Thesis--Berlin. / Vita: p. [3] of cover.

Includes bibliographical references. / Papers presented at the 8th and 9th Conference on Medieval Studies sponsored by the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University ... held May 2-5, 1976 respectively.

abstract: This study looks at Geoffrey Chaucer's use of the color green as it appears in regards to the settings and antagonists of three of the Canterbury Tales: the Wife of Bath's Tale, the Friar's Tale, and the Merchant's Tale. Following the allegorical approach, it argues that the color green in these tales is symbolic of Fortune, modeled upon Boethian philosophy and the allegory of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's thirteenth century French poem, The Romance of the Rose. It suggests, furthermore, that Fortune is a potential overarching theme of the Canterbury Tales, and that the tales, in turn, should be read as a cohesive unit. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2014

Early medieval Europe is not well known for its crowds, unlike Antiquity or the later Middle Ages. After sixth-century demographic and urban decline, crowds were smaller, less spontaneous, and easier to control than in other periods of European history. This study, the first comprehensive analysis of collective behaviors and representations in Europe from c. 500 to c. 1000, argues that crowd-scarce early medieval societies nevertheless organized their institutions around the behavior of crowds. Assemblies, festivals, fairs, and the church’s invisible multitude of saints ensured that collective behavior remained central to early medieval public life. Under the impact of Christian values and new physical realities, elites abandoned old prejudices against mobs and rabbles while embracing the crowd’s legitimacy, with enduring results for later medieval political and religious life. In chapter 1, archaeological and demographic evidence reveal how early medieval gatherings co-opted seasonal agglomerations such as markets, harvests, and festivals. Early medieval gatherings depended on the temporary accumulation of populations, and so became less spontaneous than their Roman antecedents. Chapter 2 draws on the sociology of crowds and on written and archaeological sources to trace the decline of late antique crowd spaces (the old circuses, theaters, baths, and colonnades of Roman cities). It shows why and where early medieval elites developed new, medieval gatherings, such as royal and church assemblies, hunts, armies and war-bands, and political ceremonies. In chapter 3, the semantic history of collectivity in early medieval Latin and vernacular writings demonstrates how technical and connotative distinctions in ancient words for crowds became attenuated in the face of new concepts. The same word that had meant “a dangerous rabble” in the first century could be used to describe a sacred gathering of monks in the ninth century. Chapter 4 studies patterns to which crowds conformed in the imaginations revealed by written sources: clichés and type-scenes which repeated themselves in saints’ lives, histories, liturgy, and poems. Many of these literary devices reinforced links between crowds and legitimacy. Nevertheless, the chapter ends with counter-examples, in which elites expressed anxieties about crowds using new, gendered polemics. Chapter 5 investigates rituals and their representations, like royal assemblies and liturgical rites, which arose at the intersection of early medieval material horizons for physical assembly and early medieval mentalities. It argues that the role of crowds in early medieval ritual gatherings, and their representation in visual media, endured in subsequent medieval political, religious, and legal institutions. It concludes by showing how eleventh-century demographic and urban expansion sparked a new crowd regime, which departed but also arose from the concepts and practices shaped in the first half-millennium of the Middle Ages. / History

This project examines medieval adaptations of the image of the New Jerusalem, an image of heaven drawn from the biblical book of Revelation. The book of Revelation was composed at a period of social and spiritual crisis for early Christians, when they were a persecuted minority in Asia Minor and expected imminent apocalypse. Their situation could not be more different from that of late medieval Christians in England, who constituted a cultural majority and lived long after the expected millennium. Late medieval English adaptations of the image of the New Jerusalem detach the city of God from its roots in agonistic cultural conflict and instead, relying on the theology of Saint Augustine, imagine a heaven interwoven with the temporal and flawed world. I examine seven medieval English poems: The Prick of Conscience, Sir Owayne, The Voyage of Saint Brendan, Pearl, The House of Fame, Sir Orfeo, and Saint Erkenwald. Some of these texts are overtly religious while others have been traditionally associated with secular discourse, but they share an intended lay audience. I show that when the heavenly city appears in literature designed for an increasingly urbanized laity, it emphasizes the spiritual imperative to discern truth from fiction, fantasy from fact, city of God from city of man. / English

This thesis comprises an analysis of the Norwich aldermen who were first elected to that office between 1461 and 1509. The dissertation seeks to further the understanding of the structure and contributions of this civic elite within this prominent medieval English city. Although late medieval Norwich has naturally received a certain amount of attention from recent historians, its comparatively small but very powerful governing body has not yet been analyzed in the way it clearly seems to deserve. This study involves social, economic, political and religious themes. The first chapter investigates the role of the aldermen in the governmental structure of the city; the aldermen's cursus honorum; their exonerations and absence from their duties; and the costs and benefits of office. Chapter Two considers the occupations and trades of the aldermen and examines their influence within Norwich and in England as a whole. The third chapter tackles the elusive subject of wealth and attempts to determine the aldermen's financial status. The fourth chapter is concerned with the real estate holdings of the Norwich aldermen, both in Norwich and beyond. Chapter Five explores the families, households, and acquaintances of the aldermen. Among the various other topics considered here are intermarriage and provisions for wives and children. The final two chapters investigate the religious and charitable practices of the aldermen, considering pious donations, expressions of personal belief, charitable bequests, and guild participation. A study of the aldermen's wills (65 of which survive in their entirety) forms the basis for chapters five through seven. A wide range of original evidence is used for the study. Civic assembly records, court rolls, subsidy records, Yarmouth customs accounts as well as wills comprise the main library of sources. Among others that have been consulted are records of the Guild of St George, royal patent and close rolls, and inquisitions post mortem. Thanks to the abundance of such original records, the aldermen of late medieval Norwich are probably better documented than almost all their counterparts elsewhere in England. One of this thesis' major purposes is to discover whether the conclusions produced by Professor Thrupp in The Merchant Class of Medieval London fifty years ago also apply to the mercantile elite in one of England's major provincial towns. The aldermen of late medieval Norwich tended to be the most affl).Jent lay residents of the town. They were leaders in their crafts and occupations, generous to religious and charitable concerns, and often related to one another by blood or marriage. The aldermen formed a powerful and small elite within the city. While they sometimes benefited from their political involvement in various ways, they also served out of a strong sense of civic duty and pride. This thesis concludes that, under the leadership of the aldermen of 1461-1509, Norwich remained a generally stable city, and the authority of its aldermen was, by and large, recognised and respected by its residents.

The dissertation considers how the anonymous authors of six moral and religious pseudo-ballade refrain poems first attested in the late fourteenth-century Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. poet.a.1) manipulate devices such as speaking persona, word-play, and allegory in ways that support rhetorical strategies hitherto unrecognized in Middle English lyric. The study begins with stemmatic analyses that identify, as far as is possible from the physical record, the archetypal text, or "work," of each poem. Chapter One then provides an overview of scholarship that has focussed on two important technical devices used in the Vernon refrain lyrics-the speaking voice and the refrain---and articulates how the lyrics use those devices in hitherto unrecognized ways. Chapter One concludes by considering the kinds of word-play found in other Middle English literature, in order to define that found in the Vernon lyrics. In the next six chapters, each of the six "works" is considered as a communicative event. Using mainly historicist, formalist, and reader-response methodologies, I explore, for each poem in turn, how the poet moulds language to signify indirectly so that the message is communicated figuratively, and how the implied audience is cast into a specific role vis-a-vis the communicative action in a way that inflects the message. I also explore how the rhetorical strategies of the poems are informed by various theories of signification, which are defined in relation to the socio-linguistic circumstances and philosophical currents of the time, and consider the poems in relation to other medieval, mostly earlier Middle English, lyrics. In the Conclusion, findings are assembled to indicate how the recovery of the Vernon refrain lyrics' rhetorical art expands the parameters that currently define Middle English lyric. I also turn from considering the implied audience of the "works" to considering the historical audience of the Vernon manuscript, and suggest that the recovery of the Vernon refrain lyrics' rhetorical art bolsters theories that maintain the Vernon manuscript was intended, at least in part, for an upper gentry or aristocratic audience, and that its thorough Englishness is more of a polemic assertion of the strength of the English language than a reflection of socio-linguistic conditions.

The Old English Solomon and Saturn II has received virtually no extended critical commentary since Robert J. Menner's 1941 edition of it and its companion piece, Solomon and Saturn I. The few brief attempts made to explain the poem, moreover, have been without reference to the body of OE sapiential thought to which it belongs. This thesis offers a close structural and thematic reading of SS II as it appears against the background of general notions and concepts belonging to the body of OE wisdom. The thesis begins with a review of the poem's history and related literary criticism. Lexical and thematic material is then selected from the entire OE corpus to present those aspects of OE wisdom that bear on an understanding of SS II. The thesis addresses the conceptual and intellectual formulations of wisdom in the Anglo-Saxon period, rather than simply its literary forms, and it takes into account both pre-conversion and Christian views on human and divine wisdom. The thesis then illustrates how SS II reflects certain patterns that exist in the general OE wisdom tradition. The narrator's framework establishes a metaphysical context for the whole poem that is consistent with the Christian Anglo-Saxon concept of divine Wisdom. The epistemological premises of the debate itself, as well as a core of beliefs and implicit assumptions shared by the opponents, Solomon and Saturn, reflect the tensions and harmonies that appear in the broad view of OE wisdom. The interaction between Saturn and Solomon--the one a travelling Chaldean noble, the other the Old Testament King, is examined next. The competition between an epic rhetorical model, namely, the visit of a roving hero to the court of an established king, and the Christian typology that surrounds the wise King Solomon, is arguably a significant source of meaning in the poem. The tension between literary and figural patterns provides an interpretive matrix against which the audience can follow the discourse of the two men. Finally, the thesis turns to the structure of the SS II dialogue and demonstrates that far from being a simple contest of wit and "wisdom," the poem is a sophisticated process of education through dialogue whose central concern is the emancipation of the mind from the illusions of language. The dialogue shares several "habits of thought" with Boethius' Consolation Philosophiae and Augustine's Soliloquia in the process by which it restores to Saturn's infirm and misguided mind its natural wisdom and its power of interpretation.

Au Moyen Age, le bestiaire jouait un role fondamental en tant que cle interpretative du monde parallele des animaux. En France, ce genre a connu un succes enorme au Moyen Age. De tous les bestiaires, c'est le Bestiaire marial qui se distingue par son sujet et par son choix d'animaux. Ce bestiaire francais, le dernier du Moyen Age et qui nous reste dans un manuscrit unique, se singularise pour plusieurs raisons. D'abord l'auteur anonyme l'ecrit pour un auditoire specifique. Ensuite il y fait la comparaison avec Notre-Dame (non pas le Christ). Et enfin, il traite des animaux qui ne sont pas presents dans les autres bestiaires francais. Ainsi il s'agit d'une oeuvre unique de plusieurs points de vue. Dans cette these, nous donnons la premiere edition critique de cette oeuvre importante.

Like certain of his more reactionary religious contemporaries (most notably, Nicholas of Lyra, O.F.M., and John Wyclif), Chaucer concerns himself with critically reflexive literature. Through his various narrative and exegetical efforts, he produces--in The Canterbury Tales especially--what amounts to "Christian midrashim" or a literary tarqum as he, like Nicholas and Wyclif before him, directly addresses matters of textual and referential authority, of relational significances, and of the text's apparently intended personal effects. Reflecting the logic and concerns of the central Text of the age and apparently formulating their shared concept of the literal, of its signification, and of its function from Hebraic rather than Latin referential categories, each of these writers after his fashion and field calls for a return to ethical and social praxis based upon a responsible interpretation of the Divine Word according to its inherent logic and meaning. Being concerned to re-establish the pertinence of auctorite for the individual and the age, they thus present "right reading" as an intellectual endeavour under moral imperative. Involving both author and reader in the text, they clarify the sensus literalis (the essential significance of a text) as being not only "what the words signify" (Augustine), but what the words were intended to signify by their Author--as this is supported by the body of received ecriture and as it is accessible to those who approach the text in spiritual and moral readiness, prepared to engage actively the material (and its Author) by activating it in their own immediate experience. My use of such terms as midrashim and tarqum from the Jewish tradition to describe Chaucer's unique contribution to Fourteenth century literature is quite intentional, for it foregrounds the seminal--and Semitic--source, semiotic, and structural logic that underlies the particular theory of the sensus literalis which Nicholas develops from a marriage of rabbinical and patristic sources, which Wyclif gives a distinctively English expression and application, and which Chaucer seems to adapt to poetic forms. My thesis, attempting to deal in a fuller sense with referential meaning generally and with the sensus literalis specifically, explores the ways in which Nicholas, Wyclif, and, after them, Chaucer approach the deeper significance of the literal. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)