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archives@tulane.edu / This thesis focuses on a seldom-studied illuminated manuscript of Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) Commedia, known as Yates Thompson MS 36 (ca. 1450) in the British Library, whose Paradiso miniatures have been attributed to Giovanni di Paolo. One of the most visionary artists of the Quattrocento school of painting in Siena, his oeuvre – and the Yates Thompson codex in particular – begs for sustained critical interpretation beyond issues of connoisseurship, provenance, and stylistic analysis. The manuscript presents a remarkably rare instance in which Quattrocento Sienese pictorial and narrative strategies have been preserved in a complete suite of images, and the recent resurgence of interest in Giovanni di Paolo presents an opportune time to return to his work and to reassess the historiographic legacy that has shelved the art of fifteenth-century Siena as too “fantastic and marvellous” to be critically investigated on its own terms. Focusing particularly on issues of narrative, vision and optical theory, perspective, and the intersections between art, astronomy, and cartography, this thesis takes Giovanni di Paolo's representation of pictorial space as a locus of inquiry into the collaborative nature of manuscript production in the late medieval period, as intellectual circles shifted from spiritual concerns based on biblical tradition to empiricism. More broadly, this consideration of fifteenth-century Sienese visual culture vis à vis twenty-first scholarly concerns reconfigures Giovanni di Paolo's Paradiso miniatures as a referential assemblage or "web of images" that was inextricably linked to a complex entanglement of creative associations, and asks what it means to study an illuminated manuscript that was collaboratively authored over time. / 1 / Shannah Rose

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Book designers and manuscript artists have inserted illustrations into narrative works for centuries now. This practice is an intelligent behaviour that requires specialised knowledge of the text and the external parameters affecting the selection and placement criteria. This thesis offers a model for automation of illustration insertion into a narrative discourse. The model presented here is a significant improvement to the crudest method of dividing the text into equal parts and inserting one illustration into each part. This study starts from the position that narratives are expressions of mental representations of a sequence of events in various modes of discourse. Here, this mental representation is referred to as ‘the story’. When coupled with a mode of discourse, the story becomes a narrative. Thus, a story can be expressed as oral, written, pictorial, or film narratives. If they all express the same sequence of events, they are telling the same story. In an illustrated narrative, while the written discourse expresses the event sequence in the form of sentences, illustrations depict them using pictorial elements. The insertion of illustration into written narrative is analogous to collating two texts into one, based on their event content. In this process, sentential representation of events are collated against the pictorial expressions of the same events. Thus, for the purposes of automation, this study claims that an investigation into the locations of events can lead to potential locations for illustration insertions. However, the list of potential illustration locations can be improved further through eliminating the events that are not depictable. This model is also able to further improve on the insertion policy by incorporating event constraints as parameters for event priorities. If a set of event types is given preference in the illustration policy, the model is able to prioritise the list accordingly. Furthermore, the model is able to allow the samedegree of customisation for preferred characters, locations, or time in the story. The prioritisation can be applied to the entire narrative, or smaller chunks of the narrative text such as chapters or sections. The model is developed via the study of the verb roots of sentences – denoting the event types – in the discourse of Mohl’s critical edition of the Shāhnāma, the Persian epic composed by Abu al Qāsium Firdausī in 400/1010. A collection of 109 illustrated manuscripts of the Shāhnāma was considered in this study. These manuscripts come from various traditions of Persian paintings and cover a long period from the early 14th century to the late 19th century. A population of nearly 6,000 Shāhnāma illustrations were annotated. Each illustration is linked to a sentence in the narrative. The bottom-up approach to the study of verb distribution in the written discourse against the illustration location distribution indicates that illustration distribution follows the same trend as that of the depictable event distribution in the discourse. Particular event tokens displayed a high rate of illustration rendering them as all time favourite events. In summary, this study claims that investigation into the distribution of events in a narrative discourse provides a model for the insertion of illustrations into a narrative work.

This thesis constitutes an investigation into the depiction of dreams in imagery accompanying the late-medieval manuscripts and printed editions of the Roman de la Rose. It reflects on the changing approaches to depicting dreams during the 250 years of the Rose’s popularity in central France, as well as discussing the historical theoretical understanding of the concept of dreams, and its expression in a specific Rose context. It examines the representation of dreams in a number of Rose manuscripts – in particular their prominent dreamer incipits – alongside other relevant miniatures of both a secular and religious nature. Furthermore, the alteration of trends for depicting the dream space in Rose manuscripts during the fifteenth century are also considered, as well as a case-study of the luxurious Valencia manuscript, which contains a variety of dream subjects. This is followed by a discussion of the methodology of manuscript production in the medieval period, gleaned from a number of extant Roses. This chapter underscores the important role played by artistic originality and intention in the processes of manuscript making – addressing the ‘artistic vision’ indicated in the title of this thesis. An outline of the printed editions of the Rose and their resurrection of earlier tropes of dream depiction is also included. Finally, the appendix contains a Catalogue of the Rose manuscripts studied in preparation for and throughout the production of the thesis.

This is a study of the dance movements of Christian Flor including in Lüneburg Musica Antica Practica 1198. It includes a short biography of Christian Flor, a study of the French influences on Flor and the influence Flor had on his German contemporaries as shown through his dance movements. The final chapter is a critical edition of the dance movements.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1995. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [183]-191).

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