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The master thesis is focused on the interpretation of the attitude of Francis of Assisi towards the poverty of the first Franciscan religious buildings. Religious buildings of the English Franciscans from the selected sites from the years 1224-1258/1259 will comprise the case studies. The goal of their study is to show the extent to which they reflected Francis's approach towards poverty of buildings. The study of Francis's understanding of poverty of buildings will be based on the analysis of the chosen written sources of the order's provenance. Besides Thomas of Eccleston, whose work known as Tractatus de adventu fratrum Minorum in Angliam belongs to the most important narrative sources within the examined period, the royal grants for construction and the reports from the sites which were archaeologically excavated will be used for the reconstruction of the character and liturgical function of the first religious buildings of the English Franciscans. A summary of the degree of expression of poverty on the examples of the analyzed religious buildings of the English Franciscans will be the subject of the conclusion of the master thesis.

Since humans engage in ritual activity in everyday life, we should expect that rituals are portrayed in literature. Thus I examine the question of whether rituals portrayed in heroic epics are realistic reflections of rituals from--in this case--Old English and Old Irish society, or idealized rituals, or anti-rituals (models of social behavior to be avoided). Taking this approach to heroic poetry requires an anthropological analysis of the societies that created the literary texts, which can help us generate hypotheses about the nature of the rituals and how they supported society. After such considerations, the narrative literature can be sifted for portrayals of rituals, and then analysis can tell us the complementary story: how the depicted rituals may have compared to actual use. In early chiefdom societies where warfare was endemic, rituals that regulated violent conflicts were important, as is attested by Germanic hoarding rituals and Irish boundary rituals. In Beowulf the dragon hoard may represent status symbols whose overabundance created social conflicts. The events leading to the redeposition of the hoard may reflect rituals of communion. In Tain Bo Cuailnge, the events and rules of raiding may portray the real concern for maintaining tribal boundaries nonviolently in the fragmented political climate of early Ireland. Both literary traditions portray rituals as ideal methods of behavior translatable to deeds in real life, although both traditions portray the ill-effects caused when characters break the rules of rituals. Thus, although the dragon hoard was properly buried once upon a time, a thief breaks the rules, recovers some treasure, and unleashes supernatural havoc upon the tribe in the form of a dragon. The proper redeposition of the hoard is, perhaps, for long-term 'damage control' whose immediate application caused the death of Beowulf. Similarly, Irish tradition portrays the rules of single combat being followed for a time, in which Cu Chulainn is able to hold his turf against many invaders; but as the rules of warfare are broken against him in unfair combat, his supernatural prowess wreaks mass deaths upon the enemy--mass deaths that ritual warfare attempted to avoid. Therefore the tales portray the ideals of conflict-reducing rituals by showing the state of society without ritual controls.

Cronica Sarracina was one of the most widely read books of its time. It was very popular, and contemporary historians considered it a proper historiographic work. Despite this fact, later opinion believe it to be stylistically poor. It was also considered to be a fictional work because it used myth, legend, and dream material. In order to clarify this discrepancy, the present work focuses on three fundamental points: the nature of the historical discourse, the role of the narrative in historiographic writing, and the literary conventions of the Middle Ages. In order to be considered a proper historiographic work, the work must represent the actual facts, that is to say, the facts that exist outside of the author's consciousness. The traditional historical discourse starts from this premise, but concentrates on accumulating referentiality to affirm the existence of the external reality that is independent from the discourse that announces it. However, the most recent theories hold that the events and the realities represented in a historiographical work are not independent from the discourse that announces them. The story mechanism is inseparable from the way in which we perceive and represent our world. Taking as a starting point the instability of the boundaries established among the principal forms of discourse, especially in the case of the discourses produced prior to the nineteenth century when the rules of their formation were different, this document asks whether Cronica Sarracina is a proper historiographical work. It examines the criteria of the truth and objectivity in force at the time of the Cronica's writing, the literary conventions that govern its narrative structure, and if its narrative structure contributes to the representation of the truth. The document explores the role of those aspects historically least acceptable, that is to say, those concerning chivalry and those that were traditionally labeled as myth, and how these contribute to the representation of the truth.

As we gaze into the mirror of literary texts, we often forget that the images projected back at us are verbal constructs that may bear little resemblance to the reality they purport to represent. This is the case with a group of fifteenth-century Spanish texts that denigrate or defend women. We do not witness these women as they really were; instead, we see fictionally embodied projections of the fears and fantasies of both their authors and of the societies in which they were formed. We see how man's relation to woman plays itself out in a constant oscillation between overwhelming attraction and fear of the loss of control over both himself and woman; or, we see women who are so perfect and so willingly subjected to man's control that they will never achieve status as an individual. This dissertation examines three modes of discourse used by these texts to represent women. The misogynist discourse of Alfonso Martínez de Toledo and Luis de Lucena achieves near hallucinatory visions of chaos with its depictions of Woman as Wild Man: the incarnation of every excess and sin that men might dream of but know they cannot indulge in. These creatures destroy the “natural” order of society by defying its control. Attempts to tame them may fail, for only the annointed few are equal to the task. In contrast, the profeminist discourse of Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, Mosón Diego de Valera, Álvaro de Luna, and Fray Martín de Córdoba raises women up to a potential paradise of harmony and respect between the sexes, but below the surface of these portrayals of exemplary wives, widows, and virgins, we see the continuing discourse of male control. Indeed, this control is now tightened, so that even perfect women are tested, to see which will fall. Finally, we come to Teresa de Cartagena, this group's only female voice. Teresa borrows from both male-determined discourses and then subverts them so that she can at last free herself with the very words meant to imprison her and, by extension, all women. men.

This dissertation analyses the reception of Juan de Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna (1444) in the XV century by Hernán Núñez, and in the XVI century by Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas “ El Brocense.” The study takes into account the motives that made Laberinto de Fortuna one of Spain's most commented works, in a time when the printing press just arrived in the Iberian Peninsula. The “Introduction” examines the advent of the printing press as an instrument that allowed for the creation of a literary canon that had protonationalistic undertones, and it establishes the political tone of the poem, and its peculiarities that differentiate it from the other major literary productions of the XV century. The first chapter, “Mena y su siglo,” presents a study of a century that is crucial for the understanding of Spain's literary creation in the Golden Age, by taking a look into the historical, political, and social aspects that form the intertextuality of Mena's Laberinto de Fortuna. It both takes a look at the role of the reader in the text, and the ability to interpret the signs that form its inner structure. In the second chapter, “Hernán Núñez leyendo a Mena,” the role of the reader is studied as it is documented in Hernán Núñez's commentary to El Laberinto de Fortuna: La Glosa de las Trescientas. In essence, this chapter presents a study of how an author becomes part of a literary canon, and it presents the challenge of concretizing the interpretation of a text from one century to the next. The third chapter, “Las Anotaciones: El Brocense y la edición de 1582,” concludes this study by presenting how the advent of the printing press has evolved from its arrival in Spain, and how books were read, and circulated from one medium to the next.

This dissertation is a study of the early fourteenth-century English manuscript, National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19.2.1 (The Auchinleck Manuscript), and three of the eighteen romances it contains. Commercially produced ca. 1330-40, Auchinleck is the earliest extant English manuscript containing texts exclusively in Middle English rather than Latin or French, and the majority of its 44 surviving texts appear there in their earliest copies. Through an examination first of the manuscript as a whole, then of the romances Amis and Amiloun, Sir Tristrem, and Sir Orfeo, I demonstrate that the physical and literary act of translation from French to English that constitutes the Auchinleck Manuscript had a transformative effect upon its texts, causing their authors and copyists to incorporate in them a direct (though often subtle) reflection of the social and cultural environment of fourteenth-century England. Chapter 1 draws on contemporary manuscript and historical evidence to argue that in this period literacy in English was predicated upon literacy in French and/or Latin, and that Auchinleck's exclusive use of English was thus a matter of choice rather than necessity, constituting an assertion of the value both of the language of its texts and of Englishness itself. That assertion, I argue through my analyses in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of Amis and Amiloun, Sir Tristrem and Sir Orfeo, influenced the scribes and poets who selected, adapted and/or translated romances for inclusion in the Auchinleck Manuscript, heightening their sensitivity to the interplay between those texts and the environment in which they lived and worked. Amis and Amiloun makes no secret of its dependence on an Anglo-Norman source; Sir Tristrem is derived from the Anglo-Norman verse Tristan of Thomas; Sir Orfeo has no vernacular forebear but is indebted to Ovid's tale of Orpheus. The Auchinleck versions of all three, however, display a distinctly English character, arguing that the circumstances of their composition and/or inscription prompted these scribes and poets, consciously or unconsciously, to modify these works so as to create English translations of their sources that function not only linguistically, but in the social, cultural and political sense as well.

This dissertation analyzes the extent to which the pictorial cycle and poetic text in the Códice Rico manuscript of the Cantigas de Santa María of Alfonso X el Sabio convey the same religious and ideological messages. The Códice Rico portrays an ordered, laboring Christian society with some presence of Jews and Muslims, at the mercy of nature and human nature and saved only by the grace and intercession of Holy Mary. In this iconographic society, King Alfonso appears both as the exemplary Christian ruler and the devotee of Mary, singing her praises and exhorting others to do the same. This dual representation suggests that the pictorial cycle of his Marian project is not merely pious, but also politically motivated and forming part of Alfonso X's greater ambition, the crown of Holy Roman Emperor.

My dissertation is the first systematic study to bring together contemporary legal and literary theory to the analysis of the legal texts of Spain in the New World. By focusing on the Capitulaciones de Santa Fe (1492), and other legal documents, I argue that this legal corpus is also a narrative construct which blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. My purpose is to explore the rhetorical dimension of legal writing as a process of emplotment of colonial encounters. The poetics of legal narrative will be examined applying the theory of "law as literature," a recent cross-disciplinary approach. My point is that all the strategies and approaches developed in the field of colonial literary studies have neglected to examine this corpus of laws as cultural production. Nevertheless, it is precisely rhetoric which provides an accessible medium for exploring the connection between law and literature. My point is that colonial legislation can be understood in its complexity only when it is realized that legal discourse is not merely conceptual--that is, not reducible to a set of definitions--but also literary, by which I mean that its metaphorical and associative quality derives precisely of the need to address the question of imposing principles of social control, which are at the center of any legislative controversy. In other words, Spain's legislation in America should be studied not only as a set of rules or institutions, but as a kind of discursive practice of cultural dominance. This methodological approach is based on the assumption that a nexus between law and literature was at the center of the Conquest of America. Finally, I will conclude by summarizing the objectives of my work. This study should help to increase our understanding of the relation between law and literature. Cataloguing legal texts as new objects of study within Colonial Literature, invites us to raise new research questions which, among other things, challenges the category of what we consider as "colonial texts." The methodological consequences of this broadening of the range of objects of study represents an enrichment of perspectives in colonial literary studies.