This dissertation explores the central place of semiotic interpretation in the instruction of several medieval genres--Latin and vernacular religious drama, French fabliaux, and Spanish exempla--encompassing both the lesson that is taught and the method for teaching it. It is my contention that teaching the proper way to interpret signs is the didactic focus in these genres and that their authors were also deeply concerned with scrutinizing their own use of signs in conveying this instruction. As medieval sign theory finds its origin in Augustinian semiotics, Chapter 1 of my dissertation raises key considerations in Augustine's discussions of signa that would continue to inform later treatments of interpretation. I establish the intrinsic connection between teaching and the interpretation of signs in his writings as well as his frequent ambivalence on the subject. For the Bishop of Hippo, the proper understanding of sacred signs is the paramount lesson of Christian instruction, with misreading Jews as the primary emblem of faulty interpretation. Signs are also a concern for the pedagogical process (doctrina in its second sense) because the success of any lesson is dependent on the effectiveness of its signs to communicate. Yet, Augustine also places the burden of understanding squarely on the learner who must labor with interpretation and attain personal enlightenment. Augustine clearly admires the pagan classics and acknowledges the dominant role of words in instruction, but, for him, the falsified verbal signs of fiction have no value for teaching. Moreover, non-verbal communication--through inner inspiration and visually apprehended signs or res significandi--is vastly superior to fallen language in transmitting meaning as well as creating memory of what is learned. Yet, Augustine also evinces a suspicion of sensory data. These ideas, including doubts about vision and the value of learning through fictive works, would continue to inform the instruction present in later medieval texts. Chapter 2 examines the persistence of Augustinian concepts in medieval religious plays from early church drama through the Middle English cycles. These texts are mainly concerned with teaching the proper interpretation of sacred signa, following Augustine, particularly through the characterization of Jews who fail to read signs correctly. Medieval religious drama also endorses the value of non-verbal communication--through a reliance on individual faith as a precursor to comprehension and through dramatic res such as setting, gesture, and costume--both in conveying semiotic instruction and rendering it memorable. Jewish characters are further portrayed as working against these ideas, representatives of a failure to learn by seeing and believing, who seek instead to force interpretation through violence. Chapter 3 examines a genre in which the presence of doctrinal instruction is debatable, the French fabliaux, and identifies a consistent emphasis on the risks of interpretation across the vast corpus. All signs, verbal and visual, are potentially insufficient in constructing meaning and open to manipulation, emblematized primarily by the actions of deceptive women. Fabliaux evince a self-consciousness about their ability to present these hazards both because they do so through the medium of poetry and because they must rely on signs to make their point. However, the genre ultimately flaunts the insufficiency of its own signs as part of its message, using laughter and mnemonic imagery to promote understanding. Chapter 4 extends the findings on fabliaux to the Spanish Sendebar or Libro de los engaños, a text of questionable didacticism that also emphasizes the role of women in manipulating signs. The practical wisdom derived from the collection--its interest in good counsel and prudence--can likewise be simplified to the need for careful interpretation of signs in a post-lapsarian world. However, through the didactic insufficiency of its tale-telling enterprise, it ultimately affirms the limits of teaching using signs. My dissertation concludes by examining the persistence of many of these ideas in twenty-first-century pedagogy. Recent emphasis on equipping contemporary students with the tools for interpreting signs in an increasingly image-based culture and on promoting the expanded use of visuals in the classroom reiterate longstanding concerns of doctrina. Assessing the instructional role of signs first raised by Augustine and its reconsideration in medieval texts thus sheds new light on didactic content and purpose that continue to inform our endeavors as teachers today.

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.

The last comprehensive study of Byzantine imperial art was published in 1936 and there have been surprisingly few investigations of the art of the Macedonian Dynasty, despite their reputation as active propagandists. Most studies of imperial art have taken a centuries-long perspective, identifying major patterns but overlooking choices made by or on behalf of individual emperors. This thesis considers imperial in the reigns of the first three Macedonain Emperors: Basil (867 - 886) and his sons Leo (886 - 912) and Alexander (912 - 913). It seeks to understand how they constructed images of their power and what imperial art says about the power dynamics at Constatinople. Chapter 1 considers imperial portraits. It concludes that although elements of the imperial image were unchanging, there were nevertheless important differences in the public images put forward by each emperor. Basil's physical power was often depicted, whilst Leo was depicted as a wise ruler. Aspects of emperor's private lives are also visible in their art. Chapter 2 charts the changing iconography between reigns. It studies the emergence and development of the motif of an emperor being crowned by a heavenly figure, which signified the idea of anointing, and its assimilation into imperial art. The chief innovator in terms of imperial iconography, however, was Alexander, and not Basil. Chapter 3 considers Basil and Leo's records as builders and renovators of churches, monasteries, palaces and other buildings. Whilst multiple motives were at work, Basil and Leo acted in different ways. Basil's activity, it is argued, partly reflected his response to the earthquake of 869, which might have jeopardised the perceived legitimacy of his seizure of power in 867. Chapter 4 considers power relations between the emperor and other members of the imperial household. It finds evidence of tension, for example between Basil and his surviving sons Leo and Alexander, as well as examples when imperial behaviour was not dynastic in character. Chapter 5 examines the relationship bwteen emperor and patriarch, at a time when there may have been ideological differences about the extent of imperial power. It suggests that patriarchal art presented a potential challenge to unfettered imperial power, which Basil was prepared to accept but which ran counter to the way that Leo saw his own authority. The study of imperial art in these decades supports that interpretation that art was evolutionary and adaptive in character. Yet it was more grounded in the ideas, chaacter and preferences of individual emperors than has often been recognised and did, on occasion, respond to topical concerns, hopes and fears.

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.

The main purpose of this thesis is to expound the notion that the fourteenth-century poet John Barbour used a loose framework of standard chivalric ideals and tropes to explain and in some cases legitimise the actions of his heroes and that Blind Hary adopted a similar approach when composing The Wallace around a century later. It will explore the idea that both writers did this in order to present their heroes in a way that their audiences would recognise and also to influence the behaviour of these audiences, insofar as the audience of these works in their immediate historical context can be reconstructed. This thesis will not attempt to deal with whether or not they were successful in affecting change in the behaviour of the audiences, as this would require a significant broadening of the scope of this study and it is doubtful whether this may even be possible to assess even in a much wider study. However, in addressing the major themes of both poems with regards to chivalry, this thesis will draw on the historic a l contexts in which each source was written in order to better explain why these authors adopted the attitudes they did and why the notions they espouse might have been apposite at the time of writing. In particular, it will consider the way each author explores themes of prudence, friendship and loyalty as expressed through oath-making for what these themes tell us about Barbour and Hary’s engagement with chivalry. These themes will then be drawn together in a final chapter on what constitutes ‘acceptable’ behaviour for each of these writers.

This thesis examines literary and cultural influences upon descriptions of warfare in Byzantine historiography, focusing on events of the ninth to twelfth centuries. Its main aim is twofold: to account for the appearance in historiography of more ‘heroic’ accounts of battle from the late tenth century, and to identify the sources Middle Byzantine historians employed for military events, particularly since this material appears to have had a significant role in the aforementioned development. Study of Middle Byzantine historical works grants insight into general features of war writing. Moreover, it also reveals much about the working methods of historians and the written sources they employed for military episodes. These sources, now lost to us, are determined to have primarily been campaign reports and biographical compositions. Once an understanding of the nature of such texts is reached, one may demonstrate that they presented their military subject according to contemporary ideals of valour and generalship. It is suggested that the appearance of promotional literature of the military aristocracy in the tenth century was instrumental in the development of a more ‘heroic’ form of war writing, with Homeric-style descriptions of battle, cunning military stratagems, and courageous displays more evident in historiography from this time.

This thesis presents a cultural history of families and family roles in the post-Imperial west, here defined as AD 400-700. This thesis questions the ‘tri-partite’ influences of Roman heritage, ‘Germanic’ culture and Christianisation in the post-Imperial west, and identifies the prime driver of change in the construction of families as the development and implementation of Christian thought. This thesis is in two parts. The first considers families in the legal context of the post-Imperial law codes, and provides a systematic overview of the laws using the Theodosian and Justinian codes as a point of comparison. This section concludes that the post-Imperial codes are Roman in nature and that much of the legislation which concerns the family is very similar to the late Roman law of the Theodosian Code. This section considers legal stipulations concerning betrothal, marriage, adultery, divorce, widowhood, and parenthood. Part two considers the issues raised in part one within the literary context of the post-Imperial west, drawing on a wide geographical and chronological range of genres and texts to provide a diachronic analysis. This section considers many of the same concerns which are raised part one, but highlights different perspectives. In particular, part two argues that the development of Christian thought concerning families, and the increasing power of Christian Churches underlies much change that is seen in the literary texts within and throughout this period. These two sections come together to present a broad analysis of families and family roles throughout the lifecycle of the traditional families in the post-Imperial west, highlighting new cultural and religious landscapes as drivers for change rather than ethnic values.

The complex phenomena ‘court’ and ‘court society’ have received increasing interest in academic research over recent years. The court of late Byzantium, however, has been overlooked, despite the fact that assumptions have been made about the influence of Byzantine court ceremonial on ceremonies in the late Medieval and Early Modern West and about the imitation of the Byzantine court as an institution in the early Ottoman empire. In the discussion of these influences late Byzantine sources were left untouched, a neglect that underlines the need for a comprehensive study of the court in this period. The aim of the present thesis is to fill a part of this gap in our knowledge through an examination of the core of the court in early Palaiologan Byzantium (1261-1354). The methodology used is inspired by studies of Western royal and princely courts and approaches the early Palaiologan court in an interdisciplinary way. It aims to investigate the main palace of the Palaiologan emperors and the residents of this palace (the imperial family, their servants and their guards), or in other words the imperial household. The court is therefore seen from a spatially and socially restricted viewpoint, while social interaction is used as the main differentiating tool. On a larger scale the present thesis aims to address questions about the interrelation between space and social interaction. Although the absence of an actual surviving palace and of imperial household ordinances makes it hard to investigate the late Byzantine court, this thesis presents a picture of the core of the early Palaiologan court by combining various late Byzantine sources, each of which provides us with snippets of information about the palace and (individual) members of the imperial household.

Byzantine society was highly stratified in the fourteenth century. The main division was understood as one between rich and poor or the archontes and the demos, a division which represented both inequalities in the social status of an individual and in the distribution of material wealth and political power. Elements outside this division, namely the middle class, can be identified, yet they could not be introduced into the schema. Social inequality would be expressed through a number of gestures and the exhibition of deference towards a social superior, who in turn showed his snobbery. Moreover, there existed social networks of different types. Most importantly, the patronage system of social relations, which dominated Byzantine society, seriously hindered the development of other horizontal social groups, including class divisions. This system is identified as having contributed to the lack of direction of late Byzantine society. This picture of Byzantine society is collaborated by three case studies: a) a thorough analysis of the social structure and relations in a provincial society, Serres, b) the analysis of two social networks, the two factions of the second civil war, having as a main question the degree of class consciousness in Byzantine society, c) the analysis of the social structure and relations in the besieged Constantinople at the very end of the fourteenth century.

This doctoral dissertation investigates the writings of the Venerable Bede (673-735) in the context of miracles and the miraculous. It begins by exploring the patristic tradition through which he developed his own historical and hagiographical work, particularly the thought of Gregory the Great in the context of doubt and Augustine of Hippo regarding history and truth. It then suggests that Bede had a particular affinity for the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles as models for the writing of specifically ecclesiastical history. The use of sources to attest miracle narratives in six hagiographies known to Bede from Late Antiquity are explored before applying this knowledge to Bede and five of his early Insular contemporaries. The research is rounded off by a discussion of Bede’s use of miracles in the context of reform, particularly his desire to provide adequate pastoral care through his understanding of the ideal bishop best exemplified by Cuthbert and John of Beverley. By examining Bede and the miraculous not only through the lens of his predecessors but also among his contemporaries, this thesis ultimately positions Bede as an innovative Anglo-Saxon scholar, though one clearly conscious of the traditions within which he was working.