When I began developing the video game concept for my thesis, I realized that I was one of the kids that grew up in a society where video games took prevalence over historical artistry. I, however, was unaware of the hidden secrets that resided in the art and how much they contribute to the video games I enjoy playing today. This thesis aims to provide the younger generations with an engaging and stimulating way to experience historical artistry, more specifically the Italian Renaissance, without having to consult a history book. I aim to provide enough detail on multiple aspects of the movement to bring it to life in the classroom via any video game platform. Students need to develop an awareness of the benefits our digital culture gained over the centuries from the Italian Renaissance; therefore, I aspire to provide present-day children and teenagers with the ability to learn about the movement by doing one of the things they love most: playing video games. Although the art is most intriguing in its natural form, one must stay up to date with the changing times and provide the next generation with the artistic knowledge on which they might rely in their future career.

This thesis is an artefact documenting the process of adapting a late medieval painting of hell into a short horror film. The process of adapting the Three Mouths of Hell, housed within the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, serves as an experiment in applying a dramaturgical approach to medieval studies. The process of adaptation and production, informed by critical research about the Hours of Catherine of Cleves and its Three Mouths of Hell, yields new frameworks for understanding the history of Catherine of Cleves, her Book of Hours, and the Three Mouths of Hell.

This paper compares two art museums, both created during the French Revolution, that fostered national unity by promoting a cultural identity. By analyzing the use of preexisting architecture from the ancien régime, innovative displays of art and redefinitions of the museum visitor as an Enlightened citizen, this thesis explores the application of eighteenth-century philosophy to the formation of two museums. The first is the Musée Central des Arts in the Louvre and the second is the Musée des Monuments Français, both housed in buildings taken over by the Revolutionary government and present the seized property of the royal family and Catholic Church. Created in a violent and unstable political climate, these museums were an effective means of presenting the First Republic as a guardian of national property and protector of French identity.

The present M. A. theses COUNT FRANZ ANTON SPORCK - SUPPORTER OF JANSENISM THOUGHTS AND RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE deals with Baroque period, the so called "Bohemian Baroque" in the 17th - 18th century, and ends at the beginning of the Enlightenment. On the main representatives of the Czech lands was Count Franz Anton Sporck. The first chapter looks at the emergence of the movement of Jansenism, founded by Cornelius Otto Jansen, and mentions the root movement within the environment of the University of Leuven. Cornelius Otto Jansen influenced French Jansenism which had been led by Jean-Antoine Duvergier de Hauranne (First Abbe de Saint-Cyran) at the monastery of Port-Royal des Champs, and a major French personality of the movement. The other major figures were Martin de Barcos, Antoine Arnauld, Blaise Pascal and Pasquier Quesnel, who were influenced by the Jansenism environment in the Czech lands. At the same time, the first chapter focuses on the Jesuit Order, which acts as a counterpoint to the same idea of Catholic reform during the time of post Trident. In the second chapter, the personalities of Czech Jansenism - Valerian Magni and Jerome Hirnhaim are introduced. This chapter deals with the central figure of the thesis, Count Franz Anton Sporck, who became the most significant personality of the Czech Catolic...

Since classical times, the witch has remained an eerie, powerful and foreboding figure in literature and drama. Often beautiful and alluring, like Circe, and just as often terrifying and aged, like Shakespeare’s Wyrd Sisters, the witch lives ever just outside the margins of polite society. In John Marston’s Sophonisba, or The Wonder of Women the witch’s ability to persuade through the use of language is Marston’s commentary on the power of poetry, theater and women’s speech in early modern Britain. Erichtho is the ultimate example of a terrifying woman who uses linguistic persuasion to change the course of nations. Throughout the play, the use of speech draws reader’s attention to the role of the mouth as an orifice of persuasion and to the power of speech. It is through Erichtho’s mouth that Marston truly highlights the power of subversive speech and the effects it has on its intended audience.

“The Bedroom and the Barnyard: Zoomorphic Lust Through Territory, Procedure, and Shelter in ‘The Miller’s Tale’” is an academic endeavor that takes Chaucer’s zoomorphic metaphors and similes and analyzes them in a sense that reveals the chaos of what is human and what is animal tendency. The academic work is expressed in the adjunct creative project, Haunchebones, a 10-minute drama that echoes the tale and its zoomorphic influences, while presenting the content in a stylized play influenced by Theatre of the Absurd and artwork from the medieval and early renaissance period.

The Wild Beasts springs from my desire to thank my ever-expanding queer chosen family and mentors for their strength. Working through the often violent and othering aspects of the lens and photographic histories I create floral portraits responding to each person’s being and our relationship. Using the 19th century, 8x10 large format view camera—the same used by colonialists and ethnographers to “capture” the divinity of Nature—I erect each as a traditional still life studio setup at the threshold between the natural world and that constructed by humans. These environments speak both to the character of each friend and also to the use of Nature against queer people in most legal systems across the planet. We are deemed unnatural and made criminals through inequitable semantics. The 8x10 negative becomes a portrait, a darkroom contact print that is gifted to each of The Wild Beasts, an intimate artifact of my gratitude. At these borders I lash at the histories of oppression, remaking these lineages and tools into spaces for empathy, tenderness, and love.

The study of social memory is not purely a historical or anthropological endeavor. Archaeology can provide a considerable amount of evidence about how and why people remembered. In this case study, the Colosseum will be studied in the broader sense of being a monument of damnatio memoriae and commemorative memory; the very act of building it can be seen as a form of “recutting” the landscape to fit the image Vespasian wanted to convey of his predecessor. The Colosseum will also be studied in an even larger historical context. This will involve analyzing the manner in which it was memorialized during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and by British visitors during the Victorian era. I will end the case study with an analysis of Benito Mussolini’s use of antiquity and the Colosseum to propagate Fascism. Lastly, the concept of cultural heritage and the institutions that uphold it, particularly UNESCO, will be put into question. In illustrating the fluidity of interpretations of the past, in this case through material culture, I argue that the endeavor to codify them by establishing World Heritage sites is problematic because of their subjectivity to modern agendas. However, in order to understand changing attitudes and memories associated with a single monument, one must first explore the nature of social memory.

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This article consists of a close examination of one of four Late Archaic-era tumular monuments that were excavated in the mid-1950s in the Northern Necropolis of the Pontic Greek settlement of Istros. The exploration of this monument, Tumulus XVII (circa 550-525 BCE), yielded several features that were immediately compared with heroic cremation burials as described in epic poetry (particularly the funeral of Patroklos in Homer’s Iliad). Most striking among these features were the remains of three human sacrificial victims. Despite the early connection drawn with Homeric epic, for the next three decades Tumulus XVII was classified as a non-Greek (Thracian) monument, principally due to the presence of human sacrifice. That is, human sacrifice was regarded as too primitive and thus foreign to the more ‘advanced’ Greek culture. For this reason, the evidence from Istros has not figured prominently in synthetic studies of Greek human sacrifice. Yet, the growing body of research into Greek and indigenous settlements and cemeteries in the western Black Sea, along with the more recent discovery of a bound and ritually decapitated man alongside Pyre A at Orthi Petra (circa 700 BCE; Eleutherna, Crete), has occasioned a reconsideration of the original barbarian characterization of Tumulus XVII. The funerary rituals and resulting tumular monument rather appear to have been developed by an elite subset of the Greek colonial community as a means to distinguish and elevate themselves among the ever-growing population of the city. While epic may have lent general inspiration and significance to the particular rituals performed, a more immediate model for the tumular form may have been taken from the ‘heroon’ (late 7th cent. BCE) in the necropolis of the nearby Greek settlement of Orgame. Although the precise circumstances surrounding the funerary human sacrifices elude us, this short-lived ritual phenomenon seems rather to have been introduced to the region by Greek settlers.