotional materials in local English cults, relic-like objects provided models for interaction between humans and the divine. They existed in shrines as an expression of faith, as well as an expression of collective identity for a Christian community in confrontation with a newly othered Jewish one. In the Crusades, such sacred things took on similar roles in that they physically identified groups of English Christians while also defending that identity in battle. In contrast to earlier studies of medieval images in texts, and following on from more recent investigations of the unique status of Christian materials, my dissertation considers "sacred" objects that are not relics or the consecrated host but can act like them. These objects take the materiality of relics, and their openness to being narrativized, as a model. Memorative things, which hold identity, act as transformative objects in literature about conflict - that is, they transform themselves and their narratives in the telling and even have the ability to shape collective identities by means of texts. I argue that these objects are unique to literature about religious conflict, and that they created a condition of mutuality between written culture and the material world - a quality that sometimes proves dangerous. In generically diverse medieval works that tell or re-tell narratives of religious conflict, these relic-like memorative things are contextualized in ambiguous and unexpected ways. Such transformative objects include: handmade, dedicated wax cult objects, like a wax foot, that both heal and memorialize; crusaders' defiled icons and crosses that subsequently become weapons; a Muslim belt and healing balm, each with a Christian past; and Eucharist-like miraculous objects, placed in the mouth, that enable the dead to sing. Here, I examine the ways in which such Christian memorial objects begin as conduits for group identities in a conflict and transform in unanticipated ways through narratives. The first half of this project looks at twelfth-century texts that purport to record events in conflicts. These are Anglo-Latin miracle books of Saints William and Cuthbert, and Norman and Anglo-Latin Third Crusade chronicles. The second half considers fourteenth-century works of fantasy that re-imagine these conflicts, including the Charlemagne romance Sir Ferumbras and Geoffrey Chaucer's Prioress's Tale. My investigation of this surprising variety of devotional things - which, I argue, stretch far beyond the official categories of "relic" and "Eucharist" - will show that texts about religious conflict both define, and are defined by, the materials they represent.

This dissertation studies the presence of hybridity, in both text and images, as a way of representing the different ethnic groups that resided in the Iberian Peninsula in the texts outlined above, along with a number of late-fifteenth-century and sixteenth-century texts belonging to lay and religious culture. The category of hybridity in conjunction with the construction of spaces and counter-spaces present in the texts and images of my dissertation serve as the unifying principle of this study by providing a particularly fruitful case study of ethnic representations of Jews, conversos, Muslims and moriscos in late Medieval and Early Modern Iberian cultural studies. The project highlights those images and spaces that began to be created in texts and illustrations representing Jews, conversos, Muslims and moriscos in the Spanish kingdoms in the decades that followed the statutes of blood purity in 1449, at a time when Spain’s national hegemonic project begins to emerge, and throughout the sixteenth century, during a time of imperial creation and expansion. In addition, it examines, particularly, how images previously used to depict Jews and Muslims in different textual and artistic traditions in the Middle Ages in order to illustrate religious differences began to be re-articulated in the second half of the fifteenth century to denote racial differences between that which was conceived of as autochthonous to the Iberian Peninsula, Christian and descendant of Visigoth, and that which gradually was perceived as threatening and foreign, Jews, conversos, Muslims and moriscos. The selection of texts and images of this study provides an interdisciplinary and comprehensive sample of sources while studying their historical and textual specificity. Moreover, this dissertation establishes a dialogue between texts belonging to different traditions, diatribes, polemical works, propagandistic literature, poetry, legends, sermons, and historical texts in order to demonstrate how the images of hybrids, animals and monsters were employed as a rhetoric of exclusion in some circles but also became a tool used by some conversos and moriscos in order to advocate the inclusion of ethnic groups to the Spanish hegemonic national and imperial project.

Marginal annotation in medieval romance manuscripts| Understanding the contemporary reception of the genre

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2007. / Title from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 25, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0608. Adviser: Lawrence Clopper.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 200-204). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Indiana University, 1968. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 231-247).

The purpose of this dissertation is to create a word list of male and female speech in those Old English narrative poems which contain dialogue, to use as a reference in determining what, if any, differences existed between the way male Anglo-Saxon poets constructed speech for their male and female characters. Using a specifically designed computer program and an on-line text of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, I electronically tagged those lines assigned to male characters, and then those assigned to female speakers, to generate two separate word lists. I eliminated all immortal speech (God, angels, demons), and all proper nouns as not germane to a study of male and female speech patterns. After I created the raw word lists, I parsed each individual word, and placed it under the appropriate headword. I further classified nouns, adjectives and pronouns according to case and number, and verbs according to person, number, tense and mood. In addition to the word lists, the dissertation includes a critical introduction, and a brief analysis of differences between male and female speech patterns in selected poems.

The Sibyl's importance as an authorizing figure in Christine de Pizan's oeuvre is widely acknowledged but universally under-estimated. Scholars have focused almost exclusively on Christine's use of the detached and serenely wise Cumaean Sibyl, notably in the Chemin de lonc estude and the Epistre Othea, and on close allegorized equivalents. This is to overlook the protean, cross-pollinating diversity of Christine's sibylline sources, and the variety and scope of their influence upon her writings. Here Christine's use of sibylline characters, themes, and authority will be scrutinized in texts that exemplify radical departures from the tropes generally recognized by scholars. They show selective reshapings of polymorphous classical and medieval tradition to meet the shifting contingencies of Christine's career as a writer. Explicitly, Sibyls are invoked as authorizing precedents for her self-fashioning as a woman of wisdom and foresight in political, social, moral, and theological matters; but implicitly, sibylline attributes are also incorporated in other characters and authorial voices. Furthermore, Christine draws from the full panorama of source traditions, embodying not only wisdom and foresight but also recklessness and regret; not only serenity but also frenzy and tears; not only detachment but also polemical engagement in national destiny. In her attack on courtly love, the Livre du duc des vrais amans , sibylline typologies underlie not only the unimpeachable Dame Sebille but also the transgressive Lady, whose fate evokes that of entrapped, shamed, or regretful Sibyls seen in Ovidian and later traditions. In the Epistre a la reine and the Lamentation sur les maux de la France, Christine evokes classical sibylline frenzy; calls upon the example of famous prophets who were ignored but ultimately vindicated; and she links foresight and maternal tears in an appeal to the queen, Isabel of Bavaria, to intercede as France's mother. In the Queen's Manuscript Epistre Othea, Christine pursues similar goals as sibylline tutor to Isabel and the dauphin. In the Ditie de Jehanne d'Arc , Christine addresses national crisis by inscribing Charles VII, Jehanne, and herself in a millennial prophecy of the End of Days, assuming the voice of an Apocalyptic Sibyl of judgment and divine revelation.

In the Legend, Chaucer manipulates the language of the narrator and the women, turning analytic attention toward the problem of gender categories, thereby undermining proscribed behavior and the language that represents that behavior. Nominalism, with its emphasis on singularity, is particularly suited to the problem of gender categories because it forces attention to the particulars of the man or woman, eventually draining the category of that which gives it substance. Examining the legends closely with the nominalist principle of the particularity of language firmly in mind reveals women who are radically different from one another, who are not faceless victims. Cleopatra, Hypermnestra and Thisbe, for example, are imprisoned in a patriarchial system which rewards passivity and punishes independent thought and action. However, Chaucer allows these three characters to use their bodies and linguistic license to reach beyond the bars of the hierarchical prison, thereby disgendering the text in complex ways. Again, the legends of Lucrece and Dido are connected to Troilus and Criseyde through the exploration of the tension between public and private experiences and the imagery of seeing and invisibility. Finally, Philomela's story is the most anomalous story in the poem, and thus it reveals Chaucer's attempt to reassert a particularized view of experience. These surprisingly clear-cut distinctions between characters, behavior, and reader expectations grow out of attention to the particulars of experience and language. The demand for universals made by Alceste and the God of Love provides a contrast for the close attention to language and experience in the legends themselves.

Chaucer's insistence on the name of Sarpedon signals the importance of the Iliad, with its treatment both of the hero and the theme of necessity, for the development of his Troilus. Chaucer's access to the Iliad was second hand through the Italians who were cultural heirs to the Greeks. The story of Homer's Troy reached Chaucer through three traditions: the classical, euhemeristic, and epic recountings of the people and gods of Troy; the romance tales of the fall of Troy and its lovers; the Christian mythographic allegorizing of the Trojan material. The mythographic is itself an offshoot of the epic because it also treats of Gods and men while the romance debunks the otherworldly in favor of earthly affairs. Finally, Chaucer takes a pagan tale, views it through a Dantean lens, and presents it to a fourteenth century Christian audience, integrating the romance back into the epic by expanding its scope beyond the material universe ruled by fate to a world within the Dantean universe which uses fate as an instrument of Providence but leaves men free to choose. Chaucer's Troilus, developed from Priam's two word epitaph to the hero and derived from Sarpedon, Achilles, and Hector, becomes more understandable in light of Sarpedon's acknowledgment of fate and assertion of will. Chapter One traces Sarpedon and necessity from Homer to Chaucer through the epic material about Troy. Chapter Two develops the emergence of Chaucer's Troilus from the suppressed deeds and characteristics of Homer's Sarpedon, Achilles, and Hector. Chapter Three examines Chaucer's adaptation of the mythographic method. In place of Christian allegoresis he employs myth as subtext, using Sarpedon's feast as a center of a debate about fate and using Cassandra to join the fates of Thebes to Troy and Troy to London. Chapter Four explores the Thomistic synthesis, examining the necessity soliloquy as scholastic parody and comic center for Chaucer's theme of fate and will and using Dantes's Purgatorio to interpret Troilus' Christian apotheosis, beyond the pagan apotheosis of Sarpedon's immortalization as hero, by Troilus' removal to the spheres of the Dantean universe.