The eclipse of empire?: perceptions of the western empire and its rulers in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century France

It has become an axiom of historical research that the decline of the western Empire in the second half of the thirteenth century led to a concomitant decline in subscription to the idea that a ruler might exercise temporal authority beyond the bounds of his kingdom. An increase in the authority exercised by rulers of the western kingdoms and the rediscovery of Aristotelian learning led to a new conception of autonomous states. This thesis tests the validity of this assessment by determining the place occupied by the Empire in French thought. It establishes the factors which formulated perceptions of contemporary rulers of the medieval Empire between Frederick II’s accession and the outbreak of the Hundred Years War. It examines the place occupied in French thought by the figure most widely associated with the Empire in France, the Carolingian emperor Charlemagne. It determines French conceptions of the nature of the Empire as an institution, the role that it and its ruler were considered to occupy in the world, and their relationship with the French kingdom. Rather than base its examination upon the small number of texts traditionally associated by historians with the development of a new political ideology, a broader context is established by using the widest possible source base. The consequence is a portrait of the place occupied by the Empire and its ruler in French thought that differs profoundly from the widely accepted historical model. On one level the Empire and its ruler were considered to differ very little from the French kingdom. Yet, far from abandoning the concept of universal temporal authority, the inhabitants of France also considered the emperor to fulfil a supra-regnal role necessary in a properly ordered Christian society and increasingly conceived of in terms of the leadership of the crusade

Special Libraries, December 1958

Volume 49, Issue 10https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1958/1009/thumbnail.jp

The Battle of Hastings: A Geographic Perspective

The Battle of Hastings (1066) is one of the most widely studied battles in medieval history. Yet despite the importance that research shows geography to play in the outcome of such conflicts, few studies have examined in detail the landscape of the battle or the role the landscape played in its eventual outcome. This study, consequently, seeks to assess the impact of geographic factors in understanding the events that shaped the Battle of Hastings. The analysis was undertaken using a geographic information system (GIS) with qualitative and quantitative techniques. Historical and current data combined in a series of detailed state of the art maps are used to bring an entirely new perspective to the nearly millennium long literature on the battle. Factors considered in the study included variables associated with mobilization of the respective armies, the topography and land use at the time of and since the battle, population, food/animal sources, metal resources, water, and the location of the battle. The final section of the thesis provides a detailed cartographic discussion of the development of the battle itself. Among the findings of this thesis were that location was indeed important in the mobilization of the armies, that the local topography has not changed significantly since the battle, that the distribution of resources available to the armies varied spatially, and perhaps most importantly, that there may exist at least one viable alternative battle site to that on Battle Hill

Art history at the art school: revisiting the institutional origins of the discipline based on the case of nineteenth-century Greece

As part of a broader research on the teaching of art history in nineteenth-century art academies, this paper focuses on the courses offered at the Athenian School of Arts from 1844 to 1863 by the historian and philologist Grigorios Pappadopoulos. In his teaching, Papadopoulos turned away from the tradition of a universal history for artists established in Italian and French art schools, and proposed instead an in-depth study of ancient Greek art, drawing on the German university model, and more particularly on Karl Otfried Müller’s Handbuch der Arhchaölogie der Kunst (1830). The paper examines the various operations that permitted the re-invention of an archaeological manual for the purposes of art education, and analyses the different approaches to the study of ancient art developed within the School of Arts and the Athenian University during the period. I argue that adapting the scholarly study of art to the needs of artistic training gave way to approaches primarily centred on objects, techniques and forms, rather than on the construction of historical narratives. The Greek case is used in order to reflect more broadly on the scholarly courses of art academies, which remain largely overlooked both within the history of art education and the history of art history. Lying at the intersection of these two fields, scholarly training at the art school, and art history courses in particular, may permit both a re-evaluation of art education in the nineteenth century and a better understanding of the varied institutional frameworks that shaped art history as a discipline

The social and psychological work of metaphor: a corpus linguistic investigation

This thesis investigates the triangular relationship between metaphor use, community, and state of mind, to ask the question: what social and psychological work does metaphor do, in the computer-mediated discourse setting of an online forum. The thesis goes beyond the finding and grouping of metaphors for analysis to consider the pattern of metaphor use over time in terms of (i) surrounding language style; (ii) density of use; and (iii) use by different participant groups. In achieving its aim the thesis provides insights into (i) the effect of metaphor use in terms of state of mind; (ii) the role of metaphor in the characterisation of a community; and (iii) methods for considering linguistic metaphor in naturally occurring discourse in terms of its psychological effect, which also creates insights into metaphor theory. The primary novel contribution of the thesis is to combine an analysis of metaphor use with an analysis of the language style that surrounds it, using established research relating language style to state of mind to consider the social and psychological work that metaphor does. The primary prediction of the investigation is that where metaphor is used to characterise a concept, the surrounding language will be of a style that has been found to be associated with better mental health. This is related to and supported by the second novel contribution of the thesis, which is to consider the role of metaphor in the formation and evolution of a community over time, by considering change in density of metaphor and other key variables in the data as a whole, and for comparative participant groups. The third novel contribution of the thesis is that, alongside more established corpus linguistic techniques, new techniques from the fast-evolving areas of data science and natural language processing are explored and evaluated in terms of (i) finding metaphors in the corpora; (ii) analysing language style; and (iii) diachronic analysis. It is shown that use of the identified dominant metaphor themes in each community co-occurs with specific language styles associated with mental health, and that this work of metaphor evolves over time as a consensus which becomes normative within the group for a period, such that it shapes community members as well as being shaped by them, while the flexibility of metaphor still leaves that work open to further evolution. The adaptation and prominence of particular metaphor themes over time to do particular work in each forum also underpins the characterisation of it as a particular community

Magistra Doctissima: Essays in Honor of Bonnie Wheeler

The editors of this volume use its title to honor Bonnie Wheeler for her many scholarly achievements and to celebrate her wide-ranging contributions to medieval studies in the United States. There are sections on Old and Middle English Literature, Arthuriana Then and Now, Joan of Arc Then and Now, Nuns and Spirituality, and Royal Women. As the editors note in the introduction, the volume confirms Bonnie\u27s commitment to the multidisciplinary study of the Middle Ages and affirms her conviction that the medieval and the modern are best viewed not as \u27the past\u27 and \u27the present\u27 but as interpenetrative categories.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_fopl/1000/thumbnail.jp

Politics in Translation: Language, War, and Lyric Form in Francophone Europe, 1337-1400

This dissertation investigates the fraught relationship between England and French-speaking Continental Europe in the late fourteenth century by uncovering a contemporary cross-regional discourse that theorized this relationship. The dissertation examines the so-called formes fixes, an important lyric genre widely used across Francophone Europe in the late Middle Ages. It argues for this genre\u27s emergence as a privileged medium for Francophone poets to explore the difficulty of retaining trans-European cultural affinity during the rise of protonationalist and regionalist faction in the Hundred Years War. This was a long-term conflict ostensibly between England and France, lasting from 1337 until 1453, that involved multiple other European regions within its theater. The dissertation organizes itself around a large, but little studied, late medieval manuscript anthology of formes fixes lyric, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, MS Codex 902 (formerly French 15). Never fully edited, the Pennsylvania manuscript is the largest, oldest, and most formally and geographically diverse formes fixes collection extant today. Chapter One argues that, unlike other, later, formes fixes anthologies, the Pennsylvania manuscript is not structured by author or sub-genre, but rather by form, chronology, geographic diversity, and dialectal difference. It thus reveals not only its compiler\u27s awareness of the diffusion of formes fixes lyric, but a desire to memorialize this genre\u27s transmission across regional divides. Chapter Two explores the political effects of the diffusion of formes fixes lyric by mapping literary borrowings between a corpus of anti-war texts in this anthology and other lyric corpora written in France, England, and the Low Countries. Chapter Three focuses on Francophone responses, both positive and negative, to the transmission of formes fixes lyric into England, centering on the implications of Eustache Deschamps\u27 praise of his English Francophone contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, as a great translator of formes fixes lyric. Chapter Four examines the adoption of formes fixes lyric in the work of Chaucer and his English Francophone contemporary, John Gower. It demonstrates that, like their Continental counterparts, Chaucer and Gower also view the appropriation of formes fixes lyric as a means of carving a geopolitically specific identity out of Francophone cultural belonging