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À la charnière entre deux siècles, Salomé fait office de lieu commun inévitable de la littérature et des arts. Cependant, aux côtés de la femme fatale, s'affirme la présence discrète mais tout aussi inévitable de la féminité fragile et bienveillante, formée sur le modèle de la princesse de conte et de l'héroïne de roman gothique, mais surtout sur celui de la vierge et martyre du roman édifiant, qu'il soit antiquisant ou contemporain. Parfois discrète jusqu'à l'illisibilité, cet archétype n'est légitimé dans sa fonction bienveillante que par un sacrifice. La signification religieuse du bouc émissaire reste à la fois lisible et efficace dans les structures narratives du roman, mais aussi dans le détail de l'écriture de ces personnages. Les figures mariales, magdaléennes ou féeriques sont soumises à la même épreuve de destruction, par laquelle l'édification qu'elles symbolisent se fait littéralement construction de sens, juxtaposition d'éléments esthétiques disparates mais efficaces par lesquels un personnage en vient à représenter allégoriquement la création artistique elle-même. En reliant le milieu du XIXe siècle aux années 1920 et en mettant les plus connus des héritiers de Baudelaire en perspective avec ceux dont le nom commence à peine à revenir à la postérité, l'enjeu de la recherche est d'établir dans quelle mesure ces représentations de la féminité bienveillante relèvent d'une permanence, d'un monument – au sens de monumentum – où la fin de siècle va non seulement contempler la mort d'une époque révolue, mais concentrer tout ce qui sert, à l'aube du XXe siècle, à théoriser l'art idéaliste. / At the crossroads between two centuries, Salome plays the part of a mandatory commonplace in art and literature. Nevertheless, next to the femme fatale and just as unavoidable, stands a fragile and benevolent form of feminity, molded in the cast of the fairytale princess and theGothic novel heroine, but inspired above all by the Virgin and Martyr of the edifying novel, be it antique or contemporary. As it might be discrete enough to become unreadable, this archetype's benevolence cannot be legitimated without a sacrifice. The religious meaning of the scapegoat remains just as obvious and as efficient in the novels' narrative structure, as well as in the detailsthrough which such characters are built. Marial, magdalenian and farylike characters must undergo the same destruction trial, through which their edifying meaning becomes a litteral building-up up meaning, by juxtaposing dissimilar and yet efficien aesthetic elements which turn the character into an allegory of artistic creation. By linking mid-19th century and the 1920es and by weaving a link between the most famous of Baudelaire's heirs and the ones whose name is just merging out of oblivion, the purpose of this study is to analyse how much these representations of benevolent femininity must be seen as a permanence, as a monument – or as a monumentum – where late-19th century will not only gaze a the death of a declining era, but concentrate all what will be used to theorize idealist artistic movements on the edge of the 20th century.

This thesis is an examination of English evocations of translatio studii et imperii during the Hundred Years War. According to the myth of translatio, intellectual and martial superiority were entwined and together moving ever-westwards, from Athens, to Rome, to Paris, and thence - the English claimed - to England. This study contributes to an understanding of how late-fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English aristocrats and clerics understood and legitimized their cultural struggle with France not only as a martial battle but also as an intellectual competition. It also explores how this struggle contributed to the cultural authority of libraries and book collections. The first chapter of this thesis traces the development of the translatio studii et imperii tradition from its ancient origins to its zenith in the reign King Charles V "the Wise" of France. This chapter serves to establish the historiographical implications of the translatio myth as well as the French translatio tradition to which the English responded. The second chapter of this study is devoted to a literary analysis of texts which explicitly evoke the translatio topos and which were composed or copied in England during the Hundred Years War, such as Bishop Richard de Bury's Philobiblon and Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon, as well as Oxford and Cambridge university foundation myths. The third chapter explores the extent to which late-medieval England's book culture resonated with English evocations of translatio. Central to this exploration is the underhanded acquisition of Charles V's monumental French royal library by the English regent of France, John, Duke of Bedford. As is attested in the writings of French court scholars, the monumental French royal library was held to symbolise France's cultural superiority over England during the Hundred Years War. Bedford's manoeuvre can be seen as a bid to transfer Europe's seat of learning, and by extant of power, to England. This thesis concludes with a consideration of the translatio myth's ambivalent implications for contentious master narratives such as the rise of nationalism and of the English language in late-medieval England.

CHARLES UNIVERSITY - FACULTY OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND ELT METHODOLOGY Relationships between the borrowed Old Norse adjectives in English and their Old English counterparts MA THESIS Supervisor: prof. PhDr. Jan Čermák, CSc. Author: Světlana Müllerová Abstract: The aim of this MA thesis is to examine the relationship between six word pairs, each comprising an Old Norse adjectival borrowing in Middle English and its Old English counterpart along with its Middle English reflex for further reference. The inquiry into their relationship involves an analysis of: their (i) formal aspects, (ii) syntactic properties, (iii) semantic fields and (iv) external factors possibly contributing to their obsolescence or survival, such as the restriction to certain text types or geographic localization, as suggested by the individual linguistic profiles in the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English and Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. The description of individual semantic fields of the given words is based on their semantic classification within the Historical Thesaurus of English. This analysis is based on the occurrences of the individual words as taken from the dictionaries Middle English Dictionary and Dictionary of Old English, and related corpora Dictionary of Old English Corpus and...

This thesis examines the life and works of the English Calvinist clergyman Daniel Featley (1582-1645) through the lens of various printed and manuscript sources, especially his manuscript notebooks in Oxford. It links his story and thought to the broader themes of early Stuart religious, political, and intellectual history. Chapter one analyses the first thirty- five years of Featley’s life, exploring how many of the features that underpin the major themes of Featley’s career—and which reemerged throughout his life—were formed and nurtured during Featley’s early years in Oxford, Paris, and Cornwall. There he emerges as an ambitious young divine in pursuit of preferment; a shrewd minister, who attempted to position himself within the ecclesiastical spectrum; and a budding polemicist, whose polemical exchanges were motivated by a pastoral desire to protect the English Church. Chapter two examines Featley’s role as an ecclesiastical licenser and chaplain to Archbishop George Abbot in the 1610s and 1620s. It offers a reinterpretation of the view that Featley was a benign censor, explores how pastoral sensitivities influenced his censorship, and analyses the parallels between Featley’s licensing and his broader ecclesiastical aims. Moreover, by exploring how our historiographical understandings of licensing and censorship have been clouded by Featley’s attempts to conceal that an increasingly influential anti- Calvinist movement was seizing control of the licensing system and marginalizing Calvinist licensers in the 1620s, this chapter (along with chapter 7) addresses the broader methodological issues of how to weigh and evaluate various vantage points. Chapters three and four analyse the publications resulting from Featley’s debates with prominent Catholic and anti-Calvinist leaders. These chapters examine Featley’s use of patristic tradition in these disputes, the pastoral motivations that underpinned his polemical exchanges, and how Featley strategically issued these polemical publications to counter Catholicism and anti-Calvinism and to promulgate his own alternative version of orthodoxy at several crucial political moments during the 1620s and 1630s. Chapter five focuses on how, in the 1620s and 1630s, the themes of prayer and preaching in his devotional work, Ancilla Pietatis, and collection of seventy sermons, Clavis Mystica, were complementary rather than contradictory. It also builds on several of the major themes of the thesis by examining how pastoral and polemical motivations were at the heart of these works, how Featley continued to be an active opponent—rather than a passive bystander and victim—of Laudianism, and how he positioned himself politically to avoid being reprimanded by an increasingly hostile Laudian regime. Chapter six explores the theme of ‘moderation’ in the events of the 1640s surrounding Featley’s participation at the Westminster Assembly and his debates with separatists. It focuses on how Featley’s pursuit of the middle way was both: a self-protective ‘chameleon- like’ survival instinct—a rudder he used to navigate his way through the shifting political and ecclesiastical terrain of this period—and the very means by which he moderated and manipulated two polarized groups (decidedly convictional Parliamentarians and royalists) in order to reoccupy the middle ground, even while it was eroding away. Finally, chapter seven examines Featley’s ‘afterlife’ by analysing the reception of Featley through the lens of his post-1660 biographers and how these authors, particularly Featley’s nephew, John Featley, depicted him retrospectively in their biographical accounts in the service of their own post-restoration agendas. By analysing how Featley’s own ‘chameleon-like’ tendencies contributed to his later biographers’ distorted perception of him, this final chapter returns to the major methodological issues this thesis seeks to address. In short, by exploring the various roles he played in the early Stuart English Church and seeking to build on and contribute to recent historiographical research, this study sheds light on the links between a minister’s pastoral sensitivities and polemical engagements, and how ministers pursued preferment and ecclesiastically positioned themselves, their opponents, and their biographical subjects through print.

La tesi si occupa di verificare l’influenza che i classici greci e latini hanno esercitato su i padri fondatori americani e più in particolare su Thomas Jefferson. La prima sezione tratteggia il contesto universitario e lo studio delle lingue classiche tra seicento e settecento, comprendendo non solo le università inglesi (Oxford e Cambridge) e scozzesi, ma anche i nuovi college nati nelle colonie americane. Tale analisi dei modelli e delle pratiche educative ha permesso, in effetti, di comprendere meglio l’influenza dei classici sui rivoluzionari americani. Nello specifico viene scandagliata a fondo l’educazione ricevuta da Jefferson. Tra i numerosi spunti di studio aperti da codesto argomento, il lavoro si concentra sulle modalità con cui i classici gli furono insegnati, sul suo Commonplace Book (una raccolta di brani tratti in parte da autori antichi letti in giovinezza) e su documentazione epistolare. Quest’ultima è oggetto particolare di studio, allo scopo di scoprire quali opere antiche Jefferson, in età adulta e durante la vecchiaia, lesse e apprezzò. Essendo un collezionista di libri, comprò moltissimi testi classici come dimostrano alcuni suoi manoscritti. Nonostante manchino dati precisi a riguardo, risulta inoltre che Jefferson, benché facesse largo uso di traduzioni, preferiva leggere in originale e che probabilmente abbia letto la maggior parte di questi libri durante il ritiro dalla vita politica. La seconda parte della tesi si concentra, invece, a indagare quanto la sua educazione classica abbia contributo alla formazione della sua personalità e delle sue idee, nonché alla forma stessa del suo pensiero in merito ad alcune tematiche. Lo studio è di conseguenza dedicato all’esperienza umana di Jefferson, in particolare alla sua riflessione sulla morte e sull’eternità, temi fortemente legati alla sua ricezione di idee epicuree e stoiche. Epicureismo e Stoicismo rappresentano, in definitiva, i due sistemi filosofici antichi che hanno maggiormente influenzato la sua personalità e il suo pensiero. / The aim of the present work is to evaluate the impact of the ancient classics on the American Founding Fathers, with a particular focus on Thomas Jefferson. The first section gives a wide portrait of the academic context in which the Founders were educated, comprising not only of Oxford, Cambridge, and the Scottish universities, but also the colonial colleges. The evaluation of the educational practices in use at the time makes it possible to understand better the classical impact on revolutionary Americans. In particular, this analysis studies in depth Jefferson's education. Of the many possible perspectives and approaches to this topic, the present work focuses on the way ancient classics were taught to him, his Commonplace Book, which reports part of the ancient classics he read during his youth, and his correspondence. The latter has been studied especially to understand which other ancient writers he read, valued, and esteemed in his adulthood and old age. As book collector, Jefferson bought an incredible number of ancient classics, as attested by a few manuscripts of his book lists. Despite the dearth of sure evidence, it is very likely that he read the ancient works largely during his retirement. He loved reading them in the original, though he made great use of translations. The second part of this work is dedicated to investigating how Jefferson's classical education contributed to the building of his personality and ideas, as well as how he elaborated specific classical themes in his own life. The study is thus focused on Jefferson's personal human experience, specifically on his reflection on human mortality and the afterlife. These themes, indeed, are strictly linked to his reception of Epicurean and Stoic tenets, the two ancient philosophical systems which had the greatest and most profound impact on Jefferson's personality and thought.