Browsing by Subject "Medieval England"

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Mapping kingship : the cultivation of masculinity in the treatise of Walter de Milemete (Oxford, Christ Church MS 92)
(2017-05) Dimartino, Caitlin Irene; Holladay, Joan A.
The stages of illumination for Walter de Milemete’s De nobilitatibus, sapientiis et prudentiis regum, a mirror for princes written for the newly-crowned Edward III, bridges a politically and socially volatile period in the history of medieval England. Given the failed reign and contested masculinity of king Edward II, the subsequent deposition staged by his wife, Queen Isabella of France, and the troubling regency of the queen after the coronation of her son, Edward III, it comes as little surprise that the text of this manuscript emphasizes the importance of good governance and the virtues most important for a young king to cultivate. This didactic function of the treatise and the complementary illumination program— in which humans, animals, monsters, and hybrids pose and perform inside thick borders across almost every page — has long been stressed in studies on the visual aspects of the manuscript. Yet to be addressed is the role that medieval notions of elite masculinity, which greatly influenced the legacies of Edward I, Edward II, and Edward III, have played in the creation of both the text and image in the treatise. My thesis explores the intended reception of the Milemete treatise in relation to the political climate of the early fourteenth century, the contested masculinity of Edward II and subsequent problems that arose from his lack of manliness, and the need for Edward III to cultivate and exemplify maturity in the form of controlling himself, controlling the court and his mother, and leading successful campaigns against such enemies as Scotland, in order to succeed as king and legitimize his own rule. I argue that the illumination program was intended to condition Edward III to recognize, understand, and then embody aspects of masculinity and kingship that would ultimately help him establish himself as a chivalric, capable, and autonomous ruler. The visual landscape of the manuscript was an embodiment of Edward’s personal, internal quest to reach majority and encouraged him to conceptually “travel” through the borders’ allusions to ideal kingship and masculinity and, in the process, reevaluate his own self-identification as a virtuous and legitimate king.
“That country beyond the Humber”: the English North, regionalism, and the negotiation of nation in medieval English literature
(2009-12) Taylor, William Joseph; Scala, Elizabeth, 1966-; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-; Woods, Marjorie C.; Blockley, Mary E.; Heng, Geraldine
My dissertation examines the presence of the “North of England” in medieval texts, a presence that complicates the recent work of critics who focus upon an emergent nationalism in the Middle Ages. Far removed from the ideological center of the realm in London and derided as a backwards frontier, the North nevertheless maintains a distinctly generative intimacy within the larger realm as the seat of English history—the home of the monk Bede, the “Father of English History”—and as a frontline of defense against Scottish invasion. This often convoluted dynamic of intimacy, I assert, is played out in those literary conversations in which the South derides the North and vice versa—in, for example, the curt admonition of one shepherd that the sheep-stealer Mak in the Wakefield Master’s Second Shepherd’s Play stop speaking in a southern tongue: that he “take out his southern tooth and insert a turd.” The North functioned as a contested geography, a literary character, and a spectral presence in the negotiation of a national identity in both canonical and non-canonical texts including Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, William of Malmesbury’s Latin histories, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Robin Hood ballads of the late Middle Ages. We see this contest, further, in the medieval universities wherein students segregated by their “nacion,” northern or southern, engaged in bloody clashes that, while local, nevertheless resonated at the national level. I argue that the outlying North actually operates as a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the processes of imagining nation; that regionalism is both contained within and constitutive of its apparent opposite, nationalism. My longue durée historicist approach to texts concerned with the North—either through narrative setting, character, author or textual provenance—ultimately uncovers the emerging dialectic of region and nation within the medieval North-South divide and reveals how England’s nationalist impulse found its greatest expression when it was threatened from within by the uncanny figure of the North.