This thesis examines the Lady of the Lake as an active chivalric player in the thirteenth century Lancelot-Grail Cycle (also known as the Prose Lancelot) and in Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century Le Morte Darthur. To study the many codes of chivalry, particularly in regard to women, I use two popular chivalric handbooks from the Middle Ages: Ramon Lull's Book of Knighthood and Chivalry, Geoffroi de Charny'sKnight's Own Book of Chivalry. Traditionally, the roles of women in medieval chivalry are passive, and female characters are depicted as objects to win or to inspire knights to greatness. The Lady of the Lake, I argue, uses her supernatural origins and nature to break with female chivalric conventions and become an instructress of chivalry to King Arthur's knights. As a purely human character, her power would be limited. As a guardian fairy and/or enchantress, the Lady is allowed to exercise more autonomy

The immense scope of Sir Thomas Malory¡¦s Le Morte Darthur has long kept daunting his readers. In terms of space, Malory includes both historical locations and imaginary and unnamed natural locales in his work. These places have different functions and therefore transmit different dimensions of spatial imagination. This dissertation examines three kinds of space¡Xwater as space, urban space and mystical space, and the aesthetic relations to these spaces in Le Morte Darthur. These named spaces and the selected locations in each category will be analyzed in the framework of microspace and macrospace, a structure proposed by Dick Harrison in conceptualizing medieval spatial experiences. Chapter one explores water as space. Some geographical sites, such as harbors, lakes, wells and rivers, and an imaginary space of Lancelot¡¦s tears as a qualitative concept are discussed in relation to the aquatic regenerative power. Particular interests are in how Malory accentuates differences which water exhibits in these sites and how water functions as a link to the past and to the future via language and spatial verticality. The second chapter moves to urban space, localized in specific places. This chapter aims to explicate how some medieval cities in Le Morte Darthur are consecrated or deconsecrated as a result of the city¡¦s association with distinct social and moral/immoral activities. The final chapter discusses mystical space. The places of sojourn of the Grail knights during their quest are marked by spatial verticality and horizontality, in proportion to each knight¡¦s moral worthiness. These locales form a preparatory path towards the space where the Grail vision and a divine message are ultimately revealed. An analogy between the interior space of the Grail and the extracosmic void space is drawn in order to convey the essence of the Grail in spatial terms. The progression from chapter one to three reflects a tendency from the physical to the mystical world of the human existence imagined in Malory¡¦s work. Moral dimension plays an important role in that it enables the transformation from microspace to macrospace in some instances. The term ¡§aesthetic spaces¡¨ will include both microspace and macrospace, in which Malory employs real and imaginary sites to fulfill his aesthetic ideal. ¡§Aesthetic spaces,¡¨ when taken in a broader sense, will also apply to ¡§poetic space¡¨ when language results in the transference of space which characters experience. Three categories of texts will be employed in the discussion: literary, historical and theoretical texts. The first group includes Le Morte Darthur, some major medieval English romances and chronicles and the Old French prose Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Cycles; the second, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century philosophical, religious and historical documents; and the last, theories of medieval spatial thinking from Harrison and Mircea Eliade. Through comparisons of a number of passages in Le Morte Darthur and these two French versions, this writer attempts to show that Malory, as the first writer to incorporate the Grail narrative into Arthurian romance in England prior to the late fifteenth century, succeeds in presenting microspatial and macrospatial thinking in Le Morte Darthur.

<p>  </p> <p>My dissertation proves that movement for both women and men is tantamount to power. The choice for a quest maiden (that is, a woman who takes part in a quest) to move between places and spaces is a choice for them to be able to change both their social and spatial positionalities. Focusing on high- and late medieval English chronicles and romance, I divide medieval Arthurian quest maidens into one of four categories based upon their movement: the static “in” and “out” groups that either remain inside a court or outside in the forest, and the mobile “inwards” and “outwards” groups that either enter into a court from outside it or who leave a court for the outside world. This diversity of categories is a novel contribution to spatial studies within Arthurian literature, as quest maidens are found everywhere across the Arthurian landscape. Such women dwell in the most intimate castle chambers as well as within the most remote forest copse. These placements are significant, as I argue that spaces are defined by the people who exist within them. As communal space is shaped and created by the multiple identities that inhabit that space, the ability to exist and shape that space becomes itself a demonstration of power. This power is expressed both by individuals, such as a knight in the woods or a queen in her castle, and by collectives, such as the Knights of the Round Table. A space gains its reputation by the deeds of its inhabitants, and those inhabitants either benefit or suffer by their space(s)’s reputation. This extends to the movement that occurs between such spaces. A maiden who enters Camelot to ask for help changes the identity of the court: it becomes a place that succors maidens. A maiden who conversely stops a knight in the Forest of Adventure helps shape that forest into a space for quests. As the Arthurian world is founded upon the questing process that these quest maidens both support and enable, their very existence shapes the form of the world. The space of the quest cannot be unlinked from the maidens who occupy and enable it.</p>

The thesis is a contribution to the social history of the Middle Ages. It investigates a phenomenon called courtly love, fully expressed at the noble court through an analysis of Thomas Malory's and Chrètien de Troyes' Arthurian romances, letters of Christine de Pisan and auxiliary sources. Its origin and expressions in a period literature, mostly of southern France, its inspirational sources and a continuation of Celtic folklore tradition is discussed in the initial chapters. The next part deals with individual forms of the courtly love and their effects on a gender relationship in a knightly class. The actual activity of a medieval woman and her opportunity to participate in public, ascribed social roles and a development of a masculine view is discussed in following chapters. The final part is engaged in a falling of a knightly ideal as well as a significance of the knight and his dame.

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<div> <p>The idea of “the book” overflows with extraneous significance: books are presented as windows, gateways, vessels, lighthouses, and gardens. Books speak to us and feed us, and they are a method of escape. The book has long represented much more than a static, hinged, bound, covered object inscribed with words. Even when a book is not performing an elaborate, imaginative function, the word “book” very often signifies the text it holds or even the text’s author: You can open <i>The Bluest Eye</i> or carry Toni Morrison in your bag. Fourteenth-century author Geoffrey Chaucer invokes a “book” by “Lollius” as authoritative source of his<i> Troilus and Criseyde</i>, though no person exists; likewise, to conclude the same text, Chaucer asks directs his project to “go, litel bok, go.” When a book makes an appearance in narrative, it is rarely j<i>ust a book</i>—without legs, the book moves, and without breath, it lives. This dissertation asks what about the shape of the codex has helped the book become such a metaphorically rich signifier.<br></p> <p>This dissertation attempts to unravel the various threads of meaning that make up the complex “idea of the book.” I focus on one of these threads: the book as a material object. By focusing on how the book as object—not the book as idea—functions within narrative, I argue that we can identify what about the book object enables its metaphorical range. I analyze moments in literature, television, and film when metaphorical functions are assigned, not to an ephemeral, complex idea of the book, but rather to the material realities of the book as an object. In these moments, the codex’s essential, material shape (what I am calling its bookishness) enables metaphorical functioning; I show that, by examining when mundanely physical bindings, pages, covers, and spines initiate metaphorical action, we can identify how the material book has come to mean so much more than itself.</p> <p><a></a>Indeed, despite a renewed appreciation for the book as both material and cultural object, books have become so significantly meaningful that attempts to define “the book” evade simplicity, rendering books as everything and nothing at the same time. My inquire explores this complexity by starting with a simple premise: Metaphors are based on some element of physical truth. Though the book has sprouted in a variety of metaphorical directions, many of those metaphors are grounded in the book’s material realities. Acknowledging this, especially in an age of fast-evolving media and bookish fetishism, offers a valuable and novel perspective on how and why books are both semantically rich and culturally valued objects.</p> </div> <br>