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The purpose of this study has been to create a simplified yet reliable list of literary works pertinent to medieval art; one that will serve the greatest usefulness to the largest number of students.

This thesis seeks to understand the impact of the locality on the lordships of the North-Sea world. Historians, previously, have focussed on aristocrats and lordship through a lord’s relationship to a central authority. Medievalists, moreover, have focussed on central Europe when investigating the aristocracy and nobility, the consequence of this is that lordships were fixed in central kingdoms, which have been perpetuated from a twentieth-century idea of nationhood. Also such a perception causes us to describe the period in structuralist terms and negates the possibility of a fluid society in the tenth and eleventh centuries. ‘Lords of the North-Sea World’ will, however, show that society was not ‘feudal’ or rigid, by contrast it was flexible and subject to change. This thesis intends to investigate lordships in a seascape that has been relatively untouched by historians. I use a comparative methodology which has remained an underused medium by medieval historians. I begin by outlining the topic and justifying my approach, which will explore the huge historiographical background of aristocratic studies. Four key themes will be examined; these are territory, solidarities, inheritances and ‘Noble Texts’. All will reveal how important the locality was to the identity, relationships and perception of the aristocracy in medieval society. The thesis, moreover, will suggest that local factors were a key component in the decision making of lords when they had choices. This has been achieved by drawing on narrative and documentary evidence to consider the levels of regional distinctiveness in lordships. The thesis also appeals to the global versus local debates throughout academic disciplines by suggesting that in the early middle ages, global vehicles of power were attempting to blunt the unmistakable authority of localism.

<p> Catherine of Siena, a 14th-century saint, penetrated the Italian political scene ranging from local politics to the papal seat of Pope Gregory XI. Scholars have depicted her success as a living saint on her relationship with her confessor, Raymond of Capua. However, through analysis of her letters and background texts, it is clear that Catherine created a network of families and individuals even before she met Raymond in 1374. To what extent did this network that she actively created contribute to her success as a public figure in medieval Italy? What impact did this group of people have on Catherine and what impact did Catherine have on the network of followers? What information can be extrapolated from studying Catherine&rsquo;s letters, hagiography, and testimonial works post-mortem? And, how does Raymond&rsquo;s miniscule presence in the network change our interpretation of the basis of Catherine&rsquo;s success?</p><p>

The present study investigates attitudes towards and teachings about the end of life and the soul’s passage to the next world, as expressed in late antique religious tales in Greek, particularly from Egypt and the Sinai. The intellectual setting is that of Chalcedonian Christianity, but within those strictures there was scope for a range of creative treatments and imaginings of a topic which canonical Scripture touched upon in mostly vague terms or glancing allusions. While there was much speculation and discussion in what we may call formal theology, the use of arresting narrative, some of it with an almost dramatic character, gave exponents of doctrine the ability to reach a wider audience in a more penetrating and persuasive way. And, as the number of scriptural allusions here will make clear, it was possible to develop ideas and images within the large gaps left by Holy Writ which were nevertheless not inconsonant with the same. Coupled with the relative freedom allowed for presentations of a universal (death) was an urgency to do so which was particular to the time (one of sweeping social and political changes within, and threats to, the empire). We consider here the connection between the universal and the particular, and some of the most important approaches taken to the subject. This work builds upon that of a number of scholars, including Derek Krueger, John Wortley, Phil Booth, André Binggeli, Elizabeth Castelli and Aron Gurevich. The first and last chapters of the dissertation are given to thematic treatment of the moments immediately before and immediately after death. The second, third and fourth chapters are each dedicated to one of the three most influential ascetic writers of the period: John Klimakos, John Moschos, and Anastasios of Sinai. We look at how their presentations of death not only frame the ideals of monastic life but to record for posterity the fading ways of a changing world. / Classics

In my dissertation, I explore the relationship between the material aspects of an editorial artifact and their literary implications for the texts it contains. I show how the interpretation of a text needs to be accompanied by an inquiry into the material conditions of its production, circulation and reception. This study is intended as both an investigation of the material foundations of institutions of literary study and a reflection on some often neglected sides of contemporary theorizations concerning textuality, writing, and media. My purpose is to show a paradigmatic example of the basic coincidence of textual datum and material unit, content and medium, verbal-visual message and physical support. The dissertation is articulated in a theoretical chapter followed by three case studies. In the theoretical introduction, I provide critical reflection on and expressive response to the complex, non-deterministic interplay between cultural constructs and the media within which they are formalized and by which they are formed in the context of medieval Italian literature. First, I briefly outline the theoretical coordinates within which to consider the materiality of textual supports (óstraka, papyry, codices) as a key element for the adequate interpretation of the texts that they preserve. Next, I offer examples of the interdependence between the strictly textual and material characteristics of a literary product. I sketch out the interpretive implications of these connections from the points of view of composition, circulation, and reception. I purposely draw the examples from different textual cultures, mainly classical (Greek and Latin) and medieval (Occitanic and Italian), in order to test the general plausibility of my methodology of inquiry. The first case study is conceived as a thematological inquiry. It offers a catalogue raisonné of the metaphors of the book and book production in the Dantean corpus. It studies, therefore, the description of the materiality of the book at the level of the enunciation. Books are a recursive figure in Dante’s macrotext. The reference to the “libro della mente” in the early canzone “E m’incresce di me sì duramente” prefigures the “libro della memoria” in the incipit of the Vita nova. Moreover, the book is the metaphor for the revelation of the cosmos held together by bond of love (“legato con amore in un volume”) at the climax of Dante’s mystical vision in Paradiso 33. Dante’s entire literary production is inscribed within the metaphorics of the book, which is disseminated in poetically and hermeneutically significant places. In this chapter, I begin by charting Dante’s images of and references to books in his corpus. Basing my analysis on Ernst Robert Curtius’ historical study of the book as symbol, and Hans Blumenberg’s gnoseological articulation of the metaphor of the legibility of the world, I then outline the various semantic realms that the metaphorics of the book entails. On one hand, the hints at the book structure serve as meta-textual elements that guide interpretation, since they convey information on the book format, the typology of expected readership, and the expository order of the text. In sum, these metaphors of books and book production are chiefly concerned with the text’s dramatizing its own problematic creation. For instance, the material elements implied in the address to the reader in Paradiso 10, 22 (“Or ti riman, lettor, sovra ’l tuo banco”) underscore a precise choice of book format (the “libro da banco universitario”) and a specific readership (scholars). On the other hand, the metaphorology of the book (and of the Commedia qua book) entails a more radical cognitive experience, since it signifies the reductio ad unum of scattered entities due to its nature as all-compassing semiotic vehicle. The final step of my analysis is to compare the interpretive indications inferred from references to the materiality of the book embedded in the text with actual renditions of some early witnesses of the Vita nova and Commedia. In the second case study, I explore the editorial and intertextual relations between Giovanni Boccaccio’s autograph of the Teseida and two exemplars of the poem (a manuscript and an incunabulum, both produced in Ferrara in the 1470s and kept at Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA). First, I delineate the complex system of authorial personae that Boccaccio impersonates in the manuscript. Then, I describe how visual and verbal elements in the autograph cooperate to engage the reader in a multi-sensorial aesthetic experience. Next, I investigate to what extent the material configuration of the Ferrara exemplars comply with the hermeneutic guidelines materially embedded by Boccaccio into his autograph as a means of managing the reception and controlling the interpretation of the poem. I outline how these two exemplars reveal the importance of Boccaccio’s editorial project in successfully inscribing his literary production within the canon of authoritative texts. In fact, the rich paratextual apparatus with which Boccaccio furnishes his autograph is the foundation upon which the Teseida grew into a classic and sprouted the proliferation of comments and accretions that surrounded the text of the poem. The third case study focuses on Francesco Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Petrarca’s songbook has been a privileged object of analysis for material philology since the publication of the fac-simile of the manuscript that preserves the autograph of the collection (ms. Vat. lat. 3195). The study of the autograph shows Petrarca’s editorial project of associating the poet’s activity with the scribe’s in an ideal coincidence of literary expression and script, text and book, composition and folio. Basing my inquiry on the fac-simile, I argue that the autograph should be considered as an organized form of visual poetry. In fact, this exemplar can be thought of as an entity that systematically conjugates a linguistic/verbal message with an iconic formation. The two are not simply juxtaposed, but rather they coexist in a sort of hypostasis, in which the iconic element affects the linguistic substance. On one hand, the verbal text brings about meanings that are of a linguistic type. On the other hand, it is structured as a medium that conveys meanings that are generally portrayed by the other order of representation (the visual). Therefore, the autograph delineates a project of integration between graphical and linguistic elements, in compliance with the classical and medieval tradition of visual poetry (from Simias’ taechnopagnia and Optatianus’ carmina figurata to the calligraphic production of the Schola Palatina). In the case of Petrarca’s songbook, the iconic element does not imply an apparatus of images, given the extreme essentialism of his editorial endeavors. Instead, it is chiefly limited to the graphic execution of the linguistic sign: its system of majuscules and minuscules, its layout, the regulation of written lines and blank spaces, and the relation between verse and line. I will therefore indicate how the iconic character of the autograph can be interpreted as a series of logical relations between the poetic language and its graphic rendition through writing. My purpose is to show that this series of relations conveys a specific set of visual guidelines that lead the reader through the decoding and interpretation of the text. / Romance Languages and Literatures

Starting in the mid-thirteenth century, kings, bishops, and local rulers throughout western Europe repeatedly ordered the banishment of foreigners who were lending at interest. The expulsion of these foreigners, mostly Christians hailing from northern Italy, took place against a backdrop of rising anxieties over the social and spiritual implications of a rapidly expanding credit economy. Moreover, from 1274 onward, such expulsions were backed by the weight of canon law, as the church hierarchy—inspired by secular precedents—commanded rulers everywhere to expel foreign moneylenders from their lands. Standing threats of expulsion were duly entered into statute-books from Salzburg to northern Spain. This dissertation explores the emergence and spread of the idea of expelling foreign usurers across the intellectual and legal landscape of late medieval Europe. Building on a wide array of evidence gathered from seventy archives and libraries, the dissertation examines how the idea of expulsion expressed itself in practice, how its targets came to be defined, and how the resulting expulsion orders were enforced—or not. It shows how administrative procedures, intellectual categories and linguistic habits circulated and evolved to shape the banishment not only of foreign usurers, but of other targets as well, most notably the Jews. By reconstructing these expulsions and their accompanying legal and theological debates, this dissertation weaves together broad themes ranging from the circulation of merchants and manuscripts to conflicting overlaps in political jurisdictions and commercial practices; from the resilience of Biblical exegesis to the flexibility of legal hermeneutics; and from shifts in political thought and church doctrine to definitions of foreignness and the limits of citizenship. It reveals the impact of expulsion on the geography of credit in the later Middle Ages and sheds new light on the interpenetration of law and economic life in premodern Europe. Above all, in treating expulsion as contagious and protean, this dissertation frames late medieval Europe as a society in which practices of expulsion that had fallen into abeyance since late antiquity once again reasserted themselves in European practice and thought. / History

This thesis examines the Ely Act Book, the record of the consistory court of Ely from 1374 to 1382. It uses the defamation cases from the Act Book as a lens to examine the influence of the court. After a brief discussion of the Act Book itself – its survival, its construction, and its layout, the thesis explores the Ely Consistory Court as an agent of the larger canon law system. It shows that the court enforced canon law, addressing the legal and pastoral concerns of the Church in England, and that the bishop of Ely at the time – Thomas Arundel – was committed to those goals. The second chapter examines the court from the perspective of the people who worked and sought justice in it. It first shows that the court’s emphasis on order and learning demanded the employment of bureaucrats like the man who wrote the Act Book, Robert Foxton. The court provided both a market for their skills and an opportunity to advance their careers. Then the thesis shows that the court also benefited the litigants. It offered both sides an opportunity for legal representation. For the plaintiffs, it provided a judicial solution to disputes, but at the same time it protected defendants with a strong standard of proof, and awarded court costs to the falsely accused. / Special Concentration

In poetry—so the story often goes—form is more important than content. After all, poets and critics since the early modern period have said so. Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote that content and form should be “organic” friends, with form the more important friend of the pair. Philip Sidney thought that the poet should make the “brazen” stuff of nature into better, “golden” forms of his choosing, as God himself might do. How did such an apparent preference for form over content happen? This dissertation suggests that one answer might be found in a study of pre-modern ideas of content, or what, in the literary criticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was called matere, or “matter.” In the later Middle Ages, matere referred at once to a writer’s source materials, her broader topic, and the parchment and ink with which she worked. A thing both physical and metaphysical, matere was seen to possess its own agency and force, and was held to be an equal partner to form in the making of poetry. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, these ideas of matter and form shifted. Since the Scholastics, medieval English poetic theory had held to a roughly Aristotelian notion of matter and form, wherein form inhered within matter. Poets could change the appearance of matter, but not its inner essence. An influx of Humanist and Neo-Platonic thought at the end of the fifteenth century, however, led to a different view in the sixteenth. Form came to be seen as an eidos, or “idea,” that was separable from matter—partly, because Humanist theory stressed style over content, and partly because of the renewed influence of these Platonic notions of form. My dissertation traces these different attitudes towards form, matter, and the literary over the course of four chapters, each focused on a single poet who wrote between 1400 and 1547: Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, John Skelton, and Thomas Wyatt. Where Hoccleve and Lydgate are shown to prioritize matter over form in their visions of poetry, Skelton and Wyatt gradually turn away from matter and towards form in their work. A consideration of each poet’s theoretical attitudes towards matter is paired, in each chapter, with a careful study of his practical treatment of source matter and manuscript materials. My introduction focuses primarily on those broader intellectual historical shifts that may have contributed to evolving conceptions of matter and form during the late medieval and early modern period. Ultimately, the dissertation concludes that, while early modern poetry remains as concerned with matter as it is with form, there is an ideological move away from ideas of materiality in the literary arts during the sixteenth century. This, in short, is the reason that Elizabethan poets claim that their work is, in Sidney’s words, “golden” rather than “brazen.” / English