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Veit Stoss (ca. 1438/1447-1533), a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), was one of the most prominent limewood sculptors of the late fifteenth-early sixteenth century in Central Europe. Stoss worked in Nuremberg for a majority of his career, commissioned by its leading patrician families to make various pieces of limewood sculpture for the city's churches. His work in Nuremberg was interrupted by a nearly twenty-year stay in Krakow, Poland, from 1477 until 1496, where he undertook two monumental sculptural projects that remain his earliest extant works today, the multi-winged altarpiece of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary (1477-1489) done in limewood and the red marble tomb effigy for King Casimir IV Jagiellon (1492). Previous scholarship on Stoss has focused on the commission of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, but has ignored the importance of this work both within the artist's large artistic development and within the already existing tradition of wood sculpture in late-fifteenth-century Poland. What is more, many twentieth-century German and Polish art historians have mobilized Stoss's career anachronistically within modern nationalist frameworks to support their own political agendas, choosing to ignore the cosmopolitanism of Krakow's mixed population and the dynamic hybrid nature of his works' iconography and artistic style. This thesis seeks to move beyond the limiting and distorting lens of earlier nationalist agendas with the aim to restore Stoss to his historical context as an artist who borrowed stylistically from painting, prints, and sculpture, and who met the demands of diverse patrons, both in Germany and in Poland, by creating a dynamic hybridity of styles, local and foreign. / Art History

Conservés dans le chœur de l’abbaye Saint-Robert pour lequel ils furent crées, les douze panneaux de la tenture de La Chaise-Dieu mettent en scène les épisodes de la Vie du Christ et de la Vie de la Vierge, flanqués de leurs préfigures vétérotestamentaires. En outre, deux pièces indépendantes reproduisent plusieurs compositions évangéliques du cycle principal. De multiples blasons révèlent l’identité du commanditaire, Jacques de Saint-Nectaire, qui gouverne l’institution bénédictine de 1491 à 1518, soit dans le contexte historique de l’arrivée de la commende. Basée sur un matériel d’analyse exceptionnel, cette étude monographique propose une reconstitution de l’élaboration artistique de l’œuvre et tente de définir l’implication du commanditaire dans le projet initial, le degré de liberté des peintres et l’influence des lissiers sur le rendu final des tapisseries. Dans ce but, l’étude des modèles gravés et de leur utilisation lors de la réalisation des cartons à grandeur fait l’objet d’une attention particulière. En conclusion, ce travail apporte des hypothèses concernant le milieu d’origine des artistes et la localisation de leurs ateliers. / As one of the most spectacular cycle of medieval tapestries preserved, the fourteen woven panels of La Chaise-Dieu - for most of them still hanging in the choir of Saint-Robert church (Auvergne/France) - depict episodes of Jesus and Mary’s life along with scenes extracted from the Old Testament. Their many blazons have always identified their patron with Jacques de Saint-Nectaire, abbot of the Benedictine institution from 1491 to 1518. Thanks to the tremendous group of evidences offered by this unique set, this research challenges the general assumptions of the elaboration of tapestries, introducing a new insight about the distinctive roles played by the patron, the master painter, his assistants and the weavers. A particular importance has been lent to the study of the engravings used as patterns. As a conclusion, this work aims to provide some hypothesis regarding the artists’ origins and their workshops’ location.

This dissertation challenges the standard view that fifteenth-century poets wrote irregular meters in artless imitation of Chaucer. On the contrary, I argue that Chaucer’s followers deliberately misread his meter in order to challenge his authority as a laureate. Rather than reproduce that meter, they reformed it, creating three distinct meters that vied for dominance in the first decades of the fifteenth century. In my analysis of 40,655 decasyllables written by poets other than Chaucer, I show that the fifteenth century was not the metrical wasteland so often depicted by editors and critics but an age of radical experimentation, nuance, and prosodic cunning. In Chapter One I present evidence against the two standard explanations for a fifteenth-century metrical collapse: cultural depression and linguistic instability. Chapter Two outlines an alternative framework to the statistical and linguistic methods that have come to dominate metrical studies. In their place I propose an interdisciplinary approach that combines the two techniques with cognitive science, using a reader-oriented, brain-based model of metrical competence to reframe irregular rhythms as problems that readers solve. Chapter Three applies this framework to Chaucer’s meter to show that the poets who inherited his long line exploited its soft structure in order to build competing meters; in that chapter I also argue that Chaucer did not write in iambic pentameter, as is generally assumed, but in a “footless” decasyllabic line modeled on the Italian endecasillibo. Chapter Four explores metrical reception; by probing scribal responses to Chaucer’s meter we can gain insight into how fifteenth-century readers heard it. Chapters Five through Seven investigate three specific acts of reception by poets: those of John Walton, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. I conclude the dissertation by tracing the influence of Hoccleve and Lydgate on the later fifteenth-century poets George Ashby, Osbern Bokenham, and John Metham, and by identifying the eclipse of fifteenth-century meter with the Tudor poets Stephen Hawes and Alexander Barclay, who replaced a misreading of Chaucer’s meter with a misreading of Lydgate’s, inadvertently returning sixteenth-century poets to an alternating decasyllable reminiscent of Chaucer’s own meter. / text

Les fatistes du théâtre à sujet religieux souhaitent montrer aux spectateurs médiévaux le scénario biblique. Il s’agit de représenter la confrontation du Bien et du Mal dont l’enjeu demeure l’homme. Pour autant,si les Écritures offrent (fournissent, procurent ?) aux auteurs toute la matière iconique des personnages théâtraux de la sphère christique, le diable reste une entité aux contours flous, un profil théologique. La gageure des fatistes est donc de construire le diable, puis ses comparses, afin qu’ils puissent agir sur le hourd :l’amplification, la réécriture et la poétique de ces « théologiens-dramaturges » font naître le diable théâtral.D’œuvre en œuvre, hors de toute considération d’évolution de genre, le personnage diabolique grandit et prolifère jusqu’à apparaître sous de multiples visages individualisés : ceux de la « maisnie infernale ». Dotés d’une corporéité, d’une gestuelle et d’un langage nouveaux, les diables envahissent le hourd pour agir dans et sur le mystère de la Passion. La possibilité ainsi donnée aux diables d’être les serviteurs du message chrétien tout autant que de véritables actants dramatiques et paradramatiques concourt à leur individuation. Même partiellement factice, celle-ci se réalise pleinement dans le rire diabolique. En effet, que le rire provoqué par le mystère de la Passion soit critique ou qu’il serve d’exutoire, son origine est toujours diabolique.On peut alors concevoir que l’aspect divertissant des grandes Passions s’élabore au fil de l’essor diabolique qu’elles proposent. Surtout, on peut imaginer que les germes comiques, gestuels et dramatiques nés avec ces diables fleurissent, même après la fin de la représentation des mystères de la Passion, en d’autres œuvres et à d’autres époques. / The authors of the Passion plays on religious subject want to show the biblical scenario to the medieval audiences. It consists of representing the confrontation between Good and Evil whose main stake remains Man.If the Scriptures offer to their authors all the iconic material of the theatrical characters of the Christlike sphere,the Devil remains an entity with blurred outlines, a theological profile. What is at stake for the authors of thePassion Plays is to build the Devil and its stooges so that they can act on the stage: the magnification, therewriting and the poetics of those “theological playwrights” offer a birth to the theatrical Devil.From work to work, out of any consideration about the evolution of the genre, the diabolic charactergrows and multiplies to the point of appearing under numerous individualized faces: those of the « maisnieinfernale ». Endowed with a new body language, body movements, and language; the devils swept into thestage to act in and on the Passion Plays.The possibility which is offered to the devils of being the servants of the Christian Message as much as beinggenuine dramatic and paradramatic actors contribute to their individuation. This individuation, even partlyartificial, comes entirely true in the diabolic laughter. Whether it is a grating laugh or whether it acts as a kind ofrelease, the laugh provoked by the Passion Plays is always the result of the diabolic amusement.We can then consider that the amusing aspect of the great Passion Plays is worked out in the course ofthe diabolic development it offers. Above all, we can imagine that the dramatic, gestural and comical germswhich were born with those devils bloom even after the end of the representation of the Passion Plays in otherworks but in other periods too.

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Over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, canvas substituted panel or wall as the preferred support for painting in Venice, moving from the periphery to the core of artmaking. As it did so, canvas became key to the artistic processes and novel pictorial language developed by painters like Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Sixteenth-century critics associated canvas with painting in Venice, a connection that has persisted to become a veritable trope of Venetian art history. Despite this, we have hitherto lacked a convincing account of Venetian canvas supports and their impact. This dissertation, by examining the adoption, development, and significance of canvas in Venetian art over the period 1400 to 1600, attempts to provide one. Approaching canvas from multiple perspectives, this project offers a deeper understanding of what early modern canvas was at a material level, how it was made and supplied to painters, and its catalyzing role in early modern Venetian art. By tracing precisely how canvas operates within paintings, focusing on lodestar examples whilst drawing on extensive and intensive object-based research carried out on a large corpus, this thesis demonstrates how actively canvas participated in the elaboration of the pictorial poetics of mature Cinquecento art in Venice. It argues that we owe the existence of this distinctive artistic idiom in no small part to the twist of a yarn, the roughness of a thread, the thickness of a stitch. Canvas was critical to both the making and the meaning of these pictures. The wider aims of the project are twofold: on the one hand, to model a methodology that integrates approaches such as visual, textual, and sociocultural analysis with technical art history and conservation-informed comprehension of the materially altered nature of art objects; on the other, to contribute to an account of the history of an art form—the canvas picture—that still occupies a central role in the global art world today.

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The aim of this thesis is to investigate the lives of men and women living in London and Bury St. Edmunds in the late fourteenth - early fifteenth centuries. Sources studied include the administrative and legal records of the City of London and of the Abbot and Convent of St. Edmund's abbey; legislation and court records of royal government and the wills and testaments of Londoners and Bury St. Edmunds' inhabitants. Considerable research on a wide range of topics on London, but far less work on Bury St. Edmunds, has already been undertaken; however, this thesis is the first systematic comparative study of these two towns. The introduction discusses the historiography and purpose of the thesis; the methodology used, and the shortcomings of using medieval wills and the probate process. Chapter One discusses the testamentary jurisdiction in both towns; who was involved in the will making process, and the role that clerics played as both executors and scribes and how the church courts operated. Chapter Two focuses on testators' preparations for the afterlife, their choices concerning burial location, funeral arrangements and the provisions made for prayers for their souls. Chapter Three examines in detail their pious and charitable bequests and investigates what ‘good works' testators chose to support apart from ‘forgotten tithes'. The family and household relationships, including servants and apprentices, are examined in Chapter Four, exploring the differences in bequests made depending on the testators' marital status, together with evidence for close friendships and social networks. Chapter Five discusses the ownership and types of books referred to in wills and the inter-relationship between the donors and the recipients. Testators' literacy and the provision for education are also investigated.