This dissertation analyses the reception of Juan de Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna (1444) in the XV century by Hernán Núñez, and in the XVI century by Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas “ El Brocense.” The study takes into account the motives that made Laberinto de Fortuna one of Spain's most commented works, in a time when the printing press just arrived in the Iberian Peninsula. The “Introduction” examines the advent of the printing press as an instrument that allowed for the creation of a literary canon that had protonationalistic undertones, and it establishes the political tone of the poem, and its peculiarities that differentiate it from the other major literary productions of the XV century. The first chapter, “Mena y su siglo,” presents a study of a century that is crucial for the understanding of Spain's literary creation in the Golden Age, by taking a look into the historical, political, and social aspects that form the intertextuality of Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna. It both takes a look at the role of the reader in the text, and the ability to interpret the signs that form its inner structure. In the second chapter, “Hernán Núñez leyendo a Mena,” the role of the reader is studied as it is documented in Hernán Núñez's commentary to El Laberinto de Fortuna: La Glosa de las Trescientas. In essence, this chapter presents a study of how an author becomes part of a literary canon, and it presents the challenge of concretizing the interpretation of a text from one century to the next. The third chapter, “Las Anotaciones: El Brocense y la edición de 1582,” concludes this study by presenting how the advent of the printing press has evolved from its arrival in Spain, and how books were read, and circulated from one medium to the next.

This dissertation is a study of the early fourteenth-century English manuscript, National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.2.1 (The Auchinleck Manuscript), and three of the eighteen romances it contains. Commercially produced ca. 1330-40, Auchinleck is the earliest extant English manuscript containing texts exclusively in Middle English rather than Latin or French, and the majority of its 44 surviving texts appear there in their earliest copies. Through an examination first of the manuscript as a whole, then of the romances Amis and Amiloun, Sir Tristrem, and Sir Orfeo, I demonstrate that the physical and literary act of translation from French to English that constitutes the Auchinleck Manuscript had a transformative effect upon its texts, causing their authors and copyists to incorporate in them a direct (though often subtle) reflection of the social and cultural environment of fourteenth-century England. Chapter 1 draws on contemporary manuscript and historical evidence to argue that in this period literacy in English was predicated upon literacy in French and/or Latin, and that Auchinleck's exclusive use of English was thus a matter of choice rather than necessity, constituting an assertion of the value both of the language of its texts and of Englishness itself. That assertion, I argue through my analyses in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of Amis and Amiloun, Sir Tristrem and Sir Orfeo, influenced the scribes and poets who selected, adapted and/or translated romances for inclusion in the Auchinleck Manuscript, heightening their sensitivity to the interplay between those texts and the environment in which they lived and worked. Amis and Amiloun makes no secret of its dependence on an Anglo-Norman source; Sir Tristrem is derived from the Anglo-Norman verse Tristan of Thomas; Sir Orfeo has no vernacular forebear but is indebted to Ovid's tale of Orpheus. The Auchinleck versions of all three, however, display a distinctly English character, arguing that the circumstances of their composition and/or inscription prompted these scribes and poets, consciously or unconsciously, to modify these works so as to create English translations of their sources that function not only linguistically, but in the social, cultural and political sense as well.

This dissertation analyzes the extent to which the pictorial cycle and poetic text in the Códice Rico manuscript of the Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso X el Sabio convey the same religious and ideological messages. The Códice Rico portrays an ordered, laboring Christian society with some presence of Jews and Muslims, at the mercy of nature and human nature and saved only by the grace and intercession of Holy Mary. In this iconographic society, King Alfonso appears both as the exemplary Christian ruler and the devotee of Mary, singing her praises and exhorting others to do the same. This dual representation suggests that the pictorial cycle of his Marian project is not merely pious, but also politically motivated and forming part of Alfonso X's greater ambition, the crown of Holy Roman Emperor.

My dissertation is the first systematic study to bring together contemporary legal and literary theory to the analysis of the legal texts of Spain in the New World. By focusing on the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe (1492), and other legal documents, I argue that this legal corpus is also a narrative construct which blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. My purpose is to explore the rhetorical dimension of legal writing as a process of emplotment of colonial encounters. The poetics of legal narrative will be examined applying the theory of "law as literature," a recent cross-disciplinary approach. My point is that all the strategies and approaches developed in the field of colonial literary studies have neglected to examine this corpus of laws as cultural production. Nevertheless, it is precisely rhetoric which provides an accessible medium for exploring the connection between law and literature. My point is that colonial legislation can be understood in its complexity only when it is realized that legal discourse is not merely conceptual--that is, not reducible to a set of definitions--but also literary, by which I mean that its metaphorical and associative quality derives precisely of the need to address the question of imposing principles of social control, which are at the center of any legislative controversy. In other words, Spain's legislation in America should be studied not only as a set of rules or institutions, but as a kind of discursive practice of cultural dominance. This methodological approach is based on the assumption that a nexus between law and literature was at the center of the Conquest of America. Finally, I will conclude by summarizing the objectives of my work. This study should help to increase our understanding of the relation between law and literature. Cataloguing legal texts as new objects of study within Colonial Literature, invites us to raise new research questions which, among other things, challenges the category of what we consider as "colonial texts." The methodological consequences of this broadening of the range of objects of study represents an enrichment of perspectives in colonial literary studies.

This dissertation considers as cultural artifacts surviving manuscripts of legendaries (collections of saints' lives) that focus on female saints. By the conventional count, there are only two English legendaries of women from the period 1200–1650, Osbern Bokenham's and Ralph Buckland's. This count obscures the pattern I have discerned in extant manuscripts: throughout the medieval period and into the seventeenth century, multiple female saints' lives often appear together in the same book. These groupings occur in manuscripts exclusive of male saints' lives, indicating a long-term concern with female sanctity. Privileging manuscript-culture standards over those of print culture, I stretch the term “legendary” to accommodate more than just those collections of saints' lives that stand alone, designating any grouping of three or more vitae within the same book even if they appear in a codex alongside other kinds of texts. Along with Bokenham's and Buckland's, I discuss the legendaries found in Bodley 34, Cotton Domitian A xi, Harley 4012, Arundel 168, Douce 114, Brian Anslay's 1521 translation of Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies, Archives Départementales du Nord 20 H 7, and the Life of Elizabeth Cary. My broadening of the term “legendary,” along with an inclusive definition of “English” (to indicate language or geography, rather than both), raises the count from two English legendaries of women to nine: they are not as rare as first scholarly glance suggests, but comprise a previously-unexamined genre. That so many examples are extant, and that the “legendary of women” persists beyond the Reformation (and beyond English borders), suggests the form resonated strongly with multiple audiences. Legendaries represented access to a reader's favorite vitae; stories could be chosen to fit the number of pages a patron could afford. I examine the significance of this selection along two dimensions. First, I consider the reciprocal relationships among the legendaries, female readers, and the larger religious culture. Second, in addition to placing these narratives in their manuscript contexts, I offer literary analyses of the individual vitae to demonstrate how they, and by extension these legendaries, were versatile enough to accommodate readers from vastly different backgrounds.

This analysis is limited to those Ideal Structures found in the 84 lines of text commonly called "Hrothgar's Homily." Essentially, each line is analyzed in the following manner: (1) The two or three words carrying the sound patterning for the line are noted. (2) Each occurrence of the stem-syllables and derived forms (derived forms are considered to be variants of the words) are checked in Klaeber's glossary. Occurrences are double-checked using Bessinger & Smith's Concordance. (3) All lines containing the stem-syllables and derived forms are checked to see whether that particular word participates in the dominant sound-patterning of that verse line. If it does, it is so designated on the master list. (4) The lists of each of the two words in the original line are then compared to find the percentage of simultaneous designated. (5) The lines in which these structures occur are then compared and analyzed to determine a patter of meaning and to see if the Ideal Structure affects that line even when it is negated or contrasted. The Structures commonly appear every three lines except in two portions of the text, lines 1730-1751 and 1769-1783. Twelve Structures were found. The Structures have been classified in three groups based on their information content. Type A, Primal Structures, is the least represented, but perhaps the oldest. It is represented by one Structure: fyr/flod in line 1764. Type B Structures are the Structures that deal with the interrelationships within the society, namely the reciprocal duties of king and people. The five Structures within this classification are: sod secgan (1700), fremman/folc (1701), halep/help (1709), leod/laer (1722), and wuldor/waldend (1752). Type C Structures describe the personal attributes of the Anglo-Saxon warrior. The Structures within this class are: maegen/mod (1706), dead/dom (ll. 1712, 1768), maere/mon (1715), mon/mod (1729), faege/faellan (1755), and wig/weord (1783). The placement of the Structures contributes to the content and significance of the speech. The Structures enable the audience to understand the ritual significance of Hrothgar's speech and they reflect the themes which concern the poet in the speech. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)

En mi deseo por mostrar una nueva perspectiva tanto en Cárcel de Amor como en La Celestina, encontré un artículo que encierra muchas de mis ideas sobre estas dos obras medievales: “El Ojo de la Mente”, escrito por Michael Rifaterre. Para Rifaterre lo que realmente importa en la intertextualidad de los ibros medievales es el hecho de que se busca un texto homólogo, se hacen asociaciones a textos ya conocidos, se apela a los archivos mentales tanto del lector como del escritor. En otras palabras, la memoria es el estilo que sirve para presentar el contenido. Esto para mí es una perspetiva fascinante que me hizo ver muchas obras desde puntos de vista diferentes. Si la memoria es un determinante de estilo y un elemento influyente en el contenido, la memoria define en gran parte tanto el estilo como el contenido. Empecé por considerar a La Celestina a partir de esta premisa y me pareció más abstracta que nunca. Pensé como Gilman en su libro Arte y Estrutura, que la obra es un continuum de la conciencia, es conciencia hablada. Reduje los personajes a imágenes a movimientos de pantomima como hizo Dorothy Clarke en su libro, Decalogue and Deadly Sins in La Celestina. Concluí como Lida de Malkiel que la obra da suficiente tiep para que se comunique una noción de realidad y de verosimilitud psicológica, no para el desarrollo emocional de los personajes como piensa Malkiel, sino un tiempo suficiente para afianzar un concepto en la memoria. Visto desde un ángulo menos abstracto, el hecho de que a memoria es determinante de estilo y contenido acercó en mi opinión a La Celestina más al género de la novela. Me hizo considerar aspectos como el narrador fidedigno y la narración confiable o no confiable en una obra que según algunos, no tiene narrador. En Cárcel de Amor encontré el primer juicio por jurado de las obras medievales que he leído. En esta obra vi una clara separación, casi simétrica entre lo que es real y lo que es abstracto. Pasamos de lo abstracto a lo concreto para recordar algo. Tenemos una prisión alegórica y una real, un duelo alegórico y uno real, las armas del alma pecadora y las armas que matan al hombre, el rey que es Dios y un rey que está en una corte real, el juicio final que propone la teología cristiana y un juicio por jurado en el que la memoria juega un papel muy importante. La memoria prevalece por sí sola en estas obras. Llega a ser un elemento de narración, y un marcador de identidad. En el aspecto religioso, cumple una función moral. En el aspecto humano da nuevas dimensiones a los personajes. En el aspecto literario es un fuerte marcador de estilo y contenido que abre nuevas puertas a la interpretación de estas obras.

This study examines and explains the politically, ecclesiastically and socially motivated perceptions of Joan of Arc by the French and the British focusing on late medieval and early Renaissance depictions. Joan was tried by the British in France. Even so, she had a text-book British heresy trial according to the precedent set during John Badby's trial in 1401. Equally importantly, close examination of fifteenth century French texts shows French ambivalence towards, diminution of and, in some cases, complete rejection of Joan and her role in French history. Indeed, the British perceptions about the Maid are the only perspectives on Joan that remained constant through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Our modern perceptions of Joan of Arc seem fairly stable. Yet what became evident during the research for this project is that this stability is a recent development we have simply inherited Napoleon's view of the Maid of Orléans. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the British characterized Joan of Arc as a witch and a great threat to their political well-being. British ideas about Joan of Arc, however negative and contrary they may seem to our modern ideas about her, are the only ideas that remained constant during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

The Erklaerung des Vaterunsers is a 337 page meditation and commentary on the Lord's Prayer composed by the fifteenth century German mystic, Magdalena Beutler of Freiburg. This study comprises biographical and critical essays concerning Magdalena and her works, together with a critical edition of the Erklaerung with textual apparatus. Its purpose is to reintroduce Magdalena and her hitherto inaccessible devotional works into late medieval religious and literary scholarship. Previous studies of Magdalena have dismissed her as a deluded, self-dramatizing hysteric and failed to mention either the Erklaerung or her most popular work, the Goldene Litanei, a meditation on the Passion that was widely anthologized from her own time through the early seventeenth century. This dissertation attempts to show that, despite the occasional criticism of contemporaries, Magdalena's actions lay well within a tradition of Franciscan mysticism which centered on the imitation of the life of Christ; that the special emphases of her devotion were characteristic of a strain of female piety that had begun to be voiced as early as the twelfth century; and that her peculiarly literal and physical approach to the imitatio Christi was at the same time orthodox and innovative; and that the Erklaerung represents Magdalena's efforts to share her practices and concerns with her community.

This dissertation examines vernacular saint plays in French, Italian, and English from the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. It focuses on the genre of hagiographic drama as an expression of popular religion and popular culture in the Middle Ages, serving as a test of current theories pertaining to popular culture. Sociohistorical methods are employed throughout the work as a basis for determining the role of religious theater in medieval society. Contextual analyses of theoretical approaches are provided, including New Historicism, the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, and the work of Victor Turner. The chapters offer information concerning the cultic traditions that gave rise to the saint plays, an examination of social changes related to the performances, aesthetic conventions, and issues of reception.