Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1354. Adviser: Robert D. Fulk. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 18, 2007)."

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My doctoral research concerns the use of song within narrative works in the Middle Ages. I have concentrated first on the substantial tradition in Old French of incorporating songs in this manner; and second, on the importance of this tradition to Chaucer, a poet who includes songs in nearly all his narrative poetry, and who was deeply familiar with many of the late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century French works of this type. In order to demonstrate the connection between this very large range of French narratives and Chaucer, it has been necessary first to define the French tradition on its own terms, since even by French scholars it has rarely been treated collectively, and some of the works have barely been explored. This assessment of the French material has involved a fresh attempt to define the lyric interpolations themselves, when (as in the majority of thirteenth-century works) they take the form of brief snatches of song known as refrains. Since the nature of these refrains has been a source of controversy among French scholars, my study begins by analysing them both as texts and as melodies, in order to assess their status and function within the narratives. I then go on to discuss works ranging from Jean Renart's Guillaume de Dole to Adam de la Halle's Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, to the dits amoureux of Machaut and Froissart. The influence of this French tradition upon Chaucer is examined first of all in Chaucer's early poems, through his direct knowledge and assimilation of Machaut and Froissart and other contemporary French poets. It is then traced, more indirectly, through Chaucer's reading of Boccaccio and Boethius. I thus consider Chaucer's use of Boccaccio's Il Filostrato in the light of Boccaccio's own knowledge of this French tradition from his position in the Angevin court of Naples. In addition, by investigating French translations of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae, I examine the structural importance of this work as a prosimetrum both upon French narratives containing songs, and upon Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. In this way I aim to show that the influences upon his practice of combining lyric and narrative are both multiple and multiply connected. The aim of this dissertation is therefore two-fold: first, to contribute to the understanding of a substantial but little-known area of French studies, and second, to renew the discussion of Chaucer's relation to French love poetry by seeing his work as a late medieval development in England of a distinctive, and distinctively French mode of composition. Throughout the course of my work, my wider interest is in the way in which the juxtaposition of the two categories of lyric and narrative shows us that our understanding of medieval genre is in need of refinement. In particular, by taking account of the presence of musical notation in the manuscripts of several of the French narratives, I hope to suggest that some of our assumptions about the 'literary' nature of medieval genres should be revised, especially as works of this type often seem composed precisely in order to create and exploit contrasts of genre of a musical, as well as a poetic kind.

An interest in exploring the roots of the Gregorian reform of the Church in the eleventh century led to the reading of the polemical writings by means of which papalists and imperialists contended in the latter decades of the century. It became apparent that argumentation from both sides substantially relied for expression on the metaphorical usage of the terms body and soul and their pertinent synonyms such as flesh and spirit. In examining the use of these terms—which is the burden of this thesis—it is necessary to study their pre-history. Firstly, as the eleventh century writings examined here (the Libelli de Lite, vols, one and two) abundantly show, the polemicists very often cite body/soul metaphorical usage from the Fathers of the Church as well as from the New Testament, particularly from Paul. Since these authorities in turn rest upon a Jewish basis in the context of a Hellenistic Jewish background these formative influences had to be studied. In this way, exploring the roots and subsequent formation of the medieval mentality as it grasped the meaning of body and soul and their mutual relationship one could understand the force of the eleventh century polemical use of the metaphor.^ The purpose of this thesis then is to explore the use of the body/soul metaphor in order to see specifically to what extent the contending parties agreed in their acceptance of the body/soul relationship as well as disagreed. From this understanding one might gauge the effectiveness of the polemical use of the metaphor in the social and political cause for which it was used. Since the metaphor underlies the major issues of simony, Nicolaitism, lay investiture and finally the struggle for supremacy between the Empire and the Papacy, the thesis examines it as cutting across these individual contentions and as representing the core issue, i.e. the essentially theological problem of the right relationship between the spiritual and the temporal or material orders. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation seeks to answer two important questions about the reign of Louis the Pious: What was Louis' personal and intellectual conception of the nature of kingship? What political and moral role did his second wife, Judith Augusta, play in support of her husband's position? The author contends that Louis' reign was beset by a power struggle of epic proportions, one that pitted the monarch against the most influential lords of the realm and against the political aspirations of the Frankish Church hierarchy. The root of this struggle was the contradiction between Louis' conviction of the priestly nature of royal power, a concept bequeathed to him by his father Charlemagne and one to which he held tenaciously, and that of the Frankish hierarchy that sought to interpose itself between the monarch and God. Judith supported her husband's position with unstinting loyalty. Her historic reputation is nothing more than the result of personal attacks launched by spokesmen of the Frankish Church in an effort to undermine her credibility, and thus the position of Louis. Only in this century have historians begun to view Judith in a more benign light. The author, however, sees Judith as a more active participant in the affairs of state, as one who wielded real power in support of the Frankish monarchy. The Franks viewed the power of the king to be of a sacral nature; the adoption of that concept by Charlemagne provided the foundation of the renovatio in the Frankish realm. During his reign, the Papacy and the Frankish Church were clearly subservient to the will of the monarch and both were cleverly employed to promote the ideas and policies of Charlemagne's imperium christianum. The reign of Louis the Pious is treated in an episodic manner in keeping with the presentation of that period in the sources. Emphasis is given to the role of the Ordinatio Imperii of 817 since that document, viewed initially by all as a guarantee of imperial unity, provided the Frankish bishops and their allies with a weapon against the monarch. Louis' marriage to Judith and the subsequent birth of their son Charles were the events that endangered the role of the Frankish Church as the arbiter of power in the kingdom. The catalyst came when Louis attempted to provide his new son with a portion of his royal inheritance, a move that contravened the Ordinatio. The author presents a detailed account of the efforts of the Church hierarchy to undermine the concept that the monarch embodied the imperium christianum, not by attacking Louis directly, but by willful attempts to sully the reputation of the monarch's most loyal supporters, especially the empress Judith. In this 'dress rehearsal' for that most infamous of all Church-crown confrontations, the Investiture Controversy, Louis was forced to his own 'Canossa' on three different occasions. The victor of this struggle, the author contends, was undoubtedly Louis, for the duration of his reign and that of Charles II the Bald. The images in contemporary manuscripts from both reigns show the king in direct contact with God; Frankish bishops are not represented in portraits of the king. Even Judith, the empress and indefatigable supporter of the sacral nature of her husband's position, is represented positively and without any reference to the Church hierarchy.

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Most studies of direct discourse in Old English poetry and especially in Beowulf have ignored the emphasis on speech in Anglo-Saxon society as a form of action similar to yet distinct from other types of human activity. The application of recent sociolinguistic and philosophic insights known collectively as "speech act theory" or "pragmatics" provides an interesting and productive new way of looking at direct discourse in the poem. The distribution of speeches in the poem does not appear to be governed by rules analogous to the rules governing turn-taking in "ordinary conversation." Instead, a character's representation in direct discourse appears to be largely dependent on both his social and moral status. In addition, the Beowulf poet, with one exception, appears to avoid speech-within-speech. Possibly as a consequence of this tendency, the various scop songs are always represented in indirect, rather than direct, discourse. The classification of portions of speeches as specific types of speech acts provides significant insights into the relationship of direct discourse in the poem to its social context. The beot, for example, is a specific type of commissive, an utterance in which the speaker obligates himself to perform a future act. The beot corresponds in several major respects to the modern notion of a contract. On the other hand, speakers in the poem do not seem to utter requests unless they possess some inherent right to have the listener perform the act requested. Expressives, utterances that have as their primary purpose the expression of the speaker's psychological state, seem to be limited only to the single case of a king thanking God. Speakers apparently indirectly thank individuals by uttering favorable judgements on their prowess or wisdom. In addition, there are several instances in the poem of declarations, utterances that radically alter reality merely by the fact of their being spoken. The coherence of speeches, the way that individual speech acts are combined to make meaningful extended discourse, can be viewed as a function of the relevance of succeeding speech acts to their audience. In the first part of the epic, Beowulf's adventures in Denmark, all the speeches can be considered relevant in terms of each speaker's immediate audience. In the second part of the epic, however, the speeches become less concerned with the characters to whom they are apparently directed. The growing irrelevance of the speeches serves possibly to reinforce symbolically the growing elegiac mood that dominates the last part of the poem. The application of speech act theory also allows episodes such as Hrothgar's "Sermon" to be perceived more clearly as functions of their immediate social context rather than solely as examples of Christian homiletics. But most significantly, looking at the speeches as discrete actions reveals their importance as a vital part of the narrative movement of the poem.

Compared to the romances of Chretien de Troyes, Partonopeu de Blois has been little studied up to the present. Early studies, hampered by an inadequate edition, were limited largely to an examination of sources and/or comparative traditions; the romance was often mentioned in passing in works encompassing the entire genre or all of Old French medieval literature, but was rarely studied in depth. When the romance became accessible through Gildea's edition (1967), it was included in such studies as Hanning's examination of the concept of the individual and his relation to society, Bruckner's analysis of the functioning of the convention of hospitality, and Ferrante's study of the role of women in medieval literature. Such studies have done much to expand our understanding of Partonopeu. Because of the scope of these studies--wide-ranging examinations of a theme, concept, or convention-- the discussion of Partonopeu has been a means rather than an end, and critical insights on the poem are fragmented. The present thesis attempts to study in depth some aspects of the romance in the context of an examination of that work alone, while profiting from the perceptions of scholars who have adduced the poem as evidence for their various conclusions. Much of this study is devoted to an examination of the structure of Partonopeu and the ways in which that structure contributes to the elaboration of meaning in poem. The essentially bipartite construction, while not sacrificing nuances of composition, underlines the theme of growth and personal fulfilment. This bipartition is intensified by the use in the first part of the poem of material and a tone that would not be inappropriate in a lai, devices that are droppd in the second part (Chapter II); and by a dramatic reversal of male and female roles and influence (Chapter IV). Another aspect of this study is essentially of intertextual and extratextual interest. An attempt is made to situate the romance in the context of a small corpus of roughly contemporaneous romances (Chapter V). The study of the role of the narrator, a role that constitutes the greatest innovation of the poem, is in part intended to underscore the relationship, mediated by the poet's creation, the narrator, between poet and audience; the functions of this "character," both intra- and extratextual, are examined (Chapter III).

Although later medieval St. Albans Abbey has long been renowned as a preeminent center for the writing of historical chronicles, previous studies have not acknowledged that the monastic community also had a sustained tradition of visually representing the house’s institutional history. This dissertation demonstrates that between the late eleventh and early sixteenth centuries, the monks of St. Albans depicted and evoked their abbey’s past in a large and diverse collection of artworks, ranging from illuminated manuscripts and pilgrim badges to monumental paintings and architecture. Monastic historical imagery was rarely produced during the Middle Ages, but the images and objects from St. Albans present a remarkably rich and complete account of the abbey’s history from the time of its illustrious origins through the eve of its dissolution. Using an interdisciplinary approach to contextualize these artworks within the monastery’s history and traditions, this study argues that the visual historiography of St. Albans served as a potent vehicle for the expression and self-fashioning of the abbey’s corporate identity and historical memory. As will be demonstrated, this vast corpus of imagery focuses on three fundamental elements of the monastery’s past: Saint Alban and his early cult, the eighth-century foundation of the monastery by King Offa of Mercia, and the house’s post-foundation history. Through these artworks, many of which have not previously received the attention of art historians, the monks of St. Albans documented, celebrated, and occasionally manipulated their abbey’s long and distinguished history, thereby providing a compelling justification for its continued prosperity and prestige. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Art History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2017. / November 9, 2017. / historiography, identity, medieval art, monasticism, St. Albans / Includes bibliographical references. / Richard K. Emmerson, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Lynn Jones, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; David F. Johnson, University Representative; Kyle Killian, Committee Member; Stephanie Leitch, Committee Member.

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