Factual accounts of revenants – the risen dead – seized the medieval imagination in the early eleventh century, and were recorded by serious historians and ecclesiastics as true. They then began to appear in secular imaginative literature and art, growing progressively more elaborate and frightening throughout the Middle Ages whilst retaining many of the religious overtones expressed overtly in the ecclesiastic tales. By the early modern and modern period, the tales were removed from any overt religious context and were told as purely imaginative literature. The academic half of this thesis explores the influence on the tales of the Christian doctrine of resurrection and the cult of the body of Christ and of the saints, then traces the migration of those tales into imaginative literature from the Middle Ages to the present. It identifies key motifs from the medieval chronicles and imaginative literature that continue to appear in modern stories, and explores the extent to which Christian eschatology altered perceptions of the dead and why, in an increasingly secular context, fascination with such tales continued into modern literature, what part fear of death played throughout this period, and how that fear was expressed, first in an ecclesiastical context, then in imaginative literature through horror stories. The creative half of my thesis is a literary fiction novel updating a medieval revenant tale, the Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead, to twenty-first century New England.

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The three works of Procopius of Caesarea, the History of the Wars, the Buildings and the Secret History, form a corpus which can be profitably studied as a whole. My thesis is a typology of the visual in Procopius’ corpus, which is embedded in a study of narrative technique. It concerns itself with the representation of material reality and the complex relationship between materiality and the text. It utilises the digressive and the descriptive as an indirect entry point to expose Procopius’ literary finesse and his use of poikilia. In the first half of this thesis, the main object of my study is the representation of the material world in Procopius. The first chapter is devoted to the first book of the Buildings as it depicts the city of Constantinople. The second chapter moves to the representation of space and the third chapter to that of objects of all sizes and kinds. From these three different angles, I demonstrate how the visual is deeply charged with both ideological and meta-textual intentions. The second half of the thesis goes beyond materiality to examine what I discuss as the imaginaire of Procopius. The fourth chapter examines the way violence is depicted in a material and spectacular manner as well as its meta-textual implications, and the fifth and final chapter addresses the omnipresence of the supernatural in the corpus as well as Procopius’ self-representation as narrator and character. While preoccupied to some extent with ideological and political concerns, this thesis is first and foremost centred on the text itself and how its relationship to the description of material culture throws light on a crucial author on the cusp between the classical and the medieval imaginaire, one of the most significant authors in Byzantine literary culture.

This thesis studies, for the first time, Bede’s use of the image of the Jewish temple across all his writings. Not only analysing how Bede developed earlier Christian interpretations of the temple, it also uses the temple-image to shine light on under-explored aspects of his theological thought. Throughout, I argue that the communal understanding of the temple-image in Bede’s monastery helped shape his exegesis; we should think of Bede, not as an individual scholar, but as a monk engaged in an active discourse concerning the Bible. <strong>Chapter 1</strong> introduces the thesis, providing the historiographical and historical context. Bede’s exegesis existed within a long tradition of Christian interpretation of the temple, as <strong>Chapter 2</strong> shows; one image could be interpreted in diverse ways by Bede and therefore this thesis follows a thematic approach. <strong>Chapter 3</strong> studies Bede’s engagement with the cosmic interpretation of the temple, in particular his use of the image to emphasise the Anglo-Saxons’ participation in the universal Church. Analysing Bede’s interpretation of the Jewish priesthood, <strong>Chapter 4</strong> argues that he championed an élite of ordained clerics in the role of reforming the temple-Church. This Church clashed with the Body of Satan, symbolised by the Tower of Babel, concerning which the contemporary Northumbrian situation shaped Bede’s understanding. For Bede, the temple-image stressed Christ’s humanity and his sacrificial priesthood, as <strong>Chapter 5</strong> shows. Bede urged the faithful to shape themselves as pure temples in imitation of Christ, directing them towards union with God. A diachronic overview of Bede’s writings on the temple in <strong>Chapter 6</strong> highlights the importance of the years immediately prior to 716, the period in which the Codex Amiatinus was created at his monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow, in the development of Bede’s interpretation of the temple. We should consider the possibility that Bede’s temple-commentaries drew upon interpretations formed in this communal, monastic, context.

This thesis investigates cognition and knowledge in a rich selection of late medieval Florentine commonplace books (zibaldoni) and diaries (ricordanze) with a special focus on Giovanni Rucellai’s Zibaldone Quaresimale. In Chapter Two a new methodology, named Mental Model Framework in History (MMFH), is elaborated. By studying mental processes such as categorisation and decision making, MMFH enables us to study cognition in historical documents. The dissertation is based on a computer-assisted analysis described in Chapter Three . This has brought together a number of technologies (Natural Language Processing, Semantic Web, Text Encoding Initiative) and used them according to the interpretative goals of the MMFH. Chapter Four investigates the knowledge-constructing practice of late medieval Florentines, and concludes that commonplace books and diaries were tools of information management and knowledge transmission. The core chapters study four domains of thinking: space, time, agency and perception. Chapter Five analyses social recognition and judgement in Renaissance Florence and reveals how a new ethical thought took shape, one that prepared the transition to capitalism. By applying decision and game theory, Chapter Six examines horizontal friendship, a bond that functioned as an informal but risky social insurance in Florence. Chapter Seven studies how Florentines used superlatives to construct a hierarchy of the world, with Florence on the top. This was the manifestation of a fierce competition within and outside the walls of Florence, competition that strongly influenced the social and physical environment of the city. By studying selection, periodisation and causal reasoning, Chapter Eight pinpoints the gradual secularisation of the conception of time. The thesis concludes that the late medieval revolution in information culture marked by the gradual transition from an overwhelmingly oral culture to an increasingly literate culture produced quantitative and qualitative changes in human thought. This largely contributed to the birth of modern thought, and to the late medieval transformation of the social and physical environment.

L’objectif de la thèse est de rassembler des arguments permettant de déterminer si la seconde partie de la légende mariale moyen-néerlandaise Beatrijs (vv. 865-1038) est originale ou plutôt l’œuvre d’un continuateur. Dans la séquence narrative dont il est question, l’auteur développe le thème de la confession, préalable spirituel à la rémission des péchés. En premier lieu, l’analyse stylistique objective (c.-à-d. basée sur des paramètres quantitatifs) de l’ensemble du corpus-texte nous a permis de ne déceler aucune différence notable entre les deux parties de la légende. Ensuite, par l’étude de la structure diégétique, nous avons tenté d’expliquer le rôle du processus pénitentiel dans l’œuvre moyen-néerlandaise. Grâce aux principes d’analyse sémiotique de Propp, Greimas, Courtès et Dundes, nous avons pu remarquer que la légende présente une double articulation narrative reposant sur une double quête : le rejet du péché par le retour à l’espace hétérotopique initial (dans la première partie) et la quête de la pureté originale par la confession des péchés (dans la seconde partie). Cette dernière quête semble donc très logiquement faire partie intégrante de l’œuvre médiévale. The aim of this thesis is to determine whether the second part of the Middle-Dutch legend Beatrijs (vv. 865-1038) is original. In the final sequences, the author highlights the role of confession in the absolution of sins. In the first part of our work, we carried out a stylistic analysis of the whole legend that rested on quantifiable parameters. As no significant differences could be observed between the two parts, the stylistic homogeneity seemed obvious. In the second part of our research, the emphasis was laid on the narrative structural approach. On the basis of the theories of semioticians (Propp, Greimas, Courtès and Dundes), we could analyse the legend as a bimotifemic « complex tale » in which the success of the first quest in the first part (return to the heterotopic point of departure) must be considered the first stage in the expiation. The second quest in the second part (return to the original purity) can only be achieved through confession. This physical and spiritual movement ensures absolution and salvation : for that reason we can assert that the confession process is an integral part of the medieval legend as a whole.

This thesis examines the role of women in the Parisian economy in the late thirteenth century. The Livre des metiers of Etienne Boileau offers normative provisions regarding societal structures that permitted but restricted the participation of women, while the tax rolls commonly known as the roles de la taille de Philippe le Bel furnish numbers which show their actual participation. While these sources are well known, they have not heretofore been rigorously examined. Conclusions about women based on them have been amorphous. Married women are nearly invisible in these records, but unmarried women and widows headed 13.6% of Parisian workshops. Women monopolized the Parisian silk industry. About one-third of Parisian women in the late thirteenth century worked in jobs traditionally considered "women's work," including the preparation of food and clothing, peddling food on the street, and providing personal services. The other two-thirds did nearly every kind of work that men did. A "putting out" system was well in place in Paris at this time. Women classified as chambrieres or ouvrieres worked at home, spinning and weaving raw materials provided by an entrepreneur and selling back to the entrepreneur the finished product. Working at home allowed a woman to combine household duties with production for the marketplace. Girls usually learned a trade by working alongside their parents. Formal apprenticeships were less common for girls than for boys. While women could and did participate in nearly every trade, their numbers were concentrated in the lowest-paid metiers. The few women who practiced trades dominated by men were much more successful financially.

Torre Abbey was a rural Premonstratensian monastery in south-east Devon. Although in many ways atypical of its order, not least in the quality and quantity of its surviving source material, Torre provides an excellent case study of how a medium-sized medieval monastery interacted with the world around it, and how the abbey itself was affected by that interaction. Divided into three broad sections, this thesis first examines the role of local landowners and others as patrons of the house in the most obvious sense, that of the bestowal of lands or other assets upon the house. Torre was relatively successful in this regard, and an examination of the architectural and archaeological record indicates a continuation of that relationship after the thirteenth century. The second section notes areas of conflict with the laity. Disputes could and did arise over both temporal and spiritual affairs, as well as through the involvement of a number of lay figures in the administration and patronage of the house. In both respects, notable incidents in the mid-fourteenth century highlight the complexities of the canons’ relationships with the secular world. These are further explored in an analysis of the abbey’s role during the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses, two conflicts which greatly affected the locality, but required vastly differing approaches by the canons. Finally, the effect of society on the canons themselves is considered. It is possible to recover some picture of their origins, both social and geographic, as well as some idea of the size of the community in the fifteenth century, and discuss the repercussions for an understanding of monastic recruitment. Finally, the dynamic of the community over the entire history of the abbey is considered in terms of the scattered source material, utilising both architectural and documentary evidence.