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abstract: This dissertation focuses on the connections between childbirth and spirituality in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. It argues that scholastic interest in conception and procreation led to a proliferation of texts mentioning obstetrics and gynecology, and that this attention to women's medicine and birth spread from the universities to the laity. This dissertation contends that there is interdependence between spiritual and physical health in late medieval English religious culture, correlated with and perhaps caused by an increasing fascination with materialism and women's bodies in religious practices and rhetoric. The first chapter provides an analysis of birth in medical and pastoral texts. Pastoral works were heavily influenced by the ecclesiastical emphasis on baptism, as well as by scholastic medicine's simultaneous disdain for and reluctant integration of folk medicine. The second chapter examines birth descriptions in narratives of saints' miracles and collections of exempla; these representations of childbirth were used in religious rhetoric to teach, motivate, and dissuade audiences. The third chapter turns to the cycle play representations of the nativity as depicting the mysteries of human generation and divine incarnation for public consumption. The fourth chapter analyzes the abstract uses of childbirth in visionary and other religious texts, especially in descriptions of spiritual rebirth and the development of vice and virtue in individuals or institutions. By identifying their roles as analogous with the roles of midwives, visionaries authorized themselves as spiritual caretakers, vital for communal health and necessary for collective spiritual growth. These chapters outline a trajectory of increasing male access to the birthing chamber through textual descriptions and prescriptions about birth and midwifery. At the same time, religious texts acknowledged, sought to regulate, and sometimes even utilized the potential authority of mothers and midwives as physical and spiritual caretakers. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2014

abstract: This dissertation concerns “revelations to others” in medieval hagiographical and visionary texts. Revelations to others take many forms—spiritual visions, dreams, visual and tactile witnessing of miracles, auditions—but they all are experienced by someone other than, or in addition to, the holy person who is the subject of the text. This type of revelatory experience is common and, I argue, highly significant. Most straightforwardly, revelations to others serve to further authenticate holy women or men, confirming their devotion to God, their miraculous abilities, and/or their favored position with Christ. But revelations to others do much more than authorize the visionary. They voice the possibility that one could learn to have visions, which has interesting connections to modern ideas of guided seeing, such as meditation. They suggest circumstances in which holy persons served as devotional objects, helping their viewers achieve a higher level of religious experience in a similar manner to stained glass windows, crucifixes, or images of Veronica’s veil. For women, revelations to others sometimes offer access to spaces in which they could not physically step foot, such as the altar or the bedrooms of abbots. Moreover, by showcasing the variety of persons participating in divine experiences (monks and nuns, lay persons, nobility, and sometimes other holy persons), revelations to others speak to the larger visionary communities in which these holy persons lived. Through a series of close readings, this dissertation creates a taxonomy of revelations to others and argues for their necessity in understanding the collaborative nature of medieval spirituality. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2019

This thesis interprets The Book of Margery Kempe using a medieval medical approach. Through an interdisciplinary methodology based on a medical humanities framework, the thesis explores the significance of Kempe’s painful experiences through a broad survey of the human life cycle, as understood in medieval culture. In exploring the interplay of humoral theory, medical texts, religious instruction and life cycle taxonomies, it illustrates the porousness of medicine and religion in the Middle Ages and the symbiotic relationship between spiritual and corporeal health. In an age when the circulation of medical texts in the English vernacular was increasing, scholastic medicine not only infiltrated religious houses but also translated into lay praxis. Ideas about the moral and physical nature of the human body were thus inextricably linked, based on the popular tradition of Christus medicus. For this reason, the thesis argues that Margery Kempe’s pain, experience and controversial performances amongst her euen-cristen were interpreted in physiological and medical terms by her onlookers, as ‘pain-interpreters’. It also offers a new transcription of the recipe from B.L. Add. MS 61823, f.124v, and argues for its importance as a way of reading the text as an ‘illness narrative’ which depicts Margery Kempe’s spiritual journey from sickness to health. The chapters examine Kempe’s humoral constitution and predisposition to mystical perceptivity, her crying, her childbearing and married years, her menopausal middle age of surrogate reproductivity, and her elderly life stage. Medical texts such as the Trotula, the Sekenesse of Wymmen and the Liber Diversis Medicinis help to shed light on the ways in which medieval women’s bodies were understood. The thesis concludes that, via a ‘pain surrogacy’ hermeneutic, Kempe is brought closer to a knowledge of pain which is transformational, just as she transforms through the stages of the life cycle.

Este trabalho busca conhecer o tempo histórico da Idade Média, através do livro das Posturas Antigas de Lisboa. A partir de regras, costumes e leis que consubstanciam a referida obra, questiona-se sobre o significado daquele tempo para a humanidade. Apesar de não se ter como objectivo um cotejamento entre a Idade Média e a Idade Moderna, determinações do próprio tempo conduzem a pensar no que há de comum entre ambas, especialmente no que se refere à divisão de classes, em diversas passagens. Observam-se por exemplo, que na Idade Media o Cristianismo glorificava o fim do mundo, assim como capitalistas glorificam o fim da história, ambos objectivando a mautenção do status quo. O estudo confirma a enorme influência do Cristianismo na conformação do tempo histórico medieval, sendo notável o enrelaçamento entre a fé cristã e a organização de economia. Sob o signo do medo e da esperança a igreja responde pela preservação do atraso e da ignorância que também carcterizam o medievo. Verifica-se que cada formação tem uma estrutura distinta, mas pode-se afirmar a existência de um traço comum a todas as sociedades de classe, qual seja caminhar pari e passou com adesigualdade. Dentre outras constatções, o que de mais fundamental há nesta pesquisa é a (re)afirmação de que as relações entre os homens são históricas, sociasi e transitórias.

In the past historians have used the works of Honorius Augustodunensis to answer the question of who he was. In doing this the intellectual importance of his work has often been overlooked. Honorius was one of the most popular writers of the early twelfth century, and his most popular work was the Imago Mundi. The purpose of this study is to examine the work and its historical context and to furnish an English translation of the complete text. The present work looks at each book of the Imago Mundi and its sources to develop a concept of Honorius' writing style and his methods. It also examines twelfth-century manuscripts of the Imago Mundi and their houses of origin to construct a reason for the work's popularity, both in Honorius' own time and for centuries after.

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This study engages a network of music, myth, and metaphysics within late-ancient and twelfth-century music theory and cosmology. It traces the development, expansion, and demise of a (natural-)philosophical harmonic speculation that stems largely from an a priori commitment to a harmonic cosmology with its deepest roots in Plato’s Timaeus. It argues that music theory not only allowed twelfth-century thinkers to conceptualize the fabric of the universe, but it also provided a hermeneutic tool for interpreting the ancient and late-ancient texts that offered detailed theories of the world’s construction. The twin goals of this study are thus philosophical and musicological: firstly and philosophically, to analyze and re-assert the importance of musical speculation in the writings of the self-styled physici, who probed the physical world and its metaphysical foundations during the ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’; secondly and musicologically, to document the sources and scope of this musical speculation and to situate it within the larger tradition of ‘speculative music theory.’ The first part of the thesis (chapters one and two) disentangles the knotty question of sources for and connections between the late-ancient texts (by Calcidius, Macrobius, and Boethius) that form the background of twelfth-century thought, and it sketches the proper domain of musical thought by tracing the expansion of music’s role in quadrivial and natural-philosophical contexts from late-ancient encyclopedism though various twelfth-century divisiones scientiae. The second part of the thesis (chapters three through five) assembles and analyzes the direct evidence for twelfth-century harmonic theory. These chapters, heuristically organized around the Boethian tripartition of music, present an anagogic ascent per aspera ad astra. Chapter three (musica instrumentalis) highlights the occasional and perhaps surprising employ of practical, technical music theory in cosmological contexts, and focuses on the epistemological foundations of hearing and the ontological status granted to the sonorous ‘objects’ of hearing. Chapter four (musica humana) targets the anthropological, psychological, and ethical implications of musical relations in and between body and soul. Finally, chapter five (musica mundana) outlines the cosmological framework, the anima mundi in particular, that underpins the concordant machinations of the machina mundi in all its manifestations.

This study engages a network of music, myth, and metaphysics within late-ancient and twelfth-century music theory and cosmology. It traces the development, expansion, and demise of a (natural-)philosophical harmonic speculation that stems largely from an a priori commitment to a harmonic cosmology with its deepest roots in Plato’s Timaeus. It argues that music theory not only allowed twelfth-century thinkers to conceptualize the fabric of the universe, but it also provided a hermeneutic tool for interpreting the ancient and late-ancient texts that offered detailed theories of the world’s construction. The twin goals of this study are thus philosophical and musicological: firstly and philosophically, to analyze and re-assert the importance of musical speculation in the writings of the self-styled physici, who probed the physical world and its metaphysical foundations during the ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’; secondly and musicologically, to document the sources and scope of this musical speculation and to situate it within the larger tradition of ‘speculative music theory.’ The first part of the thesis (chapters one and two) disentangles the knotty question of sources for and connections between the late-ancient texts (by Calcidius, Macrobius, and Boethius) that form the background of twelfth-century thought, and it sketches the proper domain of musical thought by tracing the expansion of music’s role in quadrivial and natural-philosophical contexts from late-ancient encyclopedism though various twelfth-century divisiones scientiae. The second part of the thesis (chapters three through five) assembles and analyzes the direct evidence for twelfth-century harmonic theory. These chapters, heuristically organized around the Boethian tripartition of music, present an anagogic ascent per aspera ad astra. Chapter three (musica instrumentalis) highlights the occasional and perhaps surprising employ of practical, technical music theory in cosmological contexts, and focuses on the epistemological foundations of hearing and the ontological status granted to the sonorous ‘objects’ of hearing. Chapter four (musica humana) targets the anthropological, psychological, and ethical implications of musical relations in and between body and soul. Finally, chapter five (musica mundana) outlines the cosmological framework, the anima mundi in particular, that underpins the concordant machinations of the machina mundi in all its manifestations.