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This dissertation focuses on the connections between childbirth and spirituality in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. It argues that scholastic interest in conception and procreation led to a proliferation of texts mentioning obstetrics and gynecology, and that this attention to women's medicine and birth spread from the universities to the

This dissertation focuses on the connections between childbirth and spirituality in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. It argues that scholastic interest in conception and procreation led to a proliferation of texts mentioning obstetrics and gynecology, and that this attention to women's medicine and birth spread from the universities to the laity. This dissertation contends that there is interdependence between spiritual and physical health in late medieval English religious culture, correlated with and perhaps caused by an increasing fascination with materialism and women's bodies in religious practices and rhetoric. The first chapter provides an analysis of birth in medical and pastoral texts. Pastoral works were heavily influenced by the ecclesiastical emphasis on baptism, as well as by scholastic medicine's simultaneous disdain for and reluctant integration of folk medicine. The second chapter examines birth descriptions in narratives of saints' miracles and collections of exempla; these representations of childbirth were used in religious rhetoric to teach, motivate, and dissuade audiences. The third chapter turns to the cycle play representations of the nativity as depicting the mysteries of human generation and divine incarnation for public consumption. The fourth chapter analyzes the abstract uses of childbirth in visionary and other religious texts, especially in descriptions of spiritual rebirth and the development of vice and virtue in individuals or institutions. By identifying their roles as analogous with the roles of midwives, visionaries authorized themselves as spiritual caretakers, vital for communal health and necessary for collective spiritual growth. These chapters outline a trajectory of increasing male access to the birthing chamber through textual descriptions and prescriptions about birth and midwifery. At the same time, religious texts acknowledged, sought to regulate, and sometimes even utilized the potential authority of mothers and midwives as physical and spiritual caretakers.
ContributorsSwann, Alaya (Author) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Thesis advisor) / Newhauser, Richard (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Christina of Markyate, a twelfth-century visionary and prioress, has been frequently seen in scholarship as an outsider at her home institution of St Albans, enduring solely under the protection of its abbot, Geoffrey, her spiritual friend and confidant. This characterization appears incorrect when The Life of Christina of Markyate, St

Christina of Markyate, a twelfth-century visionary and prioress, has been frequently seen in scholarship as an outsider at her home institution of St Albans, enduring solely under the protection of its abbot, Geoffrey, her spiritual friend and confidant. This characterization appears incorrect when The Life of Christina of Markyate, St Albans' record of Christina's personal history and religious career, is viewed in its original literary environment. The high volume of extant material from twelfth-century St Albans makes it possible to view Christina's depiction in several original ways: as a textual construction (at least in part) influenced by Bede's narratives of holy women in his widely read Ecclesiastical History; as a portrayal of contemporary devotional prayer in the style of Anselm of Canterbury, a major authority on devotional practices of the time; and as a prominent addition to St Albans' own liturgy, the record of its celebrated saints and local patrons, as an object of devotion herself. The strategy of Christina's endorsement in her Life is also notably different from strategies on display in St Albans materials related to Katherine of Alexandria, an important saint for Abbot Geoffrey, which further suggests he was not her sole promoter at the abbey, if he was involved in the process of her textual production at all. Finally, the historical fact that she was employed as a patron of St Albans before none other than Pope Adrian IV, to whom St Albans was appealing for numerous institutional benefits at the time, shows that the prevailing opinion of Christina at the abbey can not have been entirely negative. Placing the Life within the literary and cultural circumstances of its production thus provides a fresh reading of Christina's institutional and devotional roles at St Albans, medieval views of women's spirituality and its place within the western European Christian tradition, and the compositional process of a major work of medieval hagiographical literature.
ContributorsVanGinhoven, Bryan (Author) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Thesis advisor) / Newhauser, Richard (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Jason Bryant Queering Home: Domestic Space and Sexuality in Postmodern American Fiction This dissertation explores narratives of homosexuals and trans men and women occupying domestic spaces, discerning the ways that “home” shapes understandings about sexuality and examining the ways that understandings of sexuality shape how domestic spaces are occupied. Queer

Jason Bryant Queering Home: Domestic Space and Sexuality in Postmodern American Fiction This dissertation explores narratives of homosexuals and trans men and women occupying domestic spaces, discerning the ways that “home” shapes understandings about sexuality and examining the ways that understandings of sexuality shape how domestic spaces are occupied. Queer artists and intellectuals have deconstructed the legacy of normativity that clings to the metaphor of the domestic realm. Queering Home argues that writers have used the discursive concept of home to cultivate sociopolitical communities (Audre Lorde, Zami) while also insisting upon material spaces of shelter and comfort for individuals queered by gender performance, sexual orientation, and resultant adverse economic conditions (Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues). Two novels, Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Mike Albo's Hornito, challenge the coming-of-age tradition of narrating childhood/adolescence through the redeeming prism of the confident, queer adult; in particular, these novels trouble the problematic notion of domesticated maturation as a heteronormative condition that continues to cling to much contemporary American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics. The third chapter examines Marilyn Hacker's sonnet collection, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons in correspondence with Carl Phillips's collection, Cortège, as they queer the concept of domestic bliss, the goal toward which romantic partners are “supposed” to be committed. Hacker and Phillips revise the same-sex couple as a processing of gay ways of life, which resists positing normative, married futures for lesbians and homosexuals. Finally, the study investigates Terrence McNally's play, Lips Together, Teeth Apart and a series of still life paintings by Joey Terrill for their depiction of narratives of domestic spaces (pools, open-concept design, medicine cabinets), which condition the subjectification and desubjectification of gay male sexuality and domesticity in the era of HIV/AIDS. Throughout, this dissertation draws energy by challenging the “given” and “inevitable” heteronorms that condition domesticity, sexuality, and space, demonstrating how late twentieth century writers and artists have queered the home.
ContributorsBryant, Jason (Author) / Clarke, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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This dissertation analyzes presentations of death in late-medieval English Arthurian literature through the optic of the Ricardian and 15th-century English vernacular ars moriendi tradition. The period under examination begins in 1380 and ends with a discussion of the gradual loss of the artes moriendi and reimagining of King Arthur in

This dissertation analyzes presentations of death in late-medieval English Arthurian literature through the optic of the Ricardian and 15th-century English vernacular ars moriendi tradition. The period under examination begins in 1380 and ends with a discussion of the gradual loss of the artes moriendi and reimagining of King Arthur in Tudor England. The Arthurian texts examined are the Alliterative Morte Arthure (AMA), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK), and Malory’s Morte Darthur. The theological texts examined include the following: De visitacione infirmorum (A Text), BL MS Royal 18 A.X and The Book of Vices and Virtues (both ME translations of Friar Laurent’s Somme le roi), Learn to Die (a ME translation of Heinrich Suso’s Horologium sapientiae), A Tretyse of Gostly Batayle supplemented by illuminations from MS Harley 3244 (Summa de vitiis f.27v-f.28r), The Boke of the Craft of Dying, Martin Luther’s Sermon on Preparing to Die, Thomas Lupset's A Treatise of Dying Well, Richard Whitford's Daily Exercise and Experience of Death, and Desiderius Erasmus's Preparation of Death. My methodology combines Comparative Literature, New Historicism, and Jane Gilbert’s Lacanian approach. The primary research method is a comparison of the death sequences of major Arthurian figures in late-medieval English literature with the major tenets of several ars moriendi tracts. Further, these source materials are examined and compared to the earlier Arthurian texts. Lastly, some ars moriendi expedients already present in the Arthurian source materials are compared with contemporaneous rituals to elucidate which of them belong to an earlier tradition and therefore are not updates. This dissertation demonstrates the following: Malory and the authors of the AMA and SGGK captured a uniquely late-medieval English understanding of death by updating their source materials, battlefield expedients for the dying included in late-medieval English Arthurian literature can be traced back well before the Black Death, and finally, that the English knight developed into a figure who spiritually battles accidental sudden death, or mors improvisa, in the memento mori tradition, which in turn influenced English Arthurian legend.
ContributorsPike, Daniel (Author) / Newhauser, Richard (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Wheeler, Bonnie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022