This diploma thesis aims to classify the uses of as in the text of the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from a formal and functional perspective. As has acquired a great number of functions through the process of grammaticalization. The theoretical part of the thesis firstly deals with the historical development of as from the Old English swā and ealswā. It then describes the uses of as in Middle English. In this period, as was found to function as an adverb, conjunction, preposition and a relative pronoun. Each of these uses can be further divided into a number of subtypes. The thesis subsequently summarizes the functions as can have in Present-Day English. The final sections of the theoretical overview briefly present the processes of grammaticalization and constructionalization, as these two processes have been instrumental in the development of as. The practical section is concerned with the analysis of all the instances of as in the chosen text. It classifies them and defines each type of use in more detail. The analysis also considers competing means of expressing the same function and comments on possible ambiguities. Furthermore, this section deals with the uses of as in the text from the perspective of their grammaticalization and also points out uses which are only...

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2024 / This dissertation explores the multifaceted relationship between medieval books, their materiality, and the networks of human and non-human actors that shape their existence. Drawing from New Materialist studies and Bill Brown's "Thing Theory," it examines how medieval readers interacted with texts and material books, acknowledging the intricate web of people and objects involved in their production and reception. By focusing on the materiality of medieval books, this dissertation seeks to unveil the often-overlooked connections between various human and non-human actors involved in book production and reading. Each chapter delves into a specific case study, starting with the Auchinleck Manuscript, an early compilation of Middle English texts and romances. This chapter argues that the manuscript's composite nature reflects and encourages a similar mode of self-fashioning in its readers, linking English identity formation to the compilation of texts. The second chapter explores the Oxford Group Manuscripts and Chaucer's dream vision poems. It investigates how these manuscripts, produced in fascicles, parallel the imaginative process and recombination of sensory data in Chaucer's dream narratives. Chapter three examines the "compilation narratives" framing Thomas Hoccleve's poems, emphasizing their depictions of scribal labor and textual communion. Comparing these narratives to Hoccleve's holographs reveals the intersections between authorial self-fashioning and fifteenth-century bookmaking. The final chapter analyzes Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur in its earliest forms, the Winchester Manuscript and William Caxton's printed edition. It argues that Malory's work is fundamentally a compilation, and that Caxton's edition represents a broader shift towards author-centric and commodified books. The chapter also explores the paratextual features of Le Morte Darthur in its manuscript and printed forms to discern the impact they would have had on the reception and interpretation of the text. This dissertation challenges traditional notions of authorship and intentionality in book production, highlighting the agency of material objects and their role in shaping the meaning and reception of medieval texts. It offers new understandings of the dynamic interplay between human and non-human actors within the networks that shape late medieval English book culture.

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William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman was probably the first medieval English poem to achieve a national audience because Langland chose to write in the vernacular and he used the specialized vocabularies of his readership to open the poem to them. During the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, writers began using the vernacular in an attempt to allow all English people access to their texts. They did so consciously, indicating their intent in prologues and envois when they formally address readers. Some writers, like Langland and the author of Mankind, actually use representatives of the rural classes as primary characters who exhibit the beliefs and lives of the rural population. Anne Middleton's distinction between public-the readership an author imagined-and audience-the readership a work achieved-allows modern critics to discuss both public and audience and try to determine how the two differed. While the public is always only a presumption, the language in which an author writes and the cultural events depicted by the literature can provide a more plausible estimate of the public. The vernacular allowed authors like Gower, Chaucer, the author of Mankind, and Langland to use the specialized vocabularies of the legal and rural communities to discuss societal problems. They also use representatives of the communities to further open the texts to a vernacular public. These open texts provide some representation for the rural and common people's ideas about the other classes to be heard. Langland in particular uses the specialized vocabularies and representative characters to establish both the faults of all English people and a common guide they can follow to seek moral lives through Truth. His rural character, Piers the Plowman, allows rural readers to identify with the messages in the text while showing upper class and educated readers that they too can emulate a rural character who sets a moral standard.

The Master's thesis proceeds from a corpus-based analysis and focuses on strong forms of Early Middle English adjectives. A formal distinction between weak and strong adjectival forms had disappeared during the period of Middle English, the work, therefore, aims at the transitional period between Old and Middle English, when the strong forms could still be identified, either due to the relics of inflectional endings, syntactic position, or context. A representative sample of the most frequent adjectives was chosen from the corpus comprising the extant Middle English texts with help of specific searching code. Consequently, the strong forms were manually chosen from these according to their formal characteristics and position in the sentence. This sample was then analyzed from the syntactic point of view, as well as from the point of view of functional sentence perspective. The results of the analysis show that the indication of indefiniteness was mostly expressed by the mix of syntactic and contextual means in EME. It has also been found out that the adjectives, being used both attributively and predicatively, were by rule part of the rheme.

<div> <div> <div> <p>Medieval fairies are chaotic and perplexing narrative agents—neither humans nor monsters—and their actions are defined only by a characteristic unpredictability. My dissertation investigates this fairy chaos, focusing on those moments in a premodern romance when a fairy or group of fairies intrudes on a human community and, to be blunt, makes a mess. I argue that fairy disruption of human ways of thinking and being—everything from human corporeality to the definition of chivalry—is often productive or generative. Each chapter examines how narrative fairies upset medieval English culture’s operations and rules (including, frequently, the rules of the narrative itself) in order to question those conventions in the extra-narrative world of the tale’s audience. Fairy romances, I contend, puzzle and engage their audiences, encouraging readers and hearers to think about and even challenge the processes of their own society. In this way, my research explores the interaction between a text and its audience—between fiction and reality—illuminating the ways in which premodern narratives of chaos and disruption encourage readers and headers to engage in a sustained, ethical consideration of the world. </p> </div> </div> </div>

This dissertation examines the concept of intention and its relationship to the idea of the moral self in late medieval England. Late medieval English writers often identified intention, as opposed to action, as the site of moral identity. Drawing on medieval legal distinctions between intended and unintended wrongdoings, penitential and confessional definitions of sin as intention (as opposed to sinful action), this dissertation traces the development of intention-based concepts of the moral self in English chronicles, parliamentary legislation and petitions related to the Rising of 1381, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, The Testimony of William Thorpe, and The Book of Margery Kempe;. These texts employed contemporary notions of intention to represent interiority and to establish morally coherent narratives. Late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century writers, however, not only draw on contemporary discussions of morality but also reshape them, applying theories of intention but nuancing and transforming them in the process. These discussions of intention inform our understanding the late medieval notion of the subject.

My doctoral thesis, "Producing Piers Plowman to 1475: Author, Scribe, and Reader," charts a new material history of William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision, Piers Plowman, from its earliest composition to the onset of print in England. The study is divided into three sections, which examine the production of Piers from three perspectives: textual history, manuscript circulation, and medieval reception. The first section of the thesis conducts a study of Langland's revisionary process, presenting a new theory of authorial revision from the A to B version that has important implications for our understanding of authorship in Piers Plowman and for the future editing of the poem. The second section transitions into an examination of the early circulation of the Piers manuscripts in various geographical and social milieux. It examines two case studies of manuscript circulation in the Southwest Midlands and East Anglia, linking them to regionalized networks of scribes and patrons. Finally, Section III moves into a discussion of the literary contexts in which Piers circulates, particularly in multi-text manuscripts, examining how the poem's reception by a medieval audience affected its development as a literary text. This section treats production from a more theoretical standpoint, investigating the relationship between the poem's audience and the "production" of meaning in a social and historical context. As I will argue, each of these sections acts as an important frame of reference for understanding the multifaceted formation of Piers Plowman as a literary text and cultural landmark. In particular, the thesis emphasizes the importance of Piers's various contexts, from its textual genesis in the author's composition and revision to its circulation and reception in an unstable manuscript culture. It suggests that the people and the places that surrounded Piers Plowman in its early development fundamentally shaped the poem we have today.

The contrast between the familiar social space and the world beyond has been widely recognised as an organising principle in medieval literature, in which the natural and the supernatural alike are set off against human society as alien and hostile. However, the study of this antithesis has typically been restricted to the spatial aspect whereas the literature often exhibits seasonal patterns as well. This dissertation modifies the existing paradigm to accommodate the temporal dimension, demonstrating that winter stands out as a season in which the autonomy of the human domain is drawn into question in both Anglo-Saxon and early Scandinavian literature. In Old English poetry, winter is invoked as a landscape category connoting personal affliction and hostility, but it is rarely used to evoke a cyclical chronology. Old Icelandic literature likewise employs winter as a spatial category, here closely associated with the dangerous supernatural. However, Old Icelandic prose furthermore give winter a place in the annual progression of the seasons, which structures all but the most legendary of the sagas. Accordingly, the winter halfyear stands out as the near-exclusive domain of revenant hauntings and prophecy. These findings stand in stark contrast to the state of affairs in Middle English poetry, which associates diverse kinds of adventure and supernatural interaction with florid landscapes of spring and summer, and Maytime forests in particular. Even so, the seasonal imagery in <em>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</em> makes clear that Middle English poets could use the contrastive functions of winter to no less effect than authors in neighbouring corpora. In partial explanation of authorial choices in this regard, it is proposed that winter settings are employed especially where a strong empathic response is desired of the audience.