Browsing by Author "Somerset, Fiona"
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Item Open Access Love, Labor, Liturgy: Languages of Service in Late Medieval England(2009) Knowles, James RobertThis dissertation explores the complex vocabularies of service and servitude in the Age of Chaucer. Working with three major Middle English texts--William Langland's Piers Plowman (chaps. 1 and 3), Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love (chap. 2), and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (chap. 4)--my thesis argues that the languages of service available to these writers provided them with a rich set of metaphorical tools for expressing the relation between metaphysics and social practice. For late medieval English culture, the word "service" was an all-encompassing marker used to describe relations between individuals and their loved ones, their neighbors, their church, their God, and their institutions of government. In the field of Middle English studies, these categories have too often been held apart from one another and the language of service has too often been understood as drawing its meanings solely from legal and economic discourses, the purview of social historians. Love, Labor, Liturgy sets out to correct this underanalysis by pointing to a diverse tradition of theological and philosophical thought concerning the possibilities and paradoxes of Christian service, a tradition ranging from Saint Augustine to Martin Luther and beyond.
Item Open Access Memoirs of Fellows and Corresponding Fellows of the Medieval Academy of America(Speculum, 2022-07-01) Biggs, Frederick M; Unger, Richard W; Kelly, Henry Ansgar; Helmholz, Richard; Peters, Edward; Pennington, Ken; D'Avray, David A; Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn; Engen, John Van; Carruthers, Mary; Richter-Bernburg, Lutz; Bruzelius, Caroline; Draper, Peter; Gajewski, Alexandra; Ghosh, Kantik; Jurkowski, Maureen; Solopova, Elizabeth; Somerset, Fiona; Stones, Alison; Kleinhenz, Christopher; Busby, Keith; Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn; Minnis, Alastair; Edwards, ASG; Graham, Timothy C; diPaolo Healey, Antonette; Scheck, Helene; Blanton, Virginia; Reinert, Stephen W; Talbot, Alice-Mary; McCormick, MichaelItem Open Access Race and Conversion in Late Medieval England(2009) Whitaker, Cord J.Despite general consensus among scholars that race in the West is an early modern phenomenon that dates to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, late medieval English texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries expend no small amount of effort depicting the differences between people—individuals and groups—and categorizing those people accordingly. The contexts for the English literary concern with human difference were the Crusades and associated economic expansion and travel into Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Scholars who have argued that race is present in medieval texts have generally claimed that race is subordinate to religion, the dominant cultural force in medieval Europe. In “Race and Conversion in Late Medieval England,” I argue that race is not necessarily subordinate to religion. Rather, racial and religious discourses compete with one another for ideological dominance. I examine three texts, juxtaposed in only one extant manuscript, London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian E.16; the Three Kings of Cologne, the Siege of Jerusalem, and the physiognomy portion of the Secretum Secretorum together narrate competition between race and religion as community–forming ideologies in England through their treatments of religious identity and physical characteristics. In addition, I study Chaucer’s Man of Law's Tale, which distills down questions of religious difference to genealogy and the interpretation of blood. “Race and Conversion in Late Medieval England” argues that racial ideology emerges from and competes with religion in late medieval English literature as a means of consolidating power in crusading Western Europe, even as the ever present possibility of Christian conversion threatens to undermine the essentializing work of race.