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Parody is central both thematically and structurally to Chaucer's works. In this he proves to be firmly within medieval literary tradition. A parody is an incongruous imitation of some exemplary work, proposing another version of that work which is only imperfectly analogous to it. Analogy, developed in St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Francis and the doctrine of the Antichrist, is fundamental to the culture of the Christian Middle Ages: the imitation of Christ is the basis for the Christian way of life; evil is a parody of the highest good. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin satires, like Walter Map's De Nugis Curialium, the Tractatus Garsiae, the "Apocalypsis Goiliae," and the "Sancti Evangelii Secundum Marcas Argenti," criticize corrupt clergy as parodic inversions of exemplary Christian figures and doctrine. The vernacular parodies of chivalry invert the categories of romance. "Spiritual " pastourelles invert the terms of that genre. Chaucer uses analogy and analogic parody and travesty in Troilus and Criseyde to evaluate and structure the course of the love affair as imperfectly analogous to both pagan and Christian models, to ennoble Troilus, and to emplot Criseyde's behavior as a parody of Troilus', her betrayal as a travesty of their love, and her character as complementary to Diomede's. Sacred parody in the Pardoner's Tale is well-grounded in medieval exemplary parody and the theology of the Holy spirit; chivalric parody in Thopas has precedent in works such as the Audigier; the Merchant's Tale travesties chivalric and Christian values.

The anonymous Cloud author is one of five medieval spiritual writers commonly referred to as the fourteenth-century English mystics. Generally regarded as the most original writer among the five, the Cloud author remains, nonetheless, entirely orthodox in his theological outlook; in fact, his extreme concern that his works not be read out of context reflects his fear of inadvertently leading his readers into spiritual error. Although some critics dismiss the Cloud author's concern in this regard as excessive, the existence of several twentieth-century articles comparing the Cloud author's teaching to aspects of Buddhist and Hindu meditation calls for a reexamination of the Cloud corpus within its proper context. As a prerequisite to investigating the validity of comparisons that have been drawn between Eastern forms of meditation and the Cloud author's concept of prayer, the first three chapters of the dissertation attempt to establish the appropriate context within which the Cloud author's works can best be understood. Chapter One places the Cloud author's work within the context of its Roman Catholic heritage, and Chapter Two explores the nature of Neoplatonic influences in the Cloud author's writings, focusing in particular on Dionysian sources and their relationship to the Cloud corpus. The Cloud author's view of language and its proper role with respect to contemplative prayer is the subject of Chapter Three; here it becomes apparent that a correct understanding of the Cloud author's use of language is essential to an accurate comprehension of his teaching. Finally, Chapters Four and Five deal directly with parallels drawn between prayer of the Cloud author and the use of the koan and mantra, two specific techniques in Buddhist and Hindu meditation. Careful examination of these comparisons reveals a general disregard for proper context, both of the Cloud author's works as well as of Buddhist and Hindu concepts, that invalidates claims to any substantial resemblance between Eastern meditation and the contemplative prayer of the Cloud author.

This dissertation examines representations of the body in the Old French fabliaux in order to elucidate these stories’ philosophy (or philosophies) of language and their relationship to religious, medical, and dietetic cultures. An exploration of contemporary discourses referenced in the fabliaux – moral discourses around sex and food, medical and dietetic theories concerning food and animals, and rituals and rites surrounding the living and dying body – demonstrates how these elements shape narrative structure, characters, key objects, and décor. The fabliaux exhibit bodies founded by and coextensive with language, which, particularly in the form of speech, is simultaneously a function of the body. This dissertation shows the fabliaux to be profoundly anchored in the material world, but also aware that the physical and material are affected by language, and subject to transformation by the greater context of twelfth-, thirteenth-, and early fourteenth-century literature in its vernacular and Latin, secular and religious forms. The first chapter provides a critical history of the major questions in fabliaux scholarship through the 1980s, when the field began to undergo a number of important changes. The first part of Chapter 2 pursues the physical body in the fabliaux through pleasures, particularly the sexual and alimentary, while arguing that the stories respond to outside discourses about physical behavior, and that sensual or carnal pleasures and those of language coexist. The second section traces the relationship of spaces – social and domestic, permitted and forbidden – to morality. Analysis of the localization of the body in space indicates that space is essential to the construction of bodies, and may even determine (the perception of) guilt or innocence. The third chapter demonstrates that the humor of many fabliaux depends on anxieties concerning the spatial incursions of death, which mirror the visitations of outside texts. Miracles and superstitions constitute the focus of the fourth chapter, which examines the exploitation of supernatural events by the fabliaux’ human actors. The final chapter shows the importance of dysphemism and polysemy, of audience interpretation, and of the potential dangers of misinterpretation when texts become bodies and bodies become texts. / Romance Languages and Literatures

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L’étude porte sur la question de la beauté dans plusieurs romans du début du XIIIe siècle : le Perlesvaus, le Lancelot propre, la Queste del Saint Graal, le Bel Inconnu de Renaud de Beaujeu, Meraugis de Portlesguez de Raoul de Houdenc, le Roman de la Rose de Guillaume de Lorris. Il s’agit de déterminer si la représentation du beau ressortit à une conception unifiée. L’enquête associe à l’examen du corpus plusieurs autres textes : des œuvres vernaculaires du XIIe siècle, les arts poétiques du Moyen Âge et le discours théologique. Il ressort que, sans être pour autant l’équivalent roman de la pulchritudo, la « beauté romanesque » est à la fois une res, dotée de caractéristiques sensibles relativement stables, et un signum, ouvert sur un aliud aliquid. / The object of this study is the question of beauty in a selection of early thirteenth century romances: Perlesvaus, the prose Lancelot, La Queste del Saint Graal, Le Bel Inconnu by Renaud de Beaujeu, Meraugis de Portlesguez by Raoul de Houdenc, Le Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris. In an effort to determine whether the representation of beauty is based on a unified concept, the investigation associates the aforementioned romances with various other texts: vernacular works from the twelfth century, medieval "artes poeticae" and theological discourse. It appears that "romance beauty", although not a strict vernacular equivalent of the latin concept of pulchritudo, is both a res, with relatively stable characteristics, and a signum, which points to an aliud aliquid.

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.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when organizations such as the Early English Text Society began making an increasing variety of medieval texts accessible to Victorian readers, the "everyday life" of the past became an important subject of historiography. For many of William Morris's contemporaries, this project of social history and textual recovery provided welcome evidence to support either narratives of nostalgia for an ordered past or a comforting liberal sense of progress; for Morris himself, however, the everyday life of the medieval past offered an array of radical possibilities for creative adaptation. Morris's broad reading in newly recovered medieval texts, his library of manuscripts and woodcut books, and his personal experience of medieval domestic architecture were more instrumental in developing his sense of the past than were such artefacts of high culture as the great cathedrals and lavishly illustrated manuscripts, since it was through the surviving items of everyday use that Morris could best approach the creative lives of ordinary medieval men and women. For William Morris, the everyday medieval "art of the people" was collaborative, de-centralizing, and devoted to process rather than to the attainment of perfection. Morris consistently works to strip ancient texts of their veneer of authority, resisting the notion of the rare book as an object of cultural mystery and as a commodity. His response to the art of the past is a radical process, in which reading is not mere "poaching" on the hegemonic territory of capital and cultural authority, but an immersive activity in which any reader can be intimately and actively engaged with the artefact from the earliest moment of its production. Such active reception, however, as diverse and fallible as the individuals who practice it, requires in turn an ongoing creativity in the form of adaptations of, and even collaboration with, the past. Morris's theory of creative adaptation was consequently itself not static, and this dissertation traces its evolution over Morris's career. In his early poetry, Morris reveals his sense of the limitations of the historical record as his characters grasp simultaneously at fantasies and physical objects to make sense of the crises in which they find themselves, suggesting the incomplete and unstable circumstances of textual reception itself. In the socialist lectures and fiction of the 1880s, Morris makes use of surviving and imagined fragments of medieval material culture and domestic architecture to describe an aesthetic that can embrace creative diversity, co-operation, and even imperfection across historical periods. In the works produced by his Kelmscott Press, the material book itself becomes a collaborative site for artists, illustrators, and editors to work out the active reception and dissemination of the popular reading of the past. Finally, in the romances of the 1890s, Morris describes a diversity of possible social geographies, ultimately articulating a vision of the romance genre itself as a popular art, equally capable of transformation over time as are the artefacts of everyday life that Morris creatively employs in his fictions throughout his career.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when organizations such as the Early English Text Society began making an increasing variety of medieval texts accessible to Victorian readers, the "everyday life" of the past became an important subject of historiography. For many of William Morris's contemporaries, this project of social history and textual recovery provided welcome evidence to support either narratives of nostalgia for an ordered past or a comforting liberal sense of progress; for Morris himself, however, the everyday life of the medieval past offered an array of radical possibilities for creative adaptation. Morris's broad reading in newly recovered medieval texts, his library of manuscripts and woodcut books, and his personal experience of medieval domestic architecture were more instrumental in developing his sense of the past than were such artefacts of high culture as the great cathedrals and lavishly illustrated manuscripts, since it was through the surviving items of everyday use that Morris could best approach the creative lives of ordinary medieval men and women. For William Morris, the everyday medieval "art of the people" was collaborative, de-centralizing, and devoted to process rather than to the attainment of perfection. Morris consistently works to strip ancient texts of their veneer of authority, resisting the notion of the rare book as an object of cultural mystery and as a commodity. His response to the art of the past is a radical process, in which reading is not mere "poaching" on the hegemonic territory of capital and cultural authority, but an immersive activity in which any reader can be intimately and actively engaged with the artefact from the earliest moment of its production. Such active reception, however, as diverse and fallible as the individuals who practice it, requires in turn an ongoing creativity in the form of adaptations of, and even collaboration with, the past. Morris's theory of creative adaptation was consequently itself not static, and this dissertation traces its evolution over Morris's career. In his early poetry, Morris reveals his sense of the limitations of the historical record as his characters grasp simultaneously at fantasies and physical objects to make sense of the crises in which they find themselves, suggesting the incomplete and unstable circumstances of textual reception itself. In the socialist lectures and fiction of the 1880s, Morris makes use of surviving and imagined fragments of medieval material culture and domestic architecture to describe an aesthetic that can embrace creative diversity, co-operation, and even imperfection across historical periods. In the works produced by his Kelmscott Press, the material book itself becomes a collaborative site for artists, illustrators, and editors to work out the active reception and dissemination of the popular reading of the past. Finally, in the romances of the 1890s, Morris describes a diversity of possible social geographies, ultimately articulating a vision of the romance genre itself as a popular art, equally capable of transformation over time as are the artefacts of everyday life that Morris creatively employs in his fictions throughout his career.