Matching Items (5)
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- All Subjects: Medieval History
- All Subjects: Scandinavian studies
- Genre: Academic theses
- Creators: Sturges, Robert
Description
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
Description
The ancient religious practices and beliefs of the indigenous people of Northern Scandinavia, known as the Sámi, have been misrepresented and misinterpreted by well meaning ethnographers and researchers who view such practices and beliefs through an Descartes-Cartesian, objective-subjective lens. This thesis develops a more accurate, intersubjective paradigm that is used to illuminate more clearly the religious workings of the 17th-18th Century Sámi. Drawing upon the intersubjective theories presented by A. Irving Hallowell, Tim Ingold and Kenneth Morrison, ethnographic examples from the writings of early Lutheran missionaries and priests demonstrate that the Sámi lived in a world that can be best understood by the employ of the categories of Person (ontology), Power (epistemology) and Gift (axiology).
ContributorsGoettl, Eric Daniel (Author) / Gereboff, Joel (Thesis advisor) / Swanson, Todd (Committee member) / Kristiansen, Roald E. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
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
Description
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
Description
This study examines the ways in which translators writing in two contemporary medieval languages, Old Norse-Icelandic and Middle English, approached the complicated doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary. At its core this project is dedicated to understanding the spread and development of an idea in two contemporary vernacular cultures and focuses on the transmission of that idea from the debates of Latin clerical culture into Middle English and Old Norse-Icelandic literature written for an increasingly varied audience made up of monastics, secular clergy, and the laity. The project argues that Middle English and Old-Norse Icelandic writing about the bodily Assumption of Mary challenges misconceptions that vernacular translations and compositions concerned with Marian doctrine represent the popular concerns of the laity as opposed to the academic language, or high Mariology, of the clergy.
ContributorsNajork, Daniel (Author) / Bjork, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014