‘The Despair of his Tutor’: Latin as Socioeducational Marker in Les Trois Mousquetaires

A significant motif in Les Trois Mousquetaires is to communicate the four heroes’ differing natures through their differing relationships with the Latin language. The separate academic pedigrees thus suggested for the three actual musketeers, Porthos, Athos and Aramis, each represent one of the major education models of early 17th century France: the courtly academy, private tuition, and the Jesuit collège. In the case of the up-and-coming d’Artagnan, by contrast, Dumas proffers less a type of 17th century education than an updating of the social values of that period to coincide with those of his own time. The successes of this musketeer-in-training hold out the promise that talent, work and virtuous effort will be rewarded through upward mobility. The fact that the author has chosen to transmit this hopeful message partially through the vehicle of Latinlessness speaks volumes, both about the place of Latin in the curriculum over the centuries and about the role of Latin as socioeducational marker

Heraldic Imagery in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry

The significance of heraldic references in literature has been the subject of both antiquarian interest and recent scholarship. In the field of seventeenth-century poetry, there exists a small body of published work concerned with the use of heraldry by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Jolin Cleveland. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the existence and significance of heraldic references in a wider range of seventeenth-century verse and poetry. It eschews assumptions regarding the use of heraldry by, or with reference to, a narrow social elite, and examines heraldic references published in broadsheets and used in songs, as well as in the privately- circulated manuscripts of the nobility. Chapter One offers a critical examination of a range of current scholarship concerned with heraldic readings of literature. Chapter Two demonstrates that formal heraldic references, affirming or celebrating their subject’s identity, were used in diverse genres, including dedicatory verses, encomia, epitaphs, elegies, epithalamia and anagrams. Chapter Three determines the social implications of the use of heraldry, with particular reference to epic and satirical verse, arguing that heraldic references in this period develop beyond their traditional, chivalric associations. Chapter Four discusses those works that include heraldic references as expressions of authority or political power, and considers their use in different contexts to affirm or undermine the position of individuals and groups within society. Chapter Five establishes the use of heraldry within religious or spiritual poetry and addresses whether its vocabulary was regarded as an expression of particular Christian values. Chapter Six explores the engagement of women writers with heraldry and considers how far their use of the language offered a challenge to the prevailing patriarchal culture. The Conclusion draws attention to the significance of the evolution of heraldry from the seventeenth century to the present day

Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition

Shows how the interactive, confrontational practice of courtly arts shaped imperial thought in the Middle Ages A probing inquiry into medieval court struggles, this book shows the relationship between intellectual conflict and the geopolitics of empire. It examines the Persian Buyids’ takeover of the great Arab caliphate in Iraq, the counter-Crusade under Saladin, and the literature of sovereignty in Spain and Italy at the cusp of the Renaissance. The question of high culture—who best qualified as a poet, the function of race and religion in forming a courtier, what languages to use in which official ceremonies—drove much of medieval writing, and even policy itself. From the last moments of the Abbasid Empire, to the military campaign for Jerusalem, to the rise of Crusades literature in spoken Romance languages, authors and patrons took a competitive stance as a way to assert their place in a shifting imperial landscape

Beatrice de Roos (s.1415) and the Making of Art

This article examines the involvement of Beatrice, dowager Baroness Roos (d. 1415) in the making of art. Her patronage of masons and tomb-makers, glaziers and seal-makers, is explored in detail, showing her to have commissioned works from two of the most prominent English artists of the late medieval period. Her interest in the inventive use of heraldry and her role in the creation of a major monument in St Paul’s Cathedral is established. Her right to be acknowledged as the donor of the St William window in York Minster is reasserted, and her influence on its content and meaning is demonstrated. The gift of this window made Beatrice the single most important secular benefactor of York Minster, a fact that has not been acknowledged before in print, but was recorded by the medieval cathedral chapter in the glazing of the Minster’s western choir clerestory

Chivalry as community and culture : the military elite of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Spanish Orientalism: Washington Irving and the Romance of the Moors

Edward Said\u27s description of Orientalism as a constitutive element of the modern West is one of the enduring concepts of cultural history. The Orientalism thesis begins with the observation that in the 19th century Westerners began describing the Orient, particularly the Middle East and India, as a place that was once gloriously civilized but had declined under the influence of incompetent Islamic governments. This construction was then employed to justify Western Imperialism and the expansion of Christianity into Asia. This dissertation examines a case of Orientalism with a twist. Between 1775 and 1830 a group of Anglophone writers and artists depicted Spain as a state with a cultural trajectory similar to that described by the Orientalists. But in the Spanish case, the glorious past was the age of the Islamic Moors who had ruled parts of the Iberian Peninsula from 700 until 1492, while the current Christian rulers were the backwards and religiously intolerant impediments to progress. Thus the case of Spanish Orientalism employs an argument structurally identical to Said\u27s Orientalism, with the role of the Christians and Muslims reversed. In examining this phenomenon, I focus on three particular issues. The first is the representation of the Moors in early modern European popular culture. I argue that these earlier traditions use the Moors as an emblematic manifestation of oppositionality to the centralizing state and elite authority. The romantics found in the Moors a symbol comparable to such other proto-Europeans as the Celts and the Goths, worthy predecessors to the warlike, chivalric, and liberty-loving modern Europeans. The second is the political context of Spanish Orientalism. Like classical Orientalism, Spanish Orientalism had a clear political payoff. Its articulators meant to show that the Spanish government was an unworthy steward of its rapidly disintegrating empire, thus Spanish Orientalism is closely associated with attempts to assert Anglophone authority in the Caribbean. Third, I examine in detail the work of the author most clearly associated with Spanish Orientalism, Washington Irving. In the four books he wrote while in Spain during the 1820s, Irving became the individual most responsible for reframing the long representational tradition of the Moors into a modern idiom and bringing it to a mass audience

Noble warriors : the military elite and Henry VIII's expeditions of 1513 and 1544

This thesis is concerned with identifying and understanding the typical behaviour of the early Tudor nobility, particularly in relation to military activity. It is also an attempt to describe that behaviour without following the usual practice of categorising it as declining chivalry and the emergence of modern attitudes. Instead, I suggest that insofar as there was a shared area of ideas and behaviour amongst the nobles, that behaviour was in large part an outcome of their position in society as a military elite. Because the nobles formed a military elite, the behaviour of individuals in both military and civilian life was, to a major degree, shaped by the expectation that their typical actions would be the same as those of the leaders of the army. Their peacetime behaviour was, therefore, often related to the position occupied in the army by nobles, and, at the same time, behavioural characteristics associated with the noble in his civilian life frequently intruded into war situations. An outcome of the identity between the noble as a civilian and as a soldier was that the noble tended to regard the army as the proper sphere in which to display his select status, rather than seeing the army merely as an instrument of the nation or the government. Nobles were often concerned to be seen to be acting in a manner befitting their rank, even in times of great stress and danger. Because these typical activities associated with the noble might emphasise somewhat resource wasting actions, their presence helped make warfare seem even less efficient than it already was. At the same time, there were numerous traditionally based types of behaviour associated with the military elite, which many writers have been content to label as chivalry. These were adopted by the nobles as aspects of the typical behaviour of their group. But it would be incorrect to claim that these characteristics alone made up the main influence on the ideas and actions of the early Tudor nobility

"Living in these current Middle Ages": The society for creative anachronism and historical re-enacting behavior

Thesis (B.A.) in Anthropology--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1993.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 56-60)Microfiche of typescript. [Urbana, Ill.]: Photographic Services, University of Illinois, U of I Library, [1993]. 2 microfiches (66 frames): negative. s1993 ilun

Fabricating the Martial Body: Anatomy, Affect, and Armor in Early Modern England and Italy

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2017. Major: English. Advisors: John Watkins, Shirley Nelson Garner. 1 computer file (PDF); xi, 357 pages.This project investigates the physical nature of what I call the martial body—most prominently represented as the armored knight—in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English and Italian culture. Earlier studies assume that there is an innate link between elite masculinity, combat, and armor during this period. In contrast, I identify the martial body as a means by which some women and lower status men could occupy positions, express opinions, and exert influence in ways traditionally limited to the masculine martial elite. Marginalized individuals and groups used the trope of the martial body to justify rhetoric and actions that transgressed codes enforced by the hierarchical and patriarchal social structure. Incorporating methodologies from the history of medicine and warfare that derive from work with medical texts and the study of material objects like armor, my dissertation traces the construction of the martial body and its uses as physical construct and rhetorical trope in the Italian epic romances Orlando innamorato by Matteo Boiardo, Orlando furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, and Gerusalemme liberata by Torquato Tasso and the English Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. The literary sources are complemented by inclusion of English and Italian anatomical and surgical texts, fencing treatises, and armor. Because of transmission patterns from Italy to England for medical knowledge, armor design, fencing technique, and literary genre, an attempt to study the martial body in England presupposes inclusion of Italian materials. The dissertation is structured so as to define the martial body moving progressively outward, so it begins by asking what the body is made of and then moves to an examination of the body’s surface before turning to the chief marker of the martial body, armor, and ends with a consideration of the martial body in combat. The first chapter investigates what the body was made of in the context of Galenic medical theory, Vesalian anatomical illustrations, and the allegory of the body in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The second chapter considers skin and hair in all the epic romances as transactional sites that function by subtle manipulations of color, hardness, and presentation. The third again uses all four romances and turns to the martial body’s most visible marker: armor. It focuses on armor as prosthesis for entry into the hypermasculine space of combat and the complications this poses for the always already inadequate wearer. The fourth uses English and Italian fencing treatises in an examination of combat in the romances. In doing so, I demonstrate that the martial body—the literal figure and rhetorical trope of elite martial masculinity—serves as a vehicle for some women and lower status men to access the very social spheres that seem most hostile to them in order to evade strict social control

Does the West still need warriors?

Situated within strategic aspects of International Relations, this thesis asks whether the West still needs warriors. The West has always had and needed warriors, and six warrior ideal types are analysed. Three of these are premodern and three are modern. Warriors are defined as soldiers with a personal and existential commitment to master and experience warfare, who are willing and able to kill and sacrifice their life in combat. It is argued warriors are principally individual types, and whereas there are many soldiers, few of these are warriors. The thesis presents a social theory of who and what the West is, analysing how this is translated into security paradigms that conceive for example whether security ought to be pursued for only the West, or whether it ought to be pursued for all of mankind. A further context issue is the relationship between war and combat. The character of war is changing and becoming ever more instrumental. Combat, meanwhile, is existential and unchanging, consisting of the same basic features and social structure it did in Homeric times. To ask whether the West needs warriors is thus to ask both an instrumental and an existential question. The existential features have to do with whom the West conceives themselves as; the instrumental features about what the West needs. Warriors are both a type of human being embodying qualities like manliness and courage, and instruments towards the attainment of security for Western states. To an extent, social developments have eroded the esteem in which warriors are held, because society is sceptical of the deliberate use of force. Yet at the same time, the security agendas conceived by the West are more expansive than ever, which leads to a greater need for warriors