<p> Chaucer bases the marriage in the Shipman&rsquo;s Tale on the ethical and social systems of the medieval merchant class, yet criticism of the marriage and the wife&rsquo;s extra-marital transaction especially, often falls squarely in the realm of ecclesiastical, moral ideology. A moral reading of the mercantile-based Shipman&rsquo;s Tale presupposes that an accommodation can be negotiated between the mercantile and the ecclesiastical. I argue that Chaucer&rsquo;s construction of marriage in the Shipman&rsquo;s Tale allows for no accommodation. Chaucer creates a purely mercantile marriage that relies upon the ethical standards of business to determine its strength. This thesis examines the intersecting ecclesiastical and mercantile terms within the Shipman&rsquo;s Tale. Chapter one examines the assertion that money perverts the marriage of the wife and the merchant. To refute these claims I examine the medieval church&rsquo;s views on marriage, the Pauline &ldquo;marriage debt,&rdquo; adultery, and the conflicts within this ideal as they relate to and inform the marriage of the wife and merchant. The marriage between the merchant husband and his wife in the Shipman&rsquo;s Tale is strengthened by its adherence to mercantile ethics, and stands as a legitimate partnership, not as a perversion. In Chapter two I focus on the determination that the wife in the Shipman&rsquo;s Tale is &ldquo;unfaithful, aggressively self-centered, and mercenary.&rdquo; The particular assertion of &ldquo;mercenary&rdquo; interests me, since it is based on attempts to calculate a financial exchange rate in order to accuse the wife of over-selling herself to the monk. If the wife over-sells her body then she reaps a usurious profit, a practice condemned by both ecclesiastical and secular fourteenth-century courts. I analyze terms and financial transactions specific to usury and find that the wife conducts an ethical trade based on fourteenth-century mercantile law. She trades her body for the amount of currency the market will bear, therefore she is free from the charges of mercenary over-selling and moves out of the shadow of her merchant husband and into the role of independent merchant. In Chapter three I confront the &ldquo;redemptive innocence&rdquo; extended to the merchant husband and the refusal to extend such redemption to the wife. I investigate the specific mercantile terms related to the bill of exchange model used by both the husband and wife in the Shipman&rsquo;s Tale, in order to show that the wife in the Shipman&rsquo;s Tale is an ethical merchant in her own right and therefore worthy of the same &ldquo;redemptive innocence&rdquo; offered to her husband. I conclude that the merchant&rsquo;s marriage typifies the medieval mercantile business model, that ecclesiastical marriage ideology is incongruent to this business model, and that the wife&rsquo;s movements must be evaluated under the terms of mercantile ethics. I find the wife in the Shipman&rsquo;s Tale to be an ethical merchant and an exemplary participant in the mercantile marriage provided by the text.</p>

No description available.

The Gilbertine order was unusual in that it was founded for both men and women who lived in adjacent enclosures. The order had its origins in the Lincolnshire village of Sempringham where St Gilbert founded the order in the 1130s. The canons followed the rule of St Augustine and the nuns the rule of St Benedict. The history of the order has been extensively researched by Brian Golding from its foundation until the beginning of the fourteenth century. However, there has been little substantial research on the order in the period from the fourteenth century until its dissolution in 1539. This dissertation continues the work carried out by Golding and examines the later years of the order’s history and its dissolution. The main themes of this work are the recruitment of men and women into the order during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the spiritual lives of the nuns, the impact of the dissolution on the lives of the men and women of the order, and their careers after the dissolution. The study will show that in common with other religious orders there was a decline in the popularity of the Gilbertines in the later Middle Ages, and also a relaxation of the rules the nuns followed. In the period after the dissolution, the thesis will demonstrate that the social and economic position of former Gilbertine canons was much better than that of former nuns.

No description available.

This thesis uses records of criminal inquisitions from 1341 to 1404 to take up the question of medieval environmental consciousness. These records were created in the Provençal town of Manosque. The town’s region extended along six kilometres of the Durance river-valley, and is home to an ecosystem unique to the south of France and to the Mediterranean. This ecosystem was intelligibly manipulated through human industry to support, in part, a pre-plague population of about five thousand inhabitants. The statutes and privileges granted to the town illustrate a unique community, governed by the local commander of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem and negotiated through the efforts of the burgess elites, who were predominantly local merchants and notaries. Over the period of 1341 to 1404, the court dealt with twenty-eight tree-related crimes, including theft, damage, cutting, arson, disagreement, and assault of the Manosquin arboriculture. The court’s stated intention with these cases was to regulate deviant behaviour in regards to the established customs of property. Along with the addition of a corpus of modern environmental scholarship, a nuanced interpretation of the medieval European economy appears, in which the balance, or imbalance of human interaction with the environment play a critical role. So, the basic question posed herein is this: what can the conflicts of fourteenth-century rural inhabitants offer to modern scholars in search of pre-industrial environmental awareness?

Of several rhymed offices written for the Feast of the Visitation in the late fourteenth century, John of Jenstein's Office, Exurgens autem Maria, is possibly the first composed for the newly promulgated feast. Composed to implore the intercession of the Virgin to end the Great Schism, the office contains both poetic and prose liturgical items set to chant for the singing of the complete office cycle. Chants display characteristics of late medieval melodic style and compositional techniques. Being carefully planned, the office displays great unity of text and music throughout.

Anglo-Saxon legal concepts, particularly the principles of feud and dispute resolution, have a demonstrable influence on the themes and narrative structure of Beowulf. Beowulf's three main monster fights, with Grendel, Grendel's mother and the dragon, may be legally analyzed to determine why the hero has greater difficulties in each fight--in each, the hero's antagonist has a progressively stronger legal right to resistance, from the negligible legal position of Grendel up through the very ambiguous legal rights of the dragon in the final fight. An extremely important influence on each fight is the Anglo-Saxon concept of guardianship over place, or mund, which gives a legal dimension to the poem's emphasis on the sacrosanct and inviolable nature of the "close"--the great meadhall Heorot, or the gudsele ("battle-hall") of the Grendel kin or the eordsele ("earth-hall") of the dragon--and the relative justice of armed forays into such spaces.

The maritagium and the gift in tail were conditional gifts by which land from the patrimony might be provided to daughters and younger sons while ensuring that when such cadet branches failed the land would return to the central inheritance. The coalescence of the common law around coherent principles and the legislation of Edward I on land conveyance resulted in the demise of the maritagium as a land conveyance form and its replacement by the gift in tail. Also, attitudes about the place of women in the family and marriage and the economic changes of the thirteenth century, which encouraged the development of a flexible strategy between demesne and rented lands created a land sales market, caused the practice of granting marriage portions in land to daughters to be replaced by monetary and chattel gifts, while no such change was made in the provision for younger sons.

Under sixth century Roman law (Corpus Juris Civilis) and Frankish law (Pactus Legis Salicae), women, while lacking full juridical equality with men, nevertheless possessed many legal rights and freedoms. While similarities existed between the legal standings of women in both worlds, a fundamental difference underlay the laws and legal systems. Over centuries, the Roman legal system evolved from dependence on family for justice to dependence on the state. The presence of a relatively strong and stable Roman government, legal system, and policing force gradually decreased Roman women's legal dependence on their families and weakened the legal control of male agnates and husbands on Roman women's lives, creating a system which gave women legal recourse against kin (paterfamilias excepted). Frankish law was more dependent on family and kin for enforcement; hence, Frankish women, lacking legal recourse against family, were subject to greater legal control by male relatives.

This dissertation uses psychoanalytic theory to examine the similar portrayals of monstrous femininity in two Middle English poems, Robert Henryson’s the Testament of Cresseid and the Awntyrs off Arthure. In the Testament, Cresseid’s leprosy is interpreted through Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, suggesting that Cresseid experiences the abject to create a new identity as a leper. Rather than view Cresseid’s dream as an assembly of very real divinities who pass judgment over her sleeping body, I interpret the dream in a strictly physiological sense, arguing that Cresseid not only creates the judgment from her own conflicted psychology, but actively shapes her own destiny. Cresseid’s disease does not annihilate her identity, but gives her a significant position in society, because her status as a leper facilitates the economy of salvation. I continue with Kristeva’s theory to understand the characterization of the grotesque corpse of Gaynour’s mother in the Awntyrs off Arthure. Her rotting body is doubly abject, both as a corpse and a mother. While abjection provides a useful opening for discussing the portraits of Gaynour and her mother, Kristeva’s theory does not consider all women in the text, and only confirms misogynist stereotypes. To supplement Kristeva, I use Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Jacques Lacan’s theory of desire to illuminate the text as a whole, and explain the role of the corpse in shaping the narrative. / Thesis (Master, English) -- Queen's University, 2009-08-20 03:15:54.674