Matching Items (3)
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- All Subjects: Literature, Medieval
- Creators: Brown, Jessica
Description
This Master's thesis locates four works by William Dyce inspired by Dante Alighieri's Commedia: Francesca da Rimini (1837), Design for the Reverse of the Turner Medal (1858), Beatrice (1859), and Dante and Beatrice (date unknown) in the context of their literary, artistic and personal influences. It will be shown that, far from assimilating the poet to a pantheon of important worthies, Dyce found in Dante contradictions and challenges to his Victorian, Anglican way of thinking. In this thesis these contradictions and challenges are explicated in each of the four works.
ContributorsTiffany, Kristopher (Author) / Serwint, Nancy (Thesis advisor) / Gully, Anthony (Committee member) / Codell, Julie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Anglo-Saxon women wielded a remarkable amount of power in the early English church. They founded some of the country’s most influential institutions, and modern Christians continue to venerate many of them as saints. Their path to canonization, however, was informal—especially compared to men and women who were canonized after Pope Gregory IX’s decree in 1234 that reserved those powers for the pope. Many of Anglo-Saxon England’s most popular saints exhibited behaviors that, had they been born later, would have disqualified them from canonization. This project examines how the problematic lives of St. Æthelthryth of Ely and St. Edith of Wilton were simultaneously doubted and adopted by post-Norman Christians. Specifically, it considers the flawed ways that the saints, petitioners, and their communities were simultaneously doubted and legitimized by late-medieval hagiographers.
ContributorsBrown, Jessica (Author) / Bjork, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Newhauser, Richard (Committee member) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This dissertation concerns “revelations to others” in medieval hagiographical and visionary texts. Revelations to others take many forms—spiritual visions, dreams, visual and tactile witnessing of miracles, auditions—but they all are experienced by someone other than, or in addition to, the holy person who is the subject of the text. This type of revelatory experience is common and, I argue, highly significant. Most straightforwardly, revelations to others serve to further authenticate holy women or men, confirming their devotion to God, their miraculous abilities, and/or their favored position with Christ. But revelations to others do much more than authorize the visionary. They voice the possibility that one could learn to have visions, which has interesting connections to modern ideas of guided seeing, such as meditation. They suggest circumstances in which holy persons served as devotional objects, helping their viewers achieve a higher level of religious experience in a similar manner to stained glass windows, crucifixes, or images of Veronica’s veil. For women, revelations to others sometimes offer access to spaces in which they could not physically step foot, such as the altar or the bedrooms of abbots. Moreover, by showcasing the variety of persons participating in divine experiences (monks and nuns, lay persons, nobility, and sometimes other holy persons), revelations to others speak to the larger visionary communities in which these holy persons lived. Through a series of close readings, this dissertation creates a taxonomy of revelations to others and argues for their necessity in understanding the collaborative nature of medieval spirituality.
ContributorsNestel, Meghan Leigh (Author) / Sturges, Robert S (Thesis advisor) / Schleif, Corine (Committee member) / Koopmans, Rachel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019