Browsing by Subject "Medieval"

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A personal treasure : the Baltimore-Helmarshausen Psalter (Walters Art Museum MS W. 10) and its originally-intended owner
(2017-05) Porambo, Allison Michelle; Holladay, Joan A.
Earlier scholarship on the Baltimore-Helmarshausen Psalter (Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, MS W. 10) focuses almost exclusively on the identity of the noblewoman depicted in the full-page owner portrait before the start of the psalm text. This study will instead examine how this unusually small manuscript and its illuminations functioned as a private devotional prayer book for its original intended owner, Duchess Matilda Plantagenet (1156-1189), wife of Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony and Bavaria (1129- 1195). This analysis will explore how the psalter’s textual content, physical format, and illuminations, particularly the portrait of the originally-intended owner, appealed to the Duchess Matilda sensually as well as spiritually. The Baltimore-Helmarshausen Psalter offers a rare opportunity to compare the public artistic commissions of a medieval magnate, including architecture, reliquaries, and manuscripts, with the more private works of patronage made at his court. To that purpose, the Gospels of Henry the Lion (Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 105 Noviss. 2°), commissioned by the ducal couple for the Saxon court church of Saint Blaise in Brunswick, will be examined, bringing the intimacy of the psalter into stark relief. The Baltimore-Helmarshausen Psalter provides a glimpse of the personal and spiritual role that illuminated manuscripts played in the lives of medieval laymen and –women and hints at the taste for personal prayer books with portraits of the owners at their devotions that would arrive in the next century. This thesis will make the psalter the topic of extensive art historical analysis for the first time.
Chante(Fable) : romance, parody, and the medieval in Aucassin et Nicolette and Lionhead Studios’ Fable
(2015-08) Holterman, Nicholas Robert; Scala, Elizabeth, 1966-; Birkholz, Daniel
The romance was one of the most popular genres of medieval literature during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. While it is difficult to enumerate the universal characteristics shared by all romances, there are similar elements present in many. Aucassin et Nicolette, the unique thirteenth-century chantefable, has intentionally adopted these elements and manipulated them in such a way that parodies the romances put forth by Chrétien de Troyes. The video game Fable comprises a unique structural form that echoes that of Aucassin et Nicolette and, despite its creation nearly eight hundred years later, belongs to the medieval tradition of parody. This report will explore how the various motifs, such as the hero quest, the battle sequence, and the fantastic world, are imitated and manipulated by Fable and Aucassin et Nicolette in their self-conscious attempts to parody medieval romance conventions. In the era of Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, popular culture is be obsessed with medievalism. Fable, however, is categorically medieval rather than post-medieval because of the structure it shares with Aucassin et Nicolette. Together, these works self-consciously employ techniques that deride the romance conventions, and intentionally resist conforming to medieval public expectations.
The Chora of Croton 1983-1989
(University of Texas at Austin, 1990) Institute of Classical Archaeology
This annual report provides information about excavations in the territory of Croton. After the excavation at Metaponto, the archaeological team of the Institute of Classical Archaeology shifted its attention to Croton, a preeminent Greek colony in Italy. The primary aim of this excavation was to investigate the motives behind the location of farm sites within certain agricultural zones. The report presents the preliminary findings and conclusions of excavations at Capo Alfiere, a small coastal promontory south of the modern city of Crotone, and at Torre Bugiafro, a medieval ruin near the town of Isola Capo Rizzuto.
Cultural capital : production and reproduction in Emaré
(2012-08) Bristol, Abigail R.; Scala, Elizabeth, 1966-; Lesser, Wayne
Using the central romance narrative object in the Breton Lay Emaré, the anonymous poet creates a conversation highlighting the importance of class structure, religious difference, chivalric duty, the generic traditions of romance, imperial wealth, desire, and power within the narrative. The protagonist, Emaré, serves as the focus for a version of the traditional calumniated wife narrative, with few distinctions, the most intriguing of which is the focus on the particular textile that identifies her. This paper investigates how the textile and Emaré herself demonstrate the importance of production and reproduction—the fruits of both kinds of labor enabling her son to inherit two empires and their associated capitalist wealth, a social value that the likely middle class audience would have admired. This combined both the traditional dynastic focus of romance narratives with a capitalist, mercantile one, suggesting a move away from a chivalric, martial culture to one based around economic production.
Cultures of conquest : romancing the East in medieval England and France
(2009-08) Wilcox, Rebecca Anne; Heng, Geraldine; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-
Cultures of Conquest argues for the recognition of a significant and vital subcategory of medieval romance that treats the crusades as one of its primary interests, beginning at the time of the First Crusade and extending through the end of the Middle Ages. Many romances, even those not explicitly located in crusades settings, evoke and transform crusades events and figures to serve the purposes of the readers, commissioners, and authors of these texts. The prevalence of crusade images and themes in romance testifies to medieval Europe's intense preoccupation with the East in its multiple manifestations, both Christian and Muslim. The introductory chapter situates the Song of Roland (c. 1100) as a hybrid epicromance text that has long set the standard for modern thinking about medieval European attitudes toward the East. The following chapters, however, complicate the Song of Roland's black-and-white portrayal of Muslims as "wrong" and Christians as "right." Chapter Two, focusing on the Middle English romances Guy of Warwick and Sir Beues of Hamtoun, demonstrates the extreme "othering" of Muslims that occurred in medieval romance; but it also acknowledges the antagonism of other Christians (whether Eastern or European) in these texts. In Chapter Three, on romances with Saracen heroes (Floire et Blancheflor, the Sowdone of Babylone, and Saladin), I show how these texts reimagine the East as a desirable ally and even incorporate Saracens into European genealogies, seeking a more conciliatory relationship between East and West than is provided by the romances discussed in the previous chapter. My fourth chapter shows how gender mediates cultural contact in Melusine and La Fille du Comte de Ponthieu: women, as the cornerstones of important crusading families, were invested in crusading and were imagined as key to the success of the crusades. The epilogue offers a brief reading of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (emphasizing the "Squire's Tale" and the "Man of Law's Tale") within a long and varied tradition of medieval crusade romance. I argue that Chaucer works to replace a literary climate that idealizes violent conflict between East and West with one that imagines the possibility and desirability of commercial relationships with the East in England's future.
Embodied cognition, Latin pedagogy, and the rhetorical foundations of medieval vernacular poetry
(2015-05) Garbacz, Robert Scott; Woods, Marjorie Curry, 1947-; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-; Wojciehowski, Hannah C; Johnson, Michael A; Walker, Jeffrey
This dissertation uses the insights of recent cognitive science to illuminate narrative and rhetorical strategies in the Eclogue of Theodolus, a Latin debate poem, and its French and English literary descendants. The Eclogue was wildly popular in classrooms throughout the Middle Ages and modeled for students ways to respond to stories with counter-stories, demonstrating rhetorical virtuosity by transforming images, words, and ideas. In doing so, it prepared the way for vernacular literary production. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the ways the Eclogue’s narrative rhetoric, and particularly its imagery, was processedby medieval students using mental capacities recently revealed by modern cognitive linguistics and neuroscience. In the Eclogue, a character representing Christian truth triumphs over one representing pagan falsehood precisely through her ability to transform the cognitive and affective effects of the work’s visual and spatial rhetoric. Yet if the Eclogue emphasizes Christian superiority, the early French Roman d’Enéas deploys a similar specular rhetoric for a less respectable purpose. Lush descriptions of funeral monuments lure the reader away from what is otherwise the text’s central concern: legitimizing the French political order. These chapters show both the sophistication of medieval imagery and the discourses deployed to limit its power. Chapters 3 and 4 consider medieval theories of cognition. Chapter 3 focuses on the Owl and the Nightingale, a debate poem generally considered the first great work of Middle English literature. This poem undercuts the Eclogue’s lofty rhetoric by presenting myopic protagonists whose avian nature (in keeping with Neo-Aristotelian theory) is most clearly shown in their stubborn emphasis on their desires to live and kill. Similarly earthbound in its orientation is Chaucer’s House of Fame. This work, which begins with a survey of scholastic cognitive science and which offers a climactic ekphrasis in which the Eclogue takes a prominent place, offers both a deeply skeptical account of the ability of embodied humans to know the truth and a tour de force of medieval narrative rhetoric. Taken together, these discussions offer a survey of the power of medieval images on medieval brains and unearth a significant force in medieval intellectual culture.
England's Spain : an invisible romance
(2017-08-11) Ariza-Barile, Raúl, Ph. D.; Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle, 1957-; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-; Scala, Elizabeth D; Johnson, Michael A
Historically, political and cultural relations between Spain and England have been understood as tense or otherwise dominated by animosity due to the religious and imperial disputes that both nations waged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A consequence of this fraught relationship was the emergence of the so-called Black Legend, an array of English Protestant ideologies aimed at denigrating Spain, its peoples, and colonial endeavors. While the origins of the Black Legend are normally traced to the first European age of exploration, it would be misleading to think that Anglo-Spanish tensions began only in the Renaissance. My dissertation already sees complex, intricate dialogues between England and the Spain over the course of the Middle Ages and uncovers a hidden, invisible, and primeval display of a Black Legend narrative in three Middle English texts that remain relatively overlooked in scholarship: the late fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament; Geoffrey Chaucer’s A Treatise on the Astrolabe; and the anonymous Floris and Blancheflour, one of the earliest romances in Middle English. “England’s Spain: An Invisible Romance” hears echoes of Spain in England’s late medieval textual traditions. I argue that Spain, although prominent in the three texts that I analyze, appears as an othered or “invisibilized” entity from a structural and thematic standpoint, thus contributing to what I identify as an early textual strategy that mirrors complicated dialogues between Spain and England. Through an unusual combination of texts and genres, my dissertation throws into relief a cultural narrative that has been poorly understood or overshadowed by historical developments in the context of a history of acrimony and enmity. Positioning Spain as important in the development of medieval English literature exemplifies how a culture normally overlooked in Anglophone historical and cultural discourses is central –and not invisible– in the study of a field that, still today, is dominated by concerns so nationalistic, monolingual, and mono-cultural that they appear to reinforce the negative connotations of the term “medieval.”
The foundational rape tale in Medieval Iberia
(2009-12) Castellanos, María Rebeca; Bailey, Matthew; Harney, Michael, 1948-; Nicolopulos, James; Sutherland-Meier, Madeline; Ebbeler, Jennifer
The present study examines the rape episodes in Muslim and Christian historiography of the Iberian Peninsula between 9th and 13th century. These episodes possess a structure which the author defines as “rape tale.” The rape tale has a stock cast of characters—a rapist ruler, the female rape victim, and her avenging guardian, and a predictable ending: the ruler will be deposed. In the works studied in this dissertation, every version of the rape tales is part of a discourse that legitimates an occupation, an invasion, a conquest. The stable structure of the rape tale may reveal its mythic origins. It is possible that before these stories were put into writing, they were elaborated orally. The importance of these allegorical tales requires the necessity of memorization by means of oral repetition, which is possible only through a paring down of details in order to obtain a clear pattern. The images, the actions, must be formulaic in order to be recovered effectively. Characters—no matter their historicity—are simplified into types. Hence in all myths, heroes are brave and strong; princesses in distress are beautiful; tyrannical rulers, lustful. The myth studied here appears in chronicles and national/ethnic histories written by a community that saw itself as the winning character in a story of conquest—or Reconquest. It is a myth that features not one but two rape tales: the rape of Oliba (also known as Cava), daughter of Count Julian, which brought about the Moorish invasion of Spain, and the rape of Luzencia, which signaled a Christian rebirth with Pelayo’s rebellion.
Imag[in]ing the East : visualizing the threat of Islam and the desire for the Holy Land in twelfth-century Aquitaine
(2012-05) Morris, April Jehan; Holladay, Joan A.; Peers, Glenn; Mulder, Stephennie; Heng, Geralding; Patton, Pamela A.
Epic dichotomies – threat/desire, Islam/Christianity, Orient/Occident, fear/lust, self/other – have fundamentally shaped the conceptualizations, images, and imaginings of the interaction between East and West. The Holy Land was the locus of both sensations in the twelfth-century West. Islam, arisen from the Arabian Peninsula and spreading steadily, embodied the strongest threat to western Christendom that it had yet faced, both militarily and theologically. The vividly imagined “East,” particularly Jerusalem, was the locus of spiritual and material desire. These intertwined notions underlie the ideological, theological, and historical perceptions of the Crusades, in their own time as today. This project seeks to explore the dual image of the East in the twelfth-century West through the prime dichotomy that has, both historically and presently, shaped Western perceptions of the dar-al-Islam: the East as at once threat and object or source of desire. Both this dichotomy and the examinations of individual sites and objects in which it is expressed nuance and challenge earlier scholarly assertions regarding visual representations of Crusading, and posit new interpretations of iconographic traditions and their semiotic functions in the twelfth-century Aquitaine. This dissertation is arranged as a series of investigative essays into monuments and objects that express the presentation and development of these divergent ideas in the twelfth-century Aquitaine. The first half of is comprised of three interrelated examinations of material objects that illuminate Western concepts of Islam and Muslims. Various iconographic traditions, I argue, were created and modified to express the mechanisms by which Christendom attempted to define, and respond to, these evident threats to self and territory. The second half of this project focuses on the material manifestations of desire, primarily through the deployment of Orientalized architectural forms and the utilization of relics and objects related to the East. Although these trends, as my conclusion discusses, reached their true apex in the decades after the loss of Jerusalem in 1187, these early examples typify the range of cultural notions centered on the desire to possess and control the sanctity of the Holy Land.
The long line of the Middle English alliterative revival : rhythmically coherent, metrically strict, phonologically English
(2012-05) Psonak, Kevin Damien; Cable, Thomas, 1942-; Henkel, Jacqueline M.; Hinrichs, Lars; Lesser, Wayne; King, Robert D.
This study contributes to the search for metrical order in the 90,000 extant long lines of the late fourteenth-century Middle English Alliterative Revival. Using the 'Gawain'-poet's 'Patience' and 'Cleanness', it refutes nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars who mistook rhythmic liveliness for metrical disorganization and additionally corrects troubling missteps that scholars have taken over the last five years. 'Chapter One: Tame the "Gabble of Weaker Syllables"' rehearses the traditional, but mistaken view that long lines are barely patterned at all. It explains the widely-accepted methods for determining which syllables are metrically stressed and which are not: Give metrical stress to the syllables that in everyday Middle English were probably accented. 'Chapter Two: An Environment for Demotion in the B-Verse' introduces the relatively stringent metrical template of the b-verse as a foil for the different kind of meter at work in the a-verse. 'Chapter Three: Rhythmic Consistency in the Middle English Alliterative Long Line' examines the structure of the a-verse and considers the viability of verses with more than the normal two beats. An empirical investigation considers whether rhythmic consistency in the long line depends on three-beat a-verses. 'Chapter Four: Dynamic "Unmetre" and the Proscription against Three Sequential Iambs' posits an explanation for the unusual distributions of metrically unstressed syllables in the long line and finds that the 'Gawain'-poet's rhythms avoid the even alternation of beats and offbeats with uncanny precision. 'Chapter Five: Metrical Promotion, Linguistic Promotion, and False Extra-Long Dips' takes the rest of the dissertation as a foundation for explaining rhythmically puzzling a-verses. A-verses that seem to have excessively long sequences of offbeats and other a-verses that infringe on b-verse meter prove amenable to adjustment through metrical promotion. 'Conclusion: Metrical Regions in the Long Line' synthesizes the findings of the previous chapters in a survey of metrical tension in the long line. It additionally articulates the key theme of the dissertation: Contrary to traditional assumptions, Middle English alliterative long lines have variable, instead of consistent, numbers of beats and highly regulated, instead of liberally variable, arrangements of metrically unstressed syllables.
Memoria, meditatio, and the margins : marginalia as loci of ethical cultivation in the Macclesfield Psalter
(2018-08-07) Zepeda, Christine James; Holladay, Joan A.
In this paper, I argue that the marginal hybrids in the Macclesfield Psalter functioned as loci of ethical cultivation. The marginal hybrids, I contend, functioned on three levels. On the practical level, they served as aides-mémoire, playing a critical role in the overall visual system of the manuscript and its design in fulfillment of the basic principles of medieval mnemotechnique. On the spiritual level, they served as sites for and aids to meditatio, the second step in the process of lectio divina. As facilitators of meditatio, the marginal hybrids assisted the reader in his quest to discover the deeper significance of the Scriptures and, by so doing, to strive for what French scholar Jacques Hourlier called connaturalness with God. Because of their roles in both memorization and meditation, the marginal hybrids also operated on an ethical level as loci and machinae of moral cultivation. They were the means by which the reader domesticated the text in his mind and heart and confronted his inner self in order to reshape himself in the image of God.
Multum in parvo : the miniature hours of Edith G. Rosenwald as woman’s devotional book and amulet
(2013-05) Pietrowski, Emily Diane; Holladay, Joan A.
The Hours of Edith G. Rosenwald (c.1340–80) is a small book of hours in the Rosenwald Collection at the Library of Congress. Despite unique iconography and luxurious illuminations, this manuscript has so far received little scholarly attention. This thesis analyzes the size and iconography of the Rosenwald Hours to suggest that it was designed for a specific owner and function. No surviving documentation gives evidence of ownership, yet the standard program of miniatures was changed to suit a specific audience. The manuscript’s iconographic program and stylistic treatment are here considered in the context of contemporary books made for women, particularly women of the royal court in Paris, to suggest a likely audience. One of only a few extant miniature books of hours, the Rosenwald Hours is a valuable tool for looking at the place of small manuscripts in medieval society. This thesis examines the physical size, the iconography, and the inclusion of saint portraits as indicators of a function beyond the standard devotional use. A case is made for the manuscript’s connection to pilgrimage and to protective amulets. Combined with the assessment of its iconography, this study suggests an owner and intended use for miniature books of hours that provides a new way to look at these manuscripts, from obscure Flemish examples to the famous Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux.
Neo medieval urbanism : timeless urban design strategies gleaned from lasting European cities
(2015-05) Bagnasco, Angela Rose; Young, Robert F., Ph. D.; Robertson, Jim
Neo-medieval urbanism is the proposal to build urban villages in larger metropolitan areas by mimicking the design of medieval European cities. This development type is modeled after German and Italian medieval towns that existed as independent city states from the 11th century. This method for designing new communities is consistent with the high demand for walkable urbanism and the trend toward transit-oriented development. Neo-medieval urban design has the potential to create human and ecological value through an architecture that restores pedestrians as the principle users of the city and builds community. Neo-medieval features such as scale, aesthetics, context-sensitivity, and natural relationship come together in a comfortable place for people. Such design would achieve environmental objectives including using less fossil-fuel energy and lower aggregate resource consumption. Quality of life improvements when coupled with an inclusionary housing policy, would enable a variety of income groups to live well. Furthermore, neo-medieval urbanism could be a tool for local economic resilience. Neo-medieval neighborhoods need not break much from their lasting European counterparts and thus could be home and workplace to some 5,000-50,000 people. Site studies of Bologna, Siena, Lucca, and Venice in Italy and Bamberg, Rothenberg, Regensburg, and Freiburg in Germany grounded this project. Methods for producing Neo-medieval urban villages include discussion of design features, a process for designing a neo-medieval neighborhood, and a model neo-medieval zoning code. Additionally, the conceptual design for the Lakeline TOD in Austin, Texas serves as a visualization. This paper concludes that neo-medieval urbanism could achieve many local policy objectives and is the ideal form for transit-oriented development and urban villages within cities.
Performing class, performing genre : The squire of low degree as fifteenth-century drag
(2017-05-03) Heide, Melissa Louise; Heng, Geraldine
Despite the expansion of Judith Butler's theories of performativity which have proliferated since the publication of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990, few scholars have examined the implications that performativity may have for social class. Fewer still have considered how social class might be performed in the premodern text. In this thesis, I examine how the economic language which pervades the little-studied fifteenth-century romance The Squire of Low Degree enacts a socioeconomic iteration of Butler's theory of performativity. This performance of social class occurs primarily in the speeches of this romance's courtly characters and at the site of the squire's body, as he attempts to rise above his ascribed social class to become a knight and qualify as a suitable partner for his beloved, born of royalty. Finally, this thesis demonstrates not only the social performativity within the poem's narrative, but also the classed performance enacted by the genre of the romance itself, producing a medievalist fantasy of social mobility for the increasingly prominent late medieval gentry classes itself, producing a medievalist fantasy of social mobility for the increasingly prominent late medieval gentry classes.
Performing faith : the interwoven illuminations of the de Brailes Hours
(2018-12-07) Joiner, Madeline Grace; Holladay, Joan A.
This thesis reviews the pictorial contents of the de Brailes Hours within in the milieu of its reception, chiefly as a object of novelty, with Dominican connections, and a female audience. Building on this and the work of scholars like Claire Donovan and Carlee Bradbury, this thesis suggests that there is in the manuscript’s pictorial program a devotional architecture structured much like the sermo modernus, wherein a thema is dilated by several exmpla. The program contains many themata, and many different exempla for each, but examined here is specifically the thema of faith and its performance in three character-foil exempla sets: Peter and the Wandering Jew, Elizabeth and Joseph, and David and Susanna. This devotional architecture is constructed through the varied and manifold schema of cross-references, a visual and moral back-and-forthing that prompts recognition of this network as well as reflection on the viewer’s own devotions. The function of this architecture is not inherently gendered, bug the particular thema explored favors a female audience, in accordance with the manuscript’s codicological indications of its intended viewer.
Proximity to the divine : personal devotion at the Holy Graves in Strasbourg
(2012-05) Bryant, Aleyna Michelle; Holladay, Joan A.; Smith, Jeffrey C.
In this thesis I examine the Holy Grave monument located in the St. Catherine chapel of Strasbourg cathedral, erected by Bishop Berthold von Bucheck sometime between 1346 and 1348. This sculptural sarcophagus currently exists in fragmented form in the Musée de l'Oeuvre Notre-Dame; only the four relief panels of the sleeping guardians, the gisant of Christ, and some fragments of the baldachin remain of the original monument. Scholars have been able to ascertain the placement and probable appearance of the Holy Grave based on traces of three lancet bays, wall paint, and bolt holes discovered along the west wall of the chapel during twentieth-century excavations. The numerous copies that the St. Catherine Holy Grave inspired throughout Strasbourg and the surrounding area attests to the significance of the monument within the larger Holy Grave tradition. The Strasbourg Holy Grave functioned liturgically as a prop used by the clergy to reenact the drama of the resurrection during Holy Week. I argue, however, that the monument's permanence, relative accessibility, and pathos-inspiring imagery suggest its use on a more frequent basis. Through its isolation of scenes from the biblical narrative and its visualization of complex mystical metaphors, the Holy Grave at Strasbourg cathedral--and thus also the numerous copies it inspired--reveals its use as an object for personal devotion, much like the group of Rhenish Andachtsbilder that also flourished at this time. The changing beliefs concerning Christ's Passion, the nature of the Eucharist, and the understanding of death and the afterlife are reflected in the style, iconography, and didactic message of the Holy Grave monument. The influence that the mendicant orders and Rhenish mystics had on the spiritual instruction of the laity in Strasbourg points to the understanding of this monument as a tool to aid the faithful in achieving union with God. The popularity of Holy Graves in and around Strasbourg ultimately illustrates the medieval desire for proximity to the divine. As the emphasis on Christ's suffering and death grew throughout the devotional practices of the fourteenth century, art forms like the Holy Grave monument at Strasbourg cathedral increasingly focused on engendering pathos in the medieval devout. The Strasbourg Holy Grave's liturgical, devotional, and anagogical functions coalesce to create a monument that's fundamental purpose consisted of aiding the faithful in their journey toward salvation.
Revival, reform, and reason in Islam : Alfarabi on the proper relationship between religion and politics
(2018-10-09) Siddiqi, Ahmed Ali; Pangle, Thomas L.; Pangle, Lorraine; Stauffer, Devin; Azam, Hina
This dissertation applies the teachings of Alfarabi to the debate between Muslim revivalists and reformists. Reviewing selected works of Khomeini, Maududi, and Qutb, I argue that Islamist revivalism constitutes a fundamental challenge to rational political science insofar as the former demands subordinating reason to revelation. Next, through a critical analysis of several liberal Muslim theorists, I show that these leading reformists fail to vindicate the role of reason in political matters and therefore leave the Islamist challenge unmet. I subsequently turn to Alfarabi's "Book of Religion" (Kitāb al-Milla) with an emphasis on the philosopher's treatment of political science. In doing so, I find that Alfarabi is able to offer a far more compelling response than the liberals to that view of piety on which the Islamist position depends. I therefore suggest that it is Alfarabi, above all, who points modern scholars toward the necessary theoretical foundations of any successful intellectual engagement with Islamism.
The natural order : ecologies of social class in medieval British literature
(2023-02-28) Heide, Melissa Louise; Heng, Geraldine; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-; Houser, Heather; Robertson, Kellie
The Natural Order offers a new framework for the study of economics and ecology in medieval British literature. This study uncovers the mechanisms whereby discourses of social class are expressed through ecopoetics. I argue that new philosophical approaches to the natural world that emerged during the twelfth century “renaissance” come to underwrite the vocabularies and iconographies of social class in creative works of the centuries following the twelfth. Instead of examining this phenomenon exclusively in the well-worn texts of “canonical” late-medieval authors, I consider a range of texts from the patristic and Scholastic commentary traditions to late-medieval British border narratives in order to demonstrate the many ways in which medieval class is understood, explored, and mediated through ecological thought. I argue that in times of increased socioeconomic instability—especially the fourteenth century—medieval works emerged that braided together economic and environmental systems of meaning. The Natural Order traces how nonhuman agencies—animals, wildernesses, and forests—were deeply enmeshed in the daily lives of medieval people and the imaginations of medieval creators.
To cut the past : queer touch, medieval materiality, and the craft of wonder
(2016-05) Jewell, Brianna Carolyn; Lesser, Wayne; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Birkholz, Daniel; Johnson, Michael
This dissertation emerges from a multivocal conversation in queer, affect, and medievalist scholarship, which privileges encounters with fragmentary details to create and describe connections between bodies separated in time and space. From Carolyn Dinshaw’s metaphorics of touch and “partial connection” across time to Roland Barthes’s punctum that joins disparate bodies, scholars invoke and rely on the fragmentary to describe and generate affective connections. This project makes that shared understanding explicit, literal, and literary – and also gives it a deeper history – by showing how medieval poets crafted and emphasized fragmentary tropes to enable connections that might not otherwise exist. Each chapter reads a medieval literary object – the bodily cut; stained glass; and, the grafted tree – as a fragmentary trope through which mutually exclusive entities (the dead and the living, the past and the present, and the earthly and the celestial) can be imagined as coming together and coexisting. Through graphic and sustained descriptions of the body and bodily sensations, both medieval and contemporary authors betray an interest in the visceral qualities of their fragmentary tropes, and rely on that viscerality to describe various forms of partial connection. _To Cut the Past_ works to show that wonder, and specifically the openendedness and multiplicity that wonder generates, is the primary affect in establishing affective relationships between metaphysically disconnected entities. Encounters with the fragmentary objects I read create wonder, and that wonder in turn creates a portal or touchstone that allows access to perhaps otherwise unreachable worlds and things. The medieval texts I read show the process by which wonder connects. Ultimately, as I outline, this insight can be extended to pedagogy. By accepting an invitation from contemporary scholarship and medieval poets, we may encourage students to become alive to the fragments that stick out to them (the textual details to which they connect viscerally) in medieval and postmedieval texts, and to use those fragments as points of access to initiate their readings. This reading orientation works not only to make medieval literature relevant and interesting to students, and to offer a new way of understanding themselves and what matters to them; it also provides historically-enriched insight into the medieval past.
Wet hereafter : a costume generative original theater piece
(2018-05) Keator, Ananda Sandys; Glavan, James; Mickey, Susan
This work will investigate how an original theatrical piece can be conceived by the artistic mind of a costume designer. With this project, I intend to develop a one act play starting from costume design. To this end, I will assemble a creative team including a playwright, director, scenic designer, lighting designer, sound designer and cast. As a team, I will explain the thrust of my investigation and present to them five characters in costume renderings. Once this team is on board with my idea, my main focus will be the construction of the costumes and then observing the final outcome. The play will be performed three times, with two technical dress rehearsals beforehand. After each performance, I will ask myself if the story made sense and if having the costume design come at the fore of the project detracted from the whole production. In summation, I will have created an original piece of theater with costumes as the driving force of the story.