Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1933. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. [391]-400.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1933. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. [391]-400.

This diploma thesis entitled Marian sermons of Anthony of Padua is based on the translation of four speeches to the Marian Feasts given by Anthony of Padua a Franciscan theologian and preacher (1195-1231). These speeches belong to the cycle Sermones dominicales and have never before been translated into Czech. The work includes insights about Anthony of Padua himself and his relationship to Franciscan spirituality. Important too, is a theological analysis of the sermons with particular focus of Anthony of Padua's conception of the Virgin Mary. In addition to focus on on the author and his views there is particular attention paid to the stylistic and the linguistic techniques used in his work.

Parmi les nombreuses apocalypses composées durant l’Antiquité judéo-chrétienne, seules l’Apocalypse de Jean et l’Apocalypse de Paul (par l’intermédiaire de la Vision de saint Paul) ont bénéficié de traductions en ancien français. Leur réception textuelle fait l’objet dans ce travail d’un classement exhaustif et d’une étude détaillée. En raison de leur succès, ces deux apocalypses ont laissé une empreinte durable dans les mentalités médiévales, car elles répondaient à deux préoccupations majeures : le Jugement collectif (Apocalypse johannique) et le Jugement individuel (apocalypse paulinienne). Elles ont donné naissance à un imaginaire dont on peut déceler la trace dans la littérature française du Moyen Âge grâce à une approche intertextuelle. Plusieurs pans de la littérature médiévale recourent à cet imaginaire, qu’il s’agisse de la littérature visionnaire (avec La Vision de Tondale et Le Purgatoire de saint Patrick), de la littérature allégorique (dans La Tournoi de l’Antéchrist et Le Roman de la Rose) ou de la littérature didactique et religieuse (dans La Somme le roi, les sermons ou les épîtres farcies). L’imaginaire apocalyptique imprègne ainsi une part considérable de la littérature de cette époque, de telle sorte qu’on peut l’envisager comme un univers mental autonome, riche de motifs, de lieux, de créatures, et parfois d’inquiétudes. De texte en texte, cet imaginaire s’est propagé au gré de strates intertextuelles que la philologie est en mesure de distinguer. Mais ce réseau complexe d’interférences ne doit pas nous faire oublier que la réception de l’imaginaire apocalyptique ne s’appréhende pas uniquement à une échelle textuelle. Elle met aussi en jeu des mécanismes cognitifs comme la compréhension, la représentation ou l’imagination. / Among the numerous apocalypses written during the Judeo-Christian Antiquity, only the Revelation of John and the Apocalypse of Paul (through the Vision of Paul) got old french translations. In this work, their textual reception is the subject of a complete inventory and a detailed study. Because of their success, both left a durable trace in the medieval mindset, as they solved two major concerns : collective judgement (Johannine Apocalypse) and individual jugdement (paulinian apocalypse). They gave birth to an imaginary world which can be detected in medieval french literature thanks to an intertextual approach. Many parts of the medieval literature use this imagination : the visionary literature (in the Vision of Tondale and St Patrick’s Purgatory), the allegoric literature (in the Tournoi de l’Antéchrist and the Roman de la Rose) or the didactic and religious literature (in the Somme le roi, the homilies and the “épîtres farcies”). The apocalyptic imagination thus spreads through a considerable part of this literature, and therefore we can consider it as an independent world of the mind, full of motives, places, creatures, and sometimes fears. From a text to another, this imagination has disseminated according to intertextual levels which can be distinguished by philology. But this complex web of correlations must not make us forget that the reception of the apocalyptic imagination is not only accessible from a textual viewpoint. It also employs cognitive mechanisms like understanding, representation and imagination.

abstract: Christina of Markyate, a twelfth-century visionary and prioress, has been frequently seen in scholarship as an outsider at her home institution of St Albans, enduring solely under the protection of its abbot, Geoffrey, her spiritual friend and confidant. This characterization appears incorrect when The Life of Christina of Markyate, St Albans' record of Christina's personal history and religious career, is viewed in its original literary environment. The high volume of extant material from twelfth-century St Albans makes it possible to view Christina's depiction in several original ways: as a textual construction (at least in part) influenced by Bede's narratives of holy women in his widely read Ecclesiastical History; as a portrayal of contemporary devotional prayer in the style of Anselm of Canterbury, a major authority on devotional practices of the time; and as a prominent addition to St Albans' own liturgy, the record of its celebrated saints and local patrons, as an object of devotion herself. The strategy of Christina's endorsement in her Life is also notably different from strategies on display in St Albans materials related to Katherine of Alexandria, an important saint for Abbot Geoffrey, which further suggests he was not her sole promoter at the abbey, if he was involved in the process of her textual production at all. Finally, the historical fact that she was employed as a patron of St Albans before none other than Pope Adrian IV, to whom St Albans was appealing for numerous institutional benefits at the time, shows that the prevailing opinion of Christina at the abbey can not have been entirely negative. Placing the Life within the literary and cultural circumstances of its production thus provides a fresh reading of Christina's institutional and devotional roles at St Albans, medieval views of women's spirituality and its place within the western European Christian tradition, and the compositional process of a major work of medieval hagiographical literature. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2012

abstract: This dissertation examines the relationship between secular law and Old and early Middle English hagiography in order to illustrate important culturally determined aspects of early English saints’ lives. The project advances work in two fields of study, cultural readings of hagiography and legal history, by arguing that medieval English hagiographers use historically relevant legal concepts as an appeal to the experience of their readers and as literary devices that work to underscore the paradoxical nature of a saint's life by grounding the narrative in a historicized context. The study begins with a survey of the lexemes signifying theft in the 102 Old English saints’ lives in order to isolate some of the specific ways legal discourse was employed by early English hagiographers. Specialized language to refer to the theft of relics and moral discourse surrounding the concept of theft both work to place these saints lives in a distinctly literal and culturally significant idiom. Picking one of the texts from the survey, the following chapter focuses on Cynewulf’s Juliana and argues that the characterization of the marriage proposal at the center of the poem is intended to appeal to a specific audience: women in religious communities who were often under pressure from aggressive, and sometimes violent, suitors. The next chapter addresses Ælfric of Eynsham’s Lives of Saints and discusses his condemnation of the easy collaboration of secular legal authorities and ecclesiastics in his “Life of Swithun” and his suggestion in the “Life of Basil“ that litigiousness is itself a fundamentally wicked characteristic. Lastly, the project turns to the South English Legendary’s life of Saint Thomas Becket. Rather than a straightforward translation of the Latin source, the South English Legendary life is significant in the poet's inclusion of a composite version of the Constitutions of Clarendon, demonstrating the author's apparent interest in shaping the reception of legal culture for his or her readers and emphasizing the bureaucratic nature of Becket's sanctity. In sum, the study shows that the historicized legal material that appears in early medieval English hagiography functions to ground the biographies of holy men and women in the corporeal world. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2012

This dissertation examines the approximately 700 anonymous female characters who appear in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, expanding the possibilities for how gender roles might be interpreted based on a wider range of female roles. Primary named female characters such as Guinevere and Morgan Le Fay perform more stereotypical functions in the text as created and limited by the Arthurian literary tradition, but a significant portion of the nameless female characters challenge these assumptions. Malory uses many of these anonymous women to perform actions which are often attributed to male characters in medieval literature, such as acting as a guide or helper on a quest, challenging gender roles by assigning more active roles to these secondary characters. However, the very anonymity of the women help negate examples of potentially dangerous female agency by downplaying their presence in the text, removing a sense of individuality by creating nameless, faceless female characters who more easily fade into the background by refusing to identify them. This helps reassert patriarchal concerns both by focusing the reader's attention on the male characters' actions and by partially glossing over the female characters' contributions to the text. In order to address such a significant number of characters, this dissertation is divided into two parts. The first section is an analysis of Malory's text, examining the implications of using the anonymous female characters as a more significant factor in examinations of Le Morte. While current scholarship does address gender concerns to some extent, this generally focuses on those primary female characters who align more readily with stereotypical gender roles. I examine how gender assumptions can be undermined when the anonymous women are included as part of an analysis, as well as how they can affect such concerns as threatening or preserving the masculinity of the male characters based on the functions the female characters perform. I also explore medieval naming customs, or onomastics, and how cultural practices might have influenced Malory's text. This includes analyzing how Malory uses various forms of anonymity. How he refers to individual characters, such as through a vocational reference, gives the reader some insight into the character's function and portrayal. The second section of this dissertation consists of indexing the approximately 700 female characters according to Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Because the number of episodes these women are in comprise 44% of the total text , Thompson's Motif-Index offers a systematic approach for dealing with such a significant number of characters. It provides a method for classifying specific actions in Le Morte according to common themes, as well as identifying how these motifs are used by Malory in non-traditional ways. Since many of his anonymous female characters perform stereotypically male roles, the motifs offer a way to quickly identify areas of future interest for scholarship. My own Index sorts the motifs based on forms of anonymity Malory uses to identify his characters. This allows the reader to compare how he portrays women within the same category, such as female relatives or helpers. While this project is necessarily limited, my Index offers a starting point for future study by allowing for an easy identification and comparison of the anonymous female characters in Malory's text.

abstract: This study examines the ways in which translators writing in two contemporary medieval languages, Old Norse-Icelandic and Middle English, approached the complicated doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary. At its core this project is dedicated to understanding the spread and development of an idea in two contemporary vernacular cultures and focuses on the transmission of that idea from the debates of Latin clerical culture into Middle English and Old Norse-Icelandic literature written for an increasingly varied audience made up of monastics, secular clergy, and the laity. The project argues that Middle English and Old-Norse Icelandic writing about the bodily Assumption of Mary challenges misconceptions that vernacular translations and compositions concerned with Marian doctrine represent the popular concerns of the laity as opposed to the academic language, or high Mariology, of the clergy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2014

abstract: “The Moral Sense of Touch: Teaching Tactile Values in Late Medieval England” investigates the intersections of popular science and religious education in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the project draws together a range of textual artifacts, from scientific manuals to private prayerbooks, to reconstruct the vast network of touch supporting the late medieval moral syllabus. I argue that new scientific understandings of the five senses, and specifically the sense of touch, had a great impact on the processes, procedures, and parlances of vernacular religious instruction in late medieval England. The study is organized around a set of object lessons that realize the materiality of devotional reading practices. Over the course of investigation, I explore how the tactile values reinforcing medieval conceptions of pleasure and pain were cultivated to educate and, in effect, socialize popular reading audiences. Writing techniques and technologies—literary forms, manuscript designs, illustration programs—shaped the reception and user-experience of devotional texts. Focusing on the cultural life of the sense of touch, “The Moral Sense of Touch” provides a new context for a sense based study of historical literatures, one that recovers the centrality of touch in cognitive, aesthetic, and moral discourses. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016

abstract: This Master's thesis locates four works by William Dyce inspired by Dante Alighieri's Commedia: Francesca da Rimini (1837), Design for the Reverse of the Turner Medal (1858), Beatrice (1859), and Dante and Beatrice (date unknown) in the context of their literary, artistic and personal influences. It will be shown that, far from assimilating the poet to a pantheon of important worthies, Dyce found in Dante contradictions and challenges to his Victorian, Anglican way of thinking. In this thesis these contradictions and challenges are explicated in each of the four works. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Art History 2013