Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature

Many of Britain’s best known romances, such as the stories of Tristan, King Horn, Havelok, Guy of Warwick, and Bevis of Hampton, were first recorded in Anglo-Norman verse and later revised into Middle English versions. Setting these English and French texts in conversation with one another illuminates the impact of the Norman Conquest on Britain's linguistic, literary, and social history. These romances form a distinctively "insular" body of works, closely related to one another and to their situation in England. Chapters 1 and 2: Romances of English heroes assess the political ideas sustaining the shift from feudal toward national organization. Chapter 3: Pious romances counter the church's vision of irreconcilable opposition between worldly ambitions and devotion to God. Chapters 4 and 5: Romances concerned with courtliness question the hermetic elevation and spiritual refinement of conventional “courtoisie.

Imagined Geographies and the Production of Space in Occitania and Northern Catalunya in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.

In this dissertation, I examine the material and cognitive production of new medieval spaces—urban, seigneurial, and mendicant—in Occitania and northern Catalunya in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In a period of massive social, political, religious, and cultural transformations, inhabitants of this region articulated and contested new identities and the imagined geographies that sustained them. They built new material spaces that structured experience in ways that contributed to articulations of identity, influenced religious practices, and expressed or mediated authority. While the history of southern France in this period is usually seen as one of conflict and conquest, I argue that shared social, cultural, and spatial practices persisted across the centuries. I also contend that focusing on the way the material—objects and the built environment—functioned in these practices leads to new historical insights. I approach the spatial history of the region from three angles. First, I center on the world of the towns (namely, Narbonne, Toulouse, and Perpignan) to show how historical narratives allowed inhabitants to assert ancient Roman origins or claim a distinguished religious identity. These claims linked their pasts to extant or destroyed topographical landmarks, and I argue that medieval townspeople experienced that past not just through disembodied texts and legends but also materially, corporeally, in spatial practices. As consular governments of the towns began to monopolize documentary production, spaces of authority and authenticity that emanated from the figure of the notary came to be embedded in town halls and municipal cartularies. Second, I argue that these same documentary practices were adopted by lords and kings in order to assert and project their authority alongside the enquêtes, castles, and bastides that did likewise. Finally, I demonstrate how the new Dominican religious order, in the course of establishing convents and the networks of patronage that supported them, created, appropriated, or reoriented sacred landscapes and their associated imagined geographies, generating new identities for themselves and their patrons. In all these analyses, the material emerges as a constituent element, and I therefore locate authority, identity, and agency in a web of relations between people and things.PHDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133422/1/jcfarr_1.pd

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed