Browsing by Subject "Medieval"
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Item Open Access 'Dost Thou Speak like a King?': Enacting Tyranny on the Early English Stage(2009) Mitchell, Heather S.The Biblical drama that was popular in England from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries is a fruitful site for exploring the dissemination of political discourse. Unlike Fürstenspiegeln (mirrors for princes literature) or the tradition of royal civic triumphs, Biblical drama, whether presented as ambitious "history of the world" civic cycles or as individual plays put on by traveling companies or parish actors, did not attempt to define or proscribe ideals of kingly behavior. On the contrary, the superstars of the early English stage were tyrants, such as Herod, Pharoah, Pilate, and Lucifer. These figures were dressed in the most lavish costumes, assigned the longest and most elaborate speeches, and often supplied the actors who brought them to life with a substantial wage. This dissertation argues that these tyrants helped to ensure the enduring popularity of Biblical drama well into the Tudor period; their immoderation invited authors, actors, and audiences to imagine how the role of a king ought to be played, and to participate in a discourse of virtue and self-governance that was applicable to monarchs and commoners alike.
This work builds upon a growing scholarly awareness of what Theresa Coletti and Gail McMurray Gibson have called "the Tudor origins of medieval drama": namely, that our modern knowledge of "medieval" plays reflects and relies upon the sixteenth-century context in which they were preserved in manuscripts and continued to flourish in performance. The popularity of the tyrant-figures in these plays throughout the Tudor period - particularly in parts of the country that were reluctant to adapt to the ever-changing economic, judicial, and religious policies of the regime - suggests an enduring frustration with royal power that claimed to rule in the name of "the common good" yet never hesitated to achieve national obedience at the expense of economic, judicial, and religious continuity. Through an examination of surviving play-texts from the Chester Mystery Cycle and Digby MS 133 as well as documentation of performances in Cheshire and East Anglia, this dissertation chronicles Biblical drama's ability to serve as an important site of popular resistance to the Tudor dynasty, both before and after Protestantism became a matter of state policy.
Chapter One considers the Crown's surprisingly active involvement in the civic government of Chester between 1495 and 1521 in counterpoint with the early sixteenth century restructuring of the city's mystery cycle, and argues that the cycle's new opening pageant, The Fall of Lucifer, embodies Chester's fears about losing its traditional civic identity. Chapter Two examines Biblical drama's surprising ability to encourage resistance to tyranny through a reading of The Killing of the Children, which highlights the fleeting and unprofitable nature of earthly power in such a way as to resonate with audiences in the wake of Henry VIII's initial religious reforms of 1536. Chapter Three explores the capacious Mary Magdalen play, which addresses issues of succession, of national religious identity, and of female rule in ways that seem prescient of the controversial crowning of Henry VIII's eldest daughter in 1553. Chapter Four discusses the aftermath of the final performance of the Chester cycle in 1575: the city's mayor was accused of being no less of a tyrant than Herod himself for encouraging performance of a cycle seen by the Crown as "popish idolatry." The project concludes with a Shakespearean envoi: a consideration of Richard III that demonstrates that questions of tyranny and rightful governance remained as important at the end of the Tudor period as they were at the accession of Elizabeth's grandfather in 1485.
Item Open Access Historic Architecture and Digital Modeling: A Reconstruction of the Choir Screen at Santa Chiara in Naples(2016) Giles, LucasOnce a ubiquitous feature of the medieval church interior, choir screens formed an integral role in the spatial division of medieval churches. Following their widespread destruction after the Counter-Reformation in the 16th century, little trace has been left behind of these structures. Where were they located, what did the look like and ultimately how did they function?
This paper aims to answer these questions through a digital reconstruction of the choir screen at Santa Chiara in Naples. The reconstruction is based on ground penetrating radar scans which revealed the underground foundations of the structure. The screen will be recontextualised within a 3-D model of the church, transforming our understanding of this monumental building.
Item Open Access Learning to Love(2010) Deagman, RachaelThis study examines medieval edification in all of its rich senses: moral improvement, the building up of community, and the construction of a city or edifice. Drawing from medieval literature, religious writing and architectural sources, my dissertation investigates virtue formation and explores what kinds of communities nourish or hinder those virtues. The Christian virtue of love stands at the center of my project. Drawing from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, I show that medieval Christians learn the craft of love in a lifelong process into which they are initiated as apprentices to those who teach the craft in the Church. For parishioners in late medieval England, apprenticeship in the craft of love entails participation in sacramental practice, particularly in the sacrament of penance.
Chapter one considers Jacob's Well , a fifteenth-century penitential manual written by an anonymous author that uses architectural allegory to describes the penitential process. I argue that the author, a self-proclaimed "man of craft," apprentices the reader into sacramental practice. The author is both an exemplar to the reader and apprenticed to Christ. In chapter two, I explore the role of the narrative exempla in Jacob's Well. The exempla often resist the paradigm set forth in the allegory of the well. My chapter shows that learning to read these stories trains the reader to recognize forgiveness and sin in others and then to use this recognition to evaluate one's own story. Chapter three considers William Langland's richly complex fourteenth-century poem, Piers Plowman. The horrible failures of the sacrament of penance in this poem cause the Church to crumble. The allegorical Wille is left within this Church with the enjoinder to "learn the craft of love." For Wille to learn the craft of love means more than learning to forgive and to be forgiven - it means learning to be charitable. For Langland, a charitable Church is yet to be practiced, yet to be constructed. My last chapter examines Pearl, a late fourteenth-century apocalyptic allegory written by an anonymous poet. The poem opens with a jeweler lamenting the loss of his pearl in a garden. As the poem progresses it becomes clear that the jeweler is a father who mourns the death of his infant daughter. In a dream vision, his daughter appears to him as a Pearl Maiden, one of the 144,000 virgins from the Book of Revelations. In an inversion of the usual parent-child relationship, the Pearl Maiden teaches the jeweler to recognize that their interlocking narratives stem from the same Christian tradition, although his particular narrative is one of penitential practice and hers is one of grace. The Pearl poet's architectural allegory focuses on the completed City of New Jerusalem rather than on the upbuilding or crumbling of the Church.
Item Restricted Models of Confession: Penitential Writing in Late Medieval England(2011) Sirko, JillThis project examines the medieval practice of the sacrament of penance and the innovative ways in which medieval literature engaged with the pastoral project of the Catholic church to provide the penitent with a way to deal with sin. Drawing from medieval literature, religious writing and theological sources, this project begins by illustrating the extent to which each of these didactic texts produces a "model of confession" that reaffirms the teachings of the church. However, approaching these texts with careful attention to language and to the grammar of sin and penance, I show that each of these undeniably orthodox works departs from traditional accounts of the sacrament of penance in significant ways. I suggest that such departures point to moments of theological exploration. My dissertation thus interrogates the category of orthodoxy, showing it to be more capacious and exploratory than is generally recognized. Further, I suggest that the vernacular penitential literature of the late medieval period, motivated by pastoral considerations, actively engages with academic and clerical theological debates surrounding the heavily contested sacrament of penance.
Chapter one examines Jacob's Well, a fifteenth-century vernacular penitential treatise. I argue that the narrative exempla often work against the instruction offered within each chapter, compelling the reader to consider theological problems not addressed within the doctrinal material. These resistances, I suggest, are intentional and not only suggest certain limitations in traditional penitential manuals, but encourage a more conscientious penitential practice and a better understanding of church doctrine. In chapter two I consider the Showings of Julian of Norwich. I show how Julian critiques the church's penitential system and offers an alternative form of confession and penance that holds the sinner accountable for sins while reassuring the penitent of God's love and forgiveness. Chapter three compares two fifteenth-century morality plays, Mankind and the Castle of Perseverance. Through a reading of the treatment of mercy in both plays, I suggest that the Castle's departures from traditional accounts of sacramental confession allow the author to explore the scope of God's mercy and experiment with the idea of universal salvation while still promoting orthodox instruction. I conclude this dissertation with Thomas Hoccleve's poem "Lerne to Die," one of the earliest treatments of the Ars moriendi theme. Examining some of the differences between sacramental confession and deathbed confession, I show how the absence of the sacrament in this dramatic account of unprepared death emphasizes the power of God's grace and limitations of human effort. However, Hoccleve ultimately reaffirms the necessity of final confession by the end of the poem.
Item Open Access Mount Carmel in the Commune: Promoting the Holy Land in Central Italy in the 13th and 14th Centuries(2016) Dodson, Alexandra TylerThe Carmelite friars were the last of the major mendicant orders to be established in Italy. Originally an eremitical order, they arrived from the Holy Land in the 1240s, decades after other mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, had constructed churches and cultivated patrons in the burgeoning urban centers of central Italy. In a religious market already saturated with friars, the Carmelites distinguished themselves by promoting their Holy Land provenance, eremitical values, and by developing an institutional history claiming to be descendants of the Old Testament prophet Elijah. By the end of the 13th century the order had constructed thriving churches and convents and leveraged itself into a prominent position in the religious community. My dissertation analyzes these early Carmelite churches and convents, as well as the friars’ interactions with patrons, civic governments, and the urban space they occupied. Through three primary case studies – the churches and convents of Pisa, Siena and Florence – I examine the Carmelites’ approach to art, architecture, and urban space as the order transformed its mission from one of solitary prayer to one of active ministry.
My central questions are these: To what degree did the Carmelites’ Holy Land provenance inform the art and architecture they created for their central Italian churches? And to what degree was their visual culture instead a reflection of the mendicant norms of the time?
I have sought to analyze the Carmelites at the institutional level, to determine how the order viewed itself and how it wanted its legacy to develop. I then seek to determine how and if the institutional model was utilized in the artistic and architectural production of the individual convents. The understanding of Carmelite art as a promotional tool for the identity of the order is not a new one, however my work is the first to consider deeply the order’s architectural aspirations. I also consider the order’s relationships with its de facto founding saint, the prophet Elijah, and its patron, the Virgin Mary, in a more comprehensive manner that situates the resultant visual culture into the contemporary theological and historical contexts.
Item 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.
Item Open Access Reasoning Rebellion and Reformation: Natural Law and the Ethics of Power and Resistance in Late Medieval English Literature(2021) Fry, Chandler ThomasReasoning Rebellion and Reformation: Natural Law and the Ethics of Power and Resistance in Late Medieval English Literature argues that the natural law was a vital ethical, political, and literary discourse in England amid the social rebellions that comprehensively shook communal bonds in the 1380s and 90s. It illuminates the centrality and complexities of this natural law discourse through analysis of the works of two fourteenth-century writers, Thomas Usk and Geoffrey Chaucer. Twice branded a traitor and finally executed for treason in 1388, Usk held a resolute faith in the political power of the natural law, interlacing his own tumultuous political history with the natural law in an effort to save his life and reform his culture. Unlike Usk, and indeed unlike many of his contemporaries, Chaucer foregrounds in his poetry the possibility that effective resistance through the natural law may be impossible in vicious and tyrannical societies. Chaucer questions the view that the natural law is an unshakeable foundation for effective resistance, demonstrating in major poems like Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight’s Tale that the natural law can be obfuscated and indeed appropriated by corrupt forms of power. In response to his culture’s debates about natural and unnatural forms of resistance, then, Chaucer posed a more fundamental question which is often marginalized within the natural law tradition itself: are the definitions of natural and unnatural determined by the dominant powers in a culture?