This doctoral dissertation examines the manifestation of Christian reconciliation in three thirteenth century literary works from the Iberian Peninsula and the island of Mallorca, then part of the Crown of Aragon. This study discusses interpretations of the term “reconciliation” and applies the term to each work with regard to three aspects: reconciliation of self with self, of self with society, and of self with the divine. Chapter 1 discusses the various connotations of the term “reconciliation.” It outlines reconciliation as a synonym of penance, as in the four-steps in the Catholic Sacrament of Penance, now referred to as the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It also discusses the related Pauline concept of reconciliation and Paul’s possible sources. Chapter 2 will analyze these three aspects of reconciliation in an anonymous thirteenth century Castilian work in verse: La Vida de Santa María Egipciaca, or the Life of Santa María, the Egyptian. The prepubescent Alexandrian prostitute has an epiphany outside a church in Jerusalem, realizes the error of her ways, repents at the moment of intersection between human activity and divine intervention, and changes how she views herself, interacts with society, and regards the connection between earthly life and divinity. Chapter 3 takes a look at Gonzalo de Berceo’s cuaderna vía poem, written in Castilian about 1250 , Vida de Santa Oria, the Life of Saint Oria, through the same three lenses of reconciliation. This time the female figure is the Egyptian’s polar opposite. Oria is a young anchoress who has behaved in a saintly way mortifying the flesh since childhood. It might seem that in her case there is no need of reconciliation with herself because her virtue exceeds that of the majority of humans around her. I posit that, even in her case, there is room for acceptance of inner conflict. In addition, Oria reconciles herself to society (which admires her but tries to pull her back toward Earth against her will) and to the divine (which promises she will receive what she most desires when God deems it time). Chapter 4 studies the Romanç d’Evast e Blaquerna, a prose work in Catalan which dates from 1283-85. This early text provides an opportunity to analyze not only the protagonist’s reconciliation with self, society, and the divine but also that of an array of fictional characters including family members, his potential fiancée and the many people he meets along his journey to become a hermit. Finally, the Epilogue suggests that the idealistic notion of reconciliation has already been put to practical use in modern times in large-scale conflicts within and across borders. Coming to terms and living peaceably with differences, even grave ones, was accomplished at moments in Medieval Iberia among the three monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and hope remains that such moments of peace will extend beyond borders and be found again today. / Spanish

This thesis investigates conceptual networks —systems of organising, understanding and explaining thought and knowledge— and the ways in which they underlie both text and its mise en page across a range of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French and Catalan literary texts and their manuscript witnesses. Each of the three chapters explores a separate corpus of texts, using two of four interrelated network theories: Michel Serres’ notion of parasites and hosts as the basic interconnecting units that combine to constitute all relational networks; the ubiquitous organizational tree; Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold as the primary factor in producing differentiation and identity; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s unruly, anti-hierarchical and anti-arborescent rhizomatic systems. The first chapter engages primarily with parasites and trees; the second with trees and folds; and the third with folds and rhizomes. However, resonances with the other network theories are discussed as they occur, in order to demonstrate the fundamentally interconnected and often interchangeable nature of these systems. Each chapter includes close analysis of manuscript witnesses of the texts under discussion. The first chapter, ‘Saints Denis and Fanuel: Parasitism and Arborescence on the Manuscript Page’, examines parasitic and arboreal networks in two hagiographic texts: late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century prose redactions of the Vie de Saint Denis, and the thirteenth‐century hagiographic romance Li Romanz de Saint Fanuel. The second chapter, ‘Ramon Llull’s Folding Forests: The World, the Tree and the Book’, addresses arborescent and folding structures in Llull’s encyclopaedic Arbre de ciència [Tree of Science], composed between 1295 and 1296. The third chapter, ‘Transgender Genealogy: Turning, Folding and Crossing Gender’, considers three characters in medieval French texts who can be read as transgender: Saint Fanuel; the King of Torelore in Aucassin et Nicolette; and Blanchandin/e in Tristan de Nanteuil. The chapter explores the ways in which these characters’ queer trajectories can be understood through conceptions of directionality which relate to the fold and the rhizome.

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Laberinto is a type of book-form game, invented by Andrea Ghisi, and first printed in 1607. A second version was printed in 1616 and includes all the characters of the so-called tarocchi of Mantegna, with the addition of a new series of ten cards (following the logic of composition of the tarocchi). Another two versions of Laberinto (printed in 1607 and 1610) contain none of the Mantegna tarocchi characters. The rules of the game are based on the art of mathematical combinations. The aim of the game is to move through a visual labyrinth and discover which figure the opponent has in mind. The focus of this work will be on the 1616 version; my intention is to describe the problematic of the repetition of the original game concept a century and a half later, examining the conditions under which players used the allegorical field of the so-called Mantegna Tarocchi, and under which the cosmological meaning was secularized and the new series of ten cards added.