The Economics of Lady Mede’s Agency in The Vision of Piers the Plowman
This paper will argue that rather than being controlled by the process of sexual commodification Lady Mede uses the correlation of gender, money, and sex to counter Conscience’s attempts to discount her place in the court and, in so doing, her agency.
VAGANTES: Between Tradition and Change: Monastic Reform in Three fifteenth-century German Redactions of the Life of Saint Mary of Egypt
Using the life of St. Mary of Egypt, this paper will consider three different Middle High German versions produced by reform communities and will analyze how the reform ideologies and goals manifest in the texts.
Filmmaker to bring the Middle Ages and Rap together in ‘The Quickener’
A British filmmaker is seeking to raise $8000 to produce a medieval rap movie. The Quickener is described as “a fast-paced medieval drama, set during the year the Black Death struck England…”
VAGANTES: Necessary Imperfection: The Body of Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne
This paper seeks to examine the role of the body and its relationship to the world around it in the “vie de sainte” of Marie l’Egyptienne, who is an excellent example of a female saint who begins life as a sinner and transforms her body into something holy. This presentation will focus on the version of Marie l’Egyptienne’s life written by Rutebeuf in the 13th century, but will also bring in elements of other versions and of the stories of other female saints who transform their bodies for comparison.
VAGANTES: “What has Beowulf to do with a Christian King?” Heroic Legend as Poetic Speculum Principis
Through a rhetorical analysis based in grounded theory that analyzes fifteen speeches and their contexts made by Hroðgar, Beowulf, and Wiglaf, I will show how the poet appropriated the Beowulf legend to present a dramatized speculum principis using the rhetorical devices common to oral-traditional narratives to articulate the three traits of kingship most highly valued by both secular and sacred authorities: generosity, faith, and protectiveness.
VAGANTES: What the Body Said: The Corpse-as-Text in St. Erkenwald
This paper will consider how the speaking corpse of the pagan judge should be read, especially in light of the hagiographic context and medieval theological writings on the resurrection of the body.
VAGANTES: Hālnes and hǽlþ:Anglo-Saxon Bodily Wellness
Since most of the surviving mentions of wellness relate to the health of the soul, it is not clear what constituted a healthy Anglo-Saxon body. This paper will use the Old English poem Soul and Body and Old English medical texts to explore Anglo-Saxon bodily wellness.
Dragons: ancient creatures in modern times
Then an old harrower of the dark happened to find the hoard open, the burning one who hunts out barrows, the slick-skinned dragon, threatening the night sky with streamers of fire.
Authority and freedom: the medieval roots of an understanding of religious freedom
Some regard religious freedom as a product of the Enlightenment. However, the roots of a later understanding of religious freedom as articulated in Dignitatis Humanae of the Second Vatican Council lie in the Middle Ages.
Hijab – the Islamic dress code: its historical development, evidence from sacred sources and views of selected Muslim scholars
The issue of a Muslim woman’s dress code has been debated for centuries. This is of great importance as it is widely used as a criterion to measure the extent of a woman’s piety or devotion to Allah.
The Walters Art Museum Receives $265,000 NEH Grant to Digitize Over 100 Flemish Manuscripts
This third NEH grant allows the Walters to provide public access to an even greater number of its illuminated medieval manuscripts
Brute force: Medieval foundation myths and three modern organizations’ quests for hegemony
This article takes the narrative tropes of Europe’s archetypal national foundation myth, the founding of Rome, retold in the epic Latin poem, Virgil’s Aeneid, and traces their reemergence in the foundation stories of three major modern organizations.
The Hero as a Reflection of Culture
As heroes, Achilles, Aeneas, Beowulf, and Roland reflect the values of the societies that created them.
Chaucer’s female characters in the Canterbury Tales
How are the female narrators and characters represented? Does their status correspond to women‟s historical situation in the fourteenth century?
Crac des Chevaliers in danger as Syrian forces shell town around medieval castle
Video emerged yesterday which appears to show that the town surrounding Crac des Chevaliers in Syria under artillery fire from Syrian forces.
A brief review of the history of delirium as a mental disorder
This paper will review the most important of these concepts about delirium, from ancient times until the appearance of the two classification systems. Special attention will be paid to the question of how those concepts have dealt with the particular problems posed by prognosis and outcome.
A note on the origins of syphilis
The name syphilis came into common usage. It came from a Latin epic poem Syphilis, sive Morbvs Gallicvs, written by Girolamo Fracastoro or Hieronymus Fracastorius(1483–1553). In his work De contagione et contagiosis morbis, he discussed the nature and the spread of infectious diseases, foretelling the germ theory of disease.
The Poisoned Arrows of Amor: cases of syphilis from 16th-century Iceland
The number of syphilis cases at the Skriðuklaustur monastery is unexpectedly high, as nine individuals with the disease have been identified in a skeletal assemblage totalling only 198 skeletons. At least two of the cases bear the signs of congenital syphilis. The youngest individual was just an adolescent at death but still showed severe symptoms of congenital syphilis that had developed to the tertiary stage.
Islamic astronomy
Although the story of how Greek astronomy passed to the Arabsis comparatively well known, the history of its transformation by Islamic scholars and subsequent retransmission to the Latin West is only now being written
Alfred the Great’s Burnt Boethius
One can trace the reason for these curious editorial developments to two factors: (1) the inaccessibility of the tenth-century manuscript, which everyone thought was destroyed in the 1731 fire, until its burnt remains were recovered at the British Museum in the 1830s; and (2) an overpowering edition-in-progress of the twelfth-century manuscript by the great seventeenth-century scholar Francis Junius, with extensive collations from the missing tenth-century manuscript.
Philosopher-king: Nechtan mac Der Ilei
Like so much of the history of the early church in Scotland, it is bound up with modern political and religious factionalism. Was Naiton an English imperialist flunky? A Romanist stooge, allowing the authority of the Pope and St Peter into his realm?
The Roman elite and the power of the past: continuity and change in Ostrogothic Italy
This thesis examines the changes forced upon the Roman elite in the evolving political climate of Ostrogothic Italy.
Strategic Insights: The Battle of Crecy
This paper will explore and analyze strategic decision making by Edward III, King of England, and Philip VI, King of France, at the Battle of Crecy using the critical thinking model as a conceptual framework, in conjunction with egocentrism and sociocentrism as the two main cognitive frames of reference.
Childbirth Prayers in Medieval and Early Modern England: “For drede of perle that may be-falle”
Childbirth prayers and rituals from the medieval period and early modern era shall be analyzed and compared with childbirth prayers and rituals in post-Reformation England.