Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 37-10, Section: A, page: 6472. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1976.

Efforts to examine English romance as a genre are complicated by the wide variety within the corpus. This study proposes a rationale for grouping as a subgenre fourteen romances which have common interest in supernatural figures whose presence motivates definitive assessments of their protagonists. Deploying the characteristic romance diptych structure pivoted around a moment of decisive action, these romances employ a distinctive type of imagery, the romance icons. The dialogue of masculine prowess, iconically represented by the sword and the spear, with the feminine, iconized by the circular, renewable images of rings, wells, and springs, serves as the nucleus for the examination of the role of trouthe as a principle for guiding the interrelationships of sexuality, power, and self-identity. This study focuses on the manner in which the romance imaginary, the tripartite thematic complex of values in which chivalric prowess is both promoted by and rewarded by erotic fulfillment and the desires for social status, property, and feudal power, serves as the paradigmatic metaphor for the fulfillment of the self. The romances examined employ central iconic images in staging the complex interactions of the masculine and feminine which are essential in attaining this goal. Through a process of resignification, these icons become the locus for the development of the theme of trouthe as the essential value for the identification, preservation, and completion of the self. In the English supernatural testing romances, trouthe is seen as the means by which humans can cope, but not control, what is ultimately unfathomable, the complex forces of the self and the Other, signified by the icons of romance. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-04, Section: A, page: 1348. / Major Professor: Eugene Crook. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

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This dissertation is a study of how late-medieval romances construe ideal chivalric masculinity, and how aristocratic male violence was integrated into a beneficial model for masculine behavior. The focus is on the "fair unknown" romances of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and the final chapter reads Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" as thematically related to the "fair unknown" tradition in its treatment of chivalry and violence. By contrasting the masculine ideal of the romance with that of the chivalric epic, this study approaches chivalry in terms of multiple and competing models, and finds that, unlike the epic, the ideal of the romance was informed by the growing popularization of university-based philosophy and cosmology. Between Mars and Venus argues that the most significant point of departure that the chivalric romance makes from the epic is its characterization of chivalric masculinity as a moderated avoidance of extreme behavior. Animalistic and monstrous references to knightly violence in the romance often result from episodes in which the knight has been overly amorous or courtly. By identifying both extremely amorous and extremelyaggressive behavior in terms of oppositional poles on a spectrum of excess, this study reads ideal masculinity as the mediated balance between the two extremes. The connection between the production of romances and the philosophy of the universities offers an explanation of chivalric masculinity in terms of Aristotelian virtue - as a mean between excess and deficiency of prowess. This reading of chivalric violence avoids the anachronistic assumptions of stereotypical male aggression that many critics rely on. By avoiding these assumptions, this dissertation offers a reworking of the feminine/masculine binary into a paradigm of competing masculinities, which is more attuned to the intellectual and philosophical contexts of late-medieval literary production.

Issued also as Thesis--Münster. / Cover title. Includes bibliographical references (p. 4-9).

The dissertation centers on representations of women in the genres of romance, pastourelle and fabliau and explores how female characters are often more than the formulaic renditions of a singular masculine view would have them be. I base my argument on instances of social and verbal influence possessed by female characters in genres that represent three distinct classes of medieval society. Although this study is by no means able to offer a thoroughly exhaustive consideration of all classes and statuses that women in the Middle Ages inhabited, the noble lady of the romance, the shepherdess of the pastourelle and the bourgeois women of the fabliau present important examples of medieval women. Furthermore, this dissertation considers the social influence of literary women in light of the historical and cultural trends that would have affected real women in the Middle Ages. In considering these different portrayals of female characters, I argue for a dynamic representation of women that exceeds a passive and rigid place in medieval literature, particularly one that is centered immovably in a mindset of misogyny. The varied faces of medieval women will not be the only the fragments of misogynistic representation, but a multiple and divided self that is powerful in its resistance to the limits of categorizations of gender. When these female characters speak, they do so not from the same mouth, but from an abundance of mouths. In direct opposition to a constructed unity of representation, the feminine self is multiple and divided. In the fluid representation of women in medieval texts, even through the voices of their male authors, medieval women break through the reflective mirror to reveal glimpses of the feminine that is anything but marginal. / text

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Despite medieval and contemporary treatments of the Order of Apostles, an Italian lay religious movement that flourished from 1260 to 1307, that have alleged that its members were sexually immoral, promoted heresy and engaged in an apocalyptic, armed insurrection, this study argues that the Order was not immoral, nor inherently heretical and violent. Medieval sources, including chronicles and inquisitional records, have presented an overwhelmingly negative and biased account of the beliefs and actions of the Order of Apostles, which has then been uncritically repeated by most English-language scholarship, providing only a cursory overview of the Order, and often neglecting to analyze the intentions of medieval authors such as the Franciscan, Salimbene of Parma, and the Dominican inquisitor, Bernard Gui. This oversight has perpetuated a history of the Apostles that portrays them as misguided religious enthusiasts who quickly turned to violence in order to force their apostolic lifestyle on the unsuspecting medieval laity. As this dissertation argues, the Order did not foolishly seek to imitate the early apostles, but its members, including its founder, Gerard Segarelli, were instead part of larger orthodox trend among both the medieval laity and ecclesiastics who sought a more active role in religious life. By reexamining Salimbene's Cronica, the anonymous Historia Fratris Dulcini Heresiarche and Bernard Gui's De Secta Pseudo-Apostolorum , along with inquisitorial records, this study explores the message of poverty, penance and communalism that appealed to and attracted both women and men from various social classes to the Order. This study also disputes the commonly held belief that the Order, especially under its second leader, Fra Dolcino, was an actively violent apocalyptic group, first, by documenting the numerous instances where he and his followers consciously avoided conflict with episcopal and feudal authorities, and, second, by situating Dolcino and the Apostles within the larger framework of the tumultuous social and political climate of Valsesia, in northern Italy. This dissertation therefore reevaluates the Order of Apostles as more sophisticated and less violent than previously imagined.

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