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This thesis explores the depiction of ecclesiastical restorers in narrative sources in England between c.1070 and 1130. It examines the way in which contemporaries wrote about churchmen who were engaged in restoring the English Church, particularly the actions which were attributed to them. While a great deal has been written about ideas of Church reform from the time, little has been done to set out who might actually be considered a restorer. Narrative sources offer a window through which to assess the themes which most concerned writers of the time. The thesis focuses upon chronicles and saints' Lives to delve into these themes, as it seeks to identify the criteria by which writers assessed churchmen who attempted to restore the Church. Certain common trends will be identified. However, it will also be argued that different contexts and commentators honed the image of the restorer so that the needs of communities and their particular members shaped ideas of the figures under discussion. The examination is split between four chapters, each addressing an important aspect in the depiction of the restorer. Chapter One looks at the importance of material restoration, through the recovery of lost lands and the rebuilding of churches. Chapter Two looks at how writers depicted restorers correcting morals in England and improving monastic customs, particularly saints' cults. Chapter Three explores the notion of ‘right order' and how it was important for churchmen to ensure that the correct hierarchy was restored. The fourth and final chapter examines the personal characteristics expected of a restorer, such as industry, prudence and learning, as well as descriptions of saintly restorers. Finally, the conclusion tests its findings against writing from different times and places, namely other European writing from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries and tenth-century England.

Notre étude vise à dégager deux phases successives dans la construction de la royauté normande de Sicile. La première est entamée par Roger II. Le pouvoir est personnel, non défini juridiquement ; il dépend essentiellement de la capacité du roi à l’imposer. Le roi muselle l’aristocratie féodale et préfère s’entourer de l’aristocratie orientale, plus habituée à un pouvoir fort, qu’il utilise dans son administration. La seconde advient durant le règne de Guillaume Ier. Autour de 1161, la pression seigneuriale rompt la dynamique antérieure. L’émir des émirs, symbole de la domination administrative orientale, est assassiné et remplacé par un conseil de familiares regis. Ces poussées aristocratiques contraignent le pouvoir royal à s’institutionnaliser. Les contours juridiques de la fonction royale se définissent et s’occidentalisent. / The object of our study is to distinguish two following stages in the building of the Norman Kingship of Sicily. The first is initiated by Roger II. Power is personal, juridically undefined and depends mostly on the king’s ability to enforce it. The king muzzles the feudal aristocracy and rather likes to engage with the eastern aristocracy, more used to a strong power, in the administration of his affairs. The second arrives during the reign of William I. Around 1161, pressure from the lords breaks the previous dynamic. Amiratus amiratorem, emblem of the domination of the east on the administration, is killed and replaced by a council of famiiares regis.The rise of the aristocracy compels to the institutionalisation of the royal power. The royal function becomes juridically limited and is no longer influenced by an eastern approach.

Thesis advisor: Robert Stanton / This dissertation introduces the remix as an interpretive framework for the analysis of medieval texts and demonstrates its value as a new approach to understanding even well-studied texts. Breaking the process of remixing down into three composite processes—aggregation, compilation, and renarration—allows the reader to examine a given text as the cumulative effect of a series of actions taken by known or unknown remixers. Doing so in turn allows for new readings based on previously un- or under-explored alterations, completions, and juxtapositions present within the text or its physical or generic contexts, or embedded within its processes of textual production. This dissertation presents four case studies that show the usefulness of this approach in regard to (1) the physical and textual construction of the Junius manuscript; (2) the conventions of the ‘encomium urbis’ genre and the meaning of ‘home’ in Old English poetry; (3) King Leir narratives and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as forms of history writing; and (4) various contextualizations of Grendel, the antagonist from the poem Beowulf. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

The 1970s brought a change to the face of the television sitcom, particularly with the works of Norman Lear, as comedy began to shift its focus away from portrayals of the ideal nuclear family to more complicated interactions with the outside world. This thesis focuses on All in the Family and the various ways that the series broke ground in its methods of social discourse. The series’ unique representation of working-class domestic life and its various distancing techniques provided a new challenge for sitcom audiences. With other Lear series and the likes of M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the 1970s television comedy landscape provided platform for socially conscious discourse. However, this period of progressive entertainment declined toward the end of the decade, as series like Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley sought to look backward rather than forward. From the 1980s to the 2000s, with a few exceptions, the focus of the sitcom reverted back to the preservation of idealized domestic and workplace families with the likes of Family Ties and Friends. However, the 2010s bring the promise of new social relevancy in television with series like Black-ish, which negotiate 1970s relevancy with 2010 narrative and aesthetic style, and streaming, non-network programs like Orange is the New Black and Transparent that experiment with genre in new ways.

This thesis is a prosopographical study of the wives of the clergy in England and Normandy from 1050 to 1150. After the Norman Conquest of England (1066), both regions shared an elite ruling class and the churches shared personnel. However, the different social and political contexts of the English and Norman churches ensured very different responses to the drive to impose clerical celibacy. The overwhelming majority of women associated with clergy can be considered wives; there is no evidence of widespread clerical concubinage. Where women can be identified, it could be inferred that wives came from similar social groups as their husbands. All evidence suggests that clergymen’s marriages remained valid and their children were not made illegitimate by the decretals of the First Lateran Council (1123) or Second Lateran Council (1139) as current scholarship assumes. Clergymen continued to marry because clerical marriage remained the norm. Daughters continued to find appropriate marriages. The position of priests’ sons deteriorated overall, but the difficulties they faced varied from place to place and over time. Married clergy remained a significant presence, at every grade from bishop to parish priest throughout the first hundred years of reform on both sides of the Channel. Clerical celibacy was a divisive issue before 1100 in Normandy, but was never as important in England. Married clergy in England do not appear to have suffered the same degree of pressure as married clergy in Normandy. The effect of the Norman Conquest is an underestimated factor in modern scholarship on clerical celibacy. Overall, the modern narrative of clerical celibacy and priestly marriage needs to be grounded in the political and social context of each region, traced over time and reframed in order to reflect the lived experience of priests, their wives and their families.

Socrates teaches in the Meno that in order for a belief to be justified, an appropriate relation must ‘tie down’ the belief to its (apparent) truth. Alvin Goldman’s position of externalism holds that for a belief to be justified, an appropriately reliable process must have obtained. One need not be aware of this reliable process. Conversely, Laurence BonJour’s brand of internalism holds that this relation between a belief and its (apparent) truth is just what the cognizer needs to be aware of in order for that belief to be justified. This work examines their debate, with particular interest paid to BonJour’s case of Norman: a clairvoyant who forms a belief via this ability but has no evidence for or against the belief or his own clairvoyance. Using this case, I propose an ‘epistemological spectrum’ wherein the insight of externalism is appreciated – what Robert Brandom deems the Founding Insight of Reliabilism – that a reliably produced belief bears some epistemic legitimacy, while retaining the insight of internalism: that objective reliability cannot offset subjective irrationality. This is done by classifying cases wherein only the obtainment of a reliable process occurs as epistemically rational, though not justified. Ultimately I reconcile the virtues of both positions, and propose that Goldman’s brand of full blooded externalism was generated by following an intuitional illusion by way of affirming the consequent.

Socrates teaches in the Meno that in order for a belief to be justified, an appropriate relation must ‘tie down’ the belief to its (apparent) truth. Alvin Goldman’s position of externalism holds that for a belief to be justified, an appropriately reliable process must have obtained. One need not be aware of this reliable process. Conversely, Laurence BonJour’s brand of internalism holds that this relation between a belief and its (apparent) truth is just what the cognizer needs to be aware of in order for that belief to be justified. This work examines their debate, with particular interest paid to BonJour’s case of Norman: a clairvoyant who forms a belief via this ability but has no evidence for or against the belief or his own clairvoyance. Using this case, I propose an ‘epistemological spectrum’ wherein the insight of externalism is appreciated – what Robert Brandom deems the Founding Insight of Reliabilism – that a reliably produced belief bears some epistemic legitimacy, while retaining the insight of internalism: that objective reliability cannot offset subjective irrationality. This is done by classifying cases wherein only the obtainment of a reliable process occurs as epistemically rational, though not justified. Ultimately I reconcile the virtues of both positions, and propose that Goldman’s brand of full blooded externalism was generated by following an intuitional illusion by way of affirming the consequent.

Title from title page of PDF (University of Missouri--St. Louis, viewed March 3, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 26).

British Library MS Harley 2253 is a unique fourteenth-century miscellany consisting of 140 folios and containing 116 different texts, including lyrics, political poems, fabliaux and other secular and religious texts in verse and prose, Latin, Middle English and Anglo-Norman. While the so-called “Harley Lyrics” popularized by Brook’s edition may have registered widely on scholarly radar, many of the non-English texts in the collection have failed to elicit critical attention. However, these texts are vital points in the narrative of English literary history. In particular, the four Anglo-Norman fabliaux included in Harley 2253 constitute a majority of the extant pre-Chaucerian fabliaux produced on the English isles, and of these, Le Dit de la Gageure and Du Chevalier a La Corbeille have no Old French analogues. This report explores the Anglo-Norman fabliaux in this manuscript, their relationship to the continental French tradition and to the subsequent English (ie. Chaucerian) fabliaux incarnations. Specifically, I argue that representations of female desire – figured as an opposition between “stillness” and doing one’s “will” – surface in these obscene misogynist stories that simultaneously objectify and colonize the female body. “De Clerico et Puella”, Le Dit de la Gageure and Le Chevalier qui fist Les Cuns Parler all include an unmarried female who articulates her sexual desire freely, a sharp contrast to the traditional cuckoldry plot of Old French fabliaux which revolves around a married woman’s illicit affairs. Indeed, the grotesque images of sexual violence and the pornographic images of sexual fulfillment in these pre-Chaucerian fabliaux are not contained by the ecclesiastic context from which these texts originate, but rather they linger and are transformed by the female characters, patrons, readers and hearers of the medieval manuscripts in their domestic contexts. / text