This dissertation attends to the figurative device of personification, or prosopopoeia, in the writings of three late-medieval English authors, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and John Lydgate. Situating my study between three coordinates -- the lineage of rhetorical anthropomorphism stretching back to Quintilian, the medieval political context that drew on figurative personification, and recent theoretical work in political ecology and philosophical sociology (actor-network theory) -- I argue in the introduction that the redistributions of agency from abstract terms to personified figures performed in prosopopoeia entail an intrinsic politicization; the personifications of non-humans deployed by Chaucer, Langland, and Lydgate hinge on and exploit the anthropomorphic qualities of speech and embodiment, which late-medieval theories of political representation see as essential prerequisites for political agency. The affinities between literary and legal-political discourses are even thicker; more sophisticated instances of personification refract in fictive narrative the part-whole dynamic between unity and multiplicity that undergirds representative government in its negotiation between delegated sovereignty and deliberative conciliarity, or, put differently, between actors and the networks within which their action becomes intelligibly institutional. Prosopopoeia thus emerges in my texts of interest as not only a multifaceted catalyst for democratizing debate about matters of concern to vernacular publics – from female agency to royal reform -- but also as a moving target for imaginatively theorizing -- and experimenting with the limits of -- the ethical imperatives that govern the proper practice of equitable governance: participation, answerability, reconciliation, common profit. In the discursive culture of late-medieval England, literary prosopopoeia animates simulations of non-human polities for heuristic, humanistic purposes. / Graduate / 0297

This paper is a discussion of parallels between John Lydgate's Dance of Death and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Scholars have recently begun to reconsider the importance of emotions, suggesting that they are cultural constructions integral to human identity and social life. Most of these studies, however, have ignored the medieval period, focusing instead on the "civilizing process"--that is, the supposed development of social etiquette and self-restraint--that is assumed to have begun in the early modern period. This dissertation demonstrates that emotion was in fact a complex identity discourse well before the Renaissance and was fundamental to the construction of pre-modern social categories like gender. Exploring four masculine communities--clergymen, knights, university students, and merchants--I show that each community was shaped and constrained by a particular emotional ethos. Middle English poets were keenly aware of these constraints and their work often challenged the culture's emotional regimes. I focus on literary texts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries because they were created during a time of heightened emphasis on the role of the emotions in shaping selves and communities. In the years after the Black Death, England witnessed significant demographic shifts and economic volatility that resulted in dramatic transformations in the nation's social landscape. Peasant rebellion, labor shortages, migrant clergy, and an influx of foreign merchants radically altered the structure of English society during these years. As a result, the institutions and ideologies that defined English masculine identity began changing in ways not seen before. Poets not surprisingly turned to the lexicon of emotion to negotiate these disruptions; in so doing, they offered English men new ways of understanding themselves in the face of rapid cultural change. The chapters examine a range of Middle English poems--the Alliterative Morte Arthure, St. Erkenwald, Chaucer's Reeve's Tale, and Lydgate's Bycorne and Chychevache--that illuminate particular emotions (anger, compassion, grief, and sorrow) and their significance to codes of masculinity. I argue that these four texts radically revised the forms and meanings of masculine emotional identity and community. This dissertation demonstrates that Middle English poets recognized the transformative potential inherent in the lexicon of emotion and used it to reshape their audiences' understanding of critical cultural problems. The years from the 1350s to the 1450s were important not only in the emerging tradition of poetry in English, but also for the development of the language and psychology of emotion. As poets tried to come to terms with great social changes, they molded and manipulated the discourse of emotion to interrogate what it meant to be a man in late medieval England. Affective Communities reveals the importance of emotions as markers of gender and community and shows literature's role in responding to and imagining social change.

While excellent scholarly work exists on medieval space, especially in cultural geography, no book-length study of the conceptual implications of medieval vertical space exists. Attention has been lavished on the surface of the medieval world, while the heights go unseen and the depths go unplumbed. Using theories of space by scholars such as Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Le Goff, this project explores this lacuna through close reading of three late medieval English texts. The emphasis within Christian theology on a vertically-oriented model of virtue and the afterlife (ascending to Heaven, falling to Hell) was likely the initial reason for the prominence of verticality in the Middle Ages; the work of religious writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Walter Hilton set the stage for an explosion of the vertical imagination, as a blossoming of the incredible variety of what could be called "vertical thought." These ideas foreshadowed and accompanied similar developments in the secular arena, soon becoming an integral part of medieval life. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, closely interrelated--and strongly vertical--frameworks arose to structure complex concepts such as moral virtue, social class and kinship relations. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw several major developments in what can be called "vertical thought." The evolution of Augustinian ideas of religion and morality led to a nuanced vertical hierarchy of virtues and vices, while the rise of the middle class helped define the explicit division of class into vertical tiers. A shift in conceptions of kinship, from a synchronous network to a diachronic tree of ancestry, affected perceptions of gender and family. Finally, the growth of parliamentary and urban political capital in late medieval England, especially in response to the reign of child-king Henry VI, led to a battle of wills between the powerful men of London and their king. These concerns with verticality were not limited to the realms of religious belief or temporal power, but manifested themselves in medieval literature and iconography as well. Highness and lowness feature in the plots, characters, and settings of many texts, and tropes of height and depth and rising and falling make frequent appearances textually and visually. Depictions of Heaven and Hell, for example, frequently make use of height and depth, and instances such as the Virgin Mary's ascension to Heaven or Lucifer's fall from Heaven to Hell involve explicitly vertical movement which parallels the perceived virtue of said figures. The Jesse tree, a genealogy of Christ, is usually illustrated as a tree emerging from a recumbent man's body, and reflects a newly vertical visualization of familial ties, while the concept of degree or scale, often represented as a ladder or stairs, is explicitly used as a framework for both moral virtue and socioeconomic status. Through discussion of three specific medieval tropes in literature and art-- the tree of Jesse in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, the Dead Sea in Cleanness, and the giant of Lydgate's Triumphal Entry of Henry VI--this project attempts to demonstrate the importance of verticality in late medieval English literature from 1300-1500 and show how these tropes responded to and influenced changes in the way medieval, and modern, audiences perceived social class, kinship, politics, and religion.

Inaug.-diss.--Kiel. / Lebenslauf. "Benutzte literatur": 4th prelim. leaf (2 p. ).

Inaug.-diss.--Bern.

Inaug.-diss.--Kiel. / Lebenslauf. "Benutzte literatur": 4th prelim. leaf (2 p. ).

No description available.

This dissertation studies adaptations of monastic literary culture between the first decades of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the English Reformation. My discussion focuses on the writings of John Whethamstede, John Lydgate, Richard Whitford and Thomas More. I argue that, while these authors aim to satisfy readers’ desires for elaborate and authoritative forms of piety, they actually provide models of reading and patterns of disciplined living that restrict lay piety within orthodox boundaries. I begin with an introductory chapter that situates this adaptation of monastic reading within broader literary and cultural developments, such as the growing popularity of humanist reading and Protestantism, in order to demonstrate that monastic ideals remained culturally relevant throughout this century. This chapter also aims to prompt a further reassessment of the division that is often created between the medieval and early modern periods. Chapters Two and Three focus on the use of monastic reading practices within a Benedictine context. Chapter Two examines the historiographic poetry and prose of John Whethamstede in which the abbot both positions himself at the forefront of contemporary Latin literature and, at the same time, signals the differences that set the cloistered reader apart from his secular counterpart. Chapter Three examines Lydgate’s incorporation of monastic devotional culture into the Life of Our Lady through the depiction of the Virgin as living out an exemplary religious vocation and through the arrangement of the text to facilitate calculated meditative responses from readers. Chapters Four and Five then shift to the first decades of the sixteenth century. Chapter Four examines Richard Whitford’s orthodox programme of monastic and social reform that aimed not only to meliorate the individual’s ethical life but also to revitalize Catholicism and engage directly with Protestantism. Finally, Chapter Five looks back two decades to investigate More’s borrowings from different elements of religious life in his Life of Pico and Utopia that seek to manage the spiritual aspirations of the laity and to depict a society in which, much as in a monastery, the desires of the individual are shaped by and subordinated to the ideals of the community. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2009-10-30 11:56:09.669

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2005. / Thesis directed by Maura Nolan for the Department of English. "July 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 344-368).