abstract: In 1999, Geneviève Hasenohr announced the discovery of a fragment of Marguerite Porete's Mirouer des Simples Ames, a work condemned by the Church at the University of Paris in 1310, hidden in a manuscript at the Bibliothèque municipale in Valenciennes. The fragment corresponds with roughly two chapters in the only extant French version of the manuscript (Chantilly, Musée Condé MS F XIV 26), and when compared with other editions of the Mirouer, it appears to be composed in what might have been Marguerite Porete's native dialect. The discovery changed scholars' perceptions of the weight of the various versions and translations - the Chantilly manuscript had been used previously to settle any questions of discrepancy, but now it appears that the Continental Latin and Middle English translations should be the arbiters. This discovery has elevated the Middle English editions, and has made the question of the translator's identity - he is known only by his initials M.N. - and background more imperative to an understanding of why a work with such a dubious history would be translated and harbored by English Carthusians in the century that followed its condemnation. The only candidate suggested for translator of the Mirouer has been Michael Northburgh (d. 1361), the Bishop of London and co-founder of the London Charterhouse, where two of the three remaining copies of the translation were once owned, but the language of the text and Northburgh's own position and interests do not fit this suggestion. My argument is that the content of the book, the method of its translation, its selection as a work for a Latin-illiterate audience, all fit within the interests of a circle of writers based in Yorkshire at the end of the fourteenth century. By beginning among the Yorkshire circle, and widening the search to include writers with a non-traditional contemplative audience, one that exists outside of the cloister - writers like Walter Hilton, the anonymous authors of the Cloud of Unknowing and the Chastising of God's Children, and Nicholas Love - we may have a better chance of locating and understanding the motives of the Middle English translator of the Mirouer. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2011

This dissertation is a study of the work of John Milton, most especially of his late poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. The early poetry, the prose tracts, and Christian Doctrine are considered in their developmental relation to those late poems. The question my study addresses is this: What does Milton mean by obedience? The critical approach used to address the question is as much philosophical-theological as it is literary. My project seeks to understand the shaping role of Milton's theology on his poetry: that is, to attempt to recreate and understand Milton's thinking on obedience from Milton's perspective. To this end, I focus on providing contextualized, attentive readings of key poetic moments. The contexts I provide are those derived from the two great heritages Milton had at his disposal--the Classical and Christian traditions. The poetic moments I attend to are most usually theologically and conceptually difficult moments, moments in which Milton is working out (as much as reflecting on or demonstrating or poeticizing) his key theological concerns, chief among them, obedience. Milton's concept of obedience is not just an idea developed within given interpretive frameworks, Classical, Christian, and a specific historic context, England in the seventeenth century. It is a strangely practical structure of being intended by Milton to recollect something of the disposition of Adam and Even before the fall. In other words, Miltonic obedience is multifaceted and complex. To address the complexity and nuance of what Milton means by obedience, I suggest that Milton's idea of obedience may be understood as a concept. The definitional source of Milton's concept of obedience is the Bible, and various texts of the Classical tradition. The necessary mechanism of the concept is Milton's idea of right timing, derived from the Greek idea of kairos. The necessary condition of Miltonic obedience is unknowing. With Milton's concept of obedience fully established, the dissertation concludes by suggesting connections between Milton's religious imagination and his political engagements. If Milton's paramount value was obedience, it was so because his paramount concern was liberty, for himself and for his nation.

The concept of the unknown captivated medieval theologians, mystics, lovers, and travelers for centuries, and yet literary scholars too readily reduce this topos to a romance trope. "Unknowing the Middle Ages" reconsiders the grounds of late-medieval literary discourse by showing how canonical Middle English literary texts eschew the historical knowledges that informed them and, instead, affirm impossibility as a productive site for a literary poetics. My dissertation identifies what I call a "poetics of unknowing" as an important component of a budding late-medieval literary discourse that offers a way to discuss not only what can be known, but also that which exceeds exegetical, geographic, historical, and sensory comprehension. "Unknowing the Middle Ages" makes its argument through four chapters, each of which focuses on a narrative tradition extending at least five hundred years. Each chapter follows a figure---Herod the Great, Prester John, the Pearl, and Criseyde---from the texts that established their axiological significance to their appearances in Middle English texts, which attempt to unknow these figures. In their Middle English narratives these figures negotiate between an inherited religious ethics and an intellectual context compelled increasingly by that which eludes comprehension. In each case, material concerns regarding the unknowable infiltrate the formal composition of the text itself, and resonate at the level of a literary ethics. The "poetics of unknowing" that inhabit these texts reveal an epistemology less encumbered by the practical demands of clarity to which other modes of medieval writing are beholden, and also---perhaps of interest to scholars of modern literature and contemporary theory---refute the critical tendency to view the epistemological valorization of the unknown as a distinctly modern phenomenon. / text

While documenting the Old Spitalfields Market in London, UK prior to its renovation in 2006, I happened across a simple yet provocative statement- 'this will all be fields again'- inscribed into the existing pavement in an area just inside one of the eastern entrances. What it was able to report in just six simple words is the inescapable process of transformation to which the entire neighbourhood had been and will be subjected to. Rediscovered in a photograph years later, the presence of that message is explored here. As an instrumental narrative, this thesis invests in four parameters of architecture that are as much a reflection of my own struggle to articulate the experience of both literally and figuratively moving within the neighbourhood, as they are indicative of the neighbourhood’s propensity for fragmentation and fluctuation through time. Throughout this work, I have tried to place myself both on and in the moment of crisis between the opposed binaries of the material and immaterial city, and to write the necessary fiction that might allow me to hold them simultaneously in the present.

<p>This dissertation argues that the 'realist' ontology implicit in Renaissance allegory is both Aristotelian and neoplatonic, stemming from the need to talk about transcendence in material terms in order to make it comprehensible to fallen human intelligence. At the same time dramatists at the turn of the seventeenth century undermine 'realism' altogether, contributing to the emergence of a new meaning of 'realism' as mimesis, and with it a materialism without immanent forms. My theoretical framework is provided by Aristotle's Metaphysics, Physics and Categories rather than his Poetics, because these provide a better way of translating the concerns of postmodern critics back into premodern terms. I thus avoid reducing the religious culture of premodernity to 'ideology' or 'power' and show how premodern religion can be taken seriously as a critique of secular modernity. My conclusion from readings of Aristotle, Augustine, Hooker, Perkins, Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson and Tourneur is that Hell is conflated with History during the transition to modernity, that sin is revalorized as individualism, and that the translatability of terms argues for the continuing need for a concept of 'substance' in this post-Aristotelian age. I end with a reading of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous contemplative work from the fourteenth century that was still being read in the sixteenth century, which offers an alternative model of the sovereign individual, and helps me to argue against the view that philosophical idealism is inherently totalitarian.</p> / Dissertation

While documenting the Old Spitalfields Market in London, UK prior to its renovation in 2006, I happened across a simple yet provocative statement- 'this will all be fields again'- inscribed into the existing pavement in an area just inside one of the eastern entrances. What it was able to report in just six simple words is the inescapable process of transformation to which the entire neighbourhood had been and will be subjected to. Rediscovered in a photograph years later, the presence of that message is explored here. As an instrumental narrative, this thesis invests in four parameters of architecture that are as much a reflection of my own struggle to articulate the experience of both literally and figuratively moving within the neighbourhood, as they are indicative of the neighbourhood’s propensity for fragmentation and fluctuation through time. Throughout this work, I have tried to place myself both on and in the moment of crisis between the opposed binaries of the material and immaterial city, and to write the necessary fiction that might allow me to hold them simultaneously in the present.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T17:27:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Jose Paulo Coelho Faradji Chadan.pdf: 375540 bytes, checksum: ab7fc5b38b7db201759793336d7aa00a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-09-27 / The dissertation wich the reader has in its hands concerns my master dissertation about the contemplation in the Cloud of Unknowing. The Cloud of Unknowing belongs to the late medieval period (XIV century), and was probably written by a cartusian monk, as a method of teaching a young man, probably around twenty-four years old, about the contemplative life. In his writing, the author compares the contemplative life to two important biblical figures. First he compares it to Mary, that having received Jesus in her house, listens to him patiently, unlike Martha, her sister, that goes about preparing his supper. Next the author compares contemplative life, to Moses, wich with a lot of effort, climbs to the top of the mountain and sees a great cloud. Mary´s passage reports to the gospel according to Luque chapter 10, verse 38-42. Moses passage belongs to the book of Exodus, chapter 24. Mary is compared to her sister Martha. The first one represents the contemplative life, while the second one represents an active life. Moses is compared to Aaron, the last one representing a person wich with little effort and by divine grace contemplates the lord, while the first one is only capable of the same with a lot of effort. We approach the degrees of ascension to the contemplative life: the purgative path; the progressive and the contemplative one. The first degree refers to the active life while the second one refers to the active and contemplative lifes. In its turn the third level relates only to the contemplative life. The active life, being the path lived according the works of mercy and charity, as well as contemplation. Is the search of the spirit becoming closer to God through silence, solitude and loving desire / O trabalho que o leitor tem em mãos, trata da minha dissertação de mestrado acerca do tema da contemplação na Nuvem do Não-Saber. A Nuvem do Não-Saber é uma obra que data do medievo tardio (séc. XIV), tendo sido escrita provavelmente por um monge cartuxo, como modo de ensinar a um jovem em torno de vinte e quatro anos, acerca da vida contemplativa. Na obra, o autor compara a vida contemplativa a duas importantes personagens bíblicas: em primeiro lugar, compara-a a Maria, que tendo recebido Jesus em sua casa, senta-se a fim de, paciente e atenciosamente, ouvi-lo, diferentemente de Marta (sua irmã), que se apressa em preparar-lhe a refeição. Em segundo lugar, mas tão importante quanto, compara a vida contemplativa a Moisés que, com muito esforço, sobe ao cume do monte e vê ali, uma grande nuvem. A passagem de Maria reporta-se ao Evangelho de S. Lucas, no capitulo 10, versos 38- 42, já a passagem de Moisés reporta-se ao livro do Êxodo, no capítulo 24. Maria é contraposta a sua irmã Marta. Esta, representando a vida ativa, e aquela, a vida contemplativa. Já Moisés é contraposto a Aarão. Este, representando a pessoa que, sem muitos esforços e por divina graça, chega à perfeita contemplação assim que o quer, e aquele, só o consegue depois de muitos esforços. Abordamos então, os três graus de ascensão à vida contemplativa: a via purgativa, a via progressiva e a via contemplativa ou apofática. O primeiro grau, respectivo à vida ativa, e o terceiro grau, respectivo à vida contemplativa, sendo o segundo grau, intermediário (partícipe) tanto da vida ativa quanto da vida contemplativa. A vida ativa, sendo a vida vivida segundo as obras corporais de misericórdia e caridade e a vida contemplativa, sendo a busca do espírito em unir-se a Deus, por meio do silêncio, da solidão e do desejo amoroso