Both “illness and temptation of the enemy”: melancholy, the medieval patient and the writings of King Duarte of Portugal (r. 1433–38)

Recent historians have rehabilitated King Duarte of Portugal, previously maligned and neglected, as an astute ruler and philosopher. There is still a tendency, however, to view Duarte as a depressive or a hypochondriac, due to his own description of his melancholy in his advice book, the Loyal Counselor. This paper reassesses Duarte's writings, drawing on key approaches in the history of medicine, such as narrative medicine and the history of the patient. It is important to take Duarte's views on his condition seriously, placing them in the medical and theological contexts of his time and avoiding modern retrospective diagnosis. Duarte's writings can be used to explore the impact of plague, doubt and death on the life of a well-educated and conscientious late-medieval ruler

Writing on the basis of primary sources

An essay for undergraduates on the use of primary sources in writing about history.Using primary sources in writing a work of history at any level (from beginning student to greybeard specialist) provides rewarding opportunities no less than challenges. To analyze primary sources--those written at the period of time under study--is to carry out one of the historian’s basic functions; you are an historian as you do this, in other words, for you are writing history from the most basic level of evidence available

Piety and Independence in Chivalric Religion

In the third act of “Der Rosenkavalier” (by Ricard Strauss, with libretto by Hugo von Hofmannstal) the Marschellin frankly says of Baron Ochs “Er ist, mein’ich, ein Kavalier? Da wird Er sich halt gar nichts denken.” Her stark, sweeping, and comic claim can readily pose an important question for all who investigate chivalry, or even a set of questions. Did the medieval knighthood think much or deeply along religious lines? What was the origin of their ideas, the authority validating them? And ..

"That the practice of arms is the most excellent" : chivalry, honor, and violence in late medieval Florence.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of History, 2014.This study examines the influence of chivalric ideas, ideals, and attitudes on the mentality and lifestyle of the traditional warrior elite of late medieval Florence. I argue that chivalry encouraged these strenuous knights and arms bearers to see the profession of arms and honor as central to their identities. Indeed, for the chivalric elite, personal and familial honor were worth more than life itself, to be asserted, enhanced, and defended with bloody violence. Likewise, the corporate honor of the chivalric elite had to be maintained at the point of a sword, especially against the rise of new men and the emerging power of the popular classes in late medieval Florence. One important element of this fight to maintain the traditional autonomy and superiority of the chivalric elite was their monopoly on martial skills, experience, and expertise. Indeed, warfare was the raison d'etre of strenuous Florentine knights and arms bearers, who saw battles and skirmishes as the ultimate arena for demonstrating their personal prowess and valor, in the process winning or losing honor. Not surprisingly given chivalry's valorization of violence, especially in armed conflict over matters of honor and in the context of warfare, many contemporaries expressed concern about the negative consequences of such violence for public order and the common good. As a result, would-be reformers in both chivalric and non-chivalric circles promoted certain reformative virtues, like prudence, restraint, and wisdom, which were intended to balance out the dominant, violent tenets of the ideology of chivalry joyfully (in the pursuit of honor and renown) or wrathfully (in the pursuit of vengeance) employed with great effect by strenuous knights and arms bearers. This dissertation not only studies ideas and action, but also of the mediums of cultural exchange that facilitated the development and strengthening of chivalric culture in Florence. One medium are the practitioners of chivalry themselves, both native Florentine and foreign strenuous knights and arms bearers. The second are works of imaginative chivalric literature, of both native and foreign provenance, which spread chivalric ideas and ideals not only into and around Florence, but also throughout the Italian peninsula

Honor, courage, and blood: an elite ideology of violence in Trastámara Castile, 1369-1474

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of History, 2015.This dissertation examines elite violence in late medieval Castile from an ideological perspective, asking not simply how violence was perpetrated by the knightly class, but what these practitioners of violence thought about the violence they were perpetrating. By looking at sources such as imaginative literature, chronicles, and treatises, this dissertation seeks to recover the voices and the thought processes of the knights of Trastámara Castile. As part of this process, the dissertation also asks what others in Castilian society thought about knightly violence. Calls for reform came from clergymen and peasants while the Trastámara kings attempted to direct knightly violence to their own ends. Sometimes we have evidence that knights heard and thought about these criticisms of their violent profession; at other times they appear to have simply ignored calls for reform. This dissertation insists that those who constituted the chivalric elite were violent, were aware that they were violent, and embraced their violence through the construction of an ideology that largely supported their actions. Concepts of chivalry, violence, and religion were not simply ex post facto justifications for actions taken, but were informed by and helped to inform those actions. Particularly on the question of violence, we as historians need to acknowledge that ideas about violence, when placed in the context of a violent society, had real and serious effects in the world. Medieval knights were not automatons who wielded their swords only when a king or pope commanded it. They thought about their actions and built an ideology dealing with them, an ideology that continued to inform their violent deeds. In a larger sense, this dissertation seeks an answer to the question of how Castile moved from a medieval kingdom wracked by civil war and foreign invasion in 1369 to the precipice of a global empire in the late 15th century. How is it that the Catholic Monarchs and the Spanish Empire emerged out of the late Middle Ages? What would be the ideology that formed the foundation for a world empire and why was it such a challenge for the Trastámara kings

English monasticism and royal governance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of History, 2013.Recent challenges to a once-dominant explanation of the Dissolution's origins, namely that associated with David Knowles' The Religious Orders in England, have left revisionist portraits of English monasticism untethered to any assumption of monasticism's spiritual decline. Monastic historiography here mirrors recent challenges to secularization theory. Whereas sociologists previously treated any decline in the administrative role of religious institutions as progressive, scholars are now more cautious to avoid teleological assumptions when studying changes in religious institutions' political influence. This dissertation, reacting to these two historiographic trends, offers a new approach to the changing relationship between monasticism and royal governance in the two centuries prior to the Dissolution (1536-1541). Specifically, it will 1. draw upon chancery records related to Augustinian, Benedictine, and Cistercian abbeys to relate monastic history to historiographic questions concerning the state of public order in late medieval England, and 2. analyze sermons and chronicles to identify the ideological relationships between royal and monastic authority. The resulting construct of monastic history obviates once-standard attempts to gauge monasticism's spiritual vitality, which have so often been indebted to assumptions of monasticism's spiritual decline or the inevitability of secularization. Instead, this study of monasticism's changing societal role offers a more rigorous approach to the historical relationship between religious discourse and its administrative, judicial, and political context