UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item “But Hold Me Fast and Fear Me Not” Comparing Gender Roles in the Ballad Tam Lin and Medieval and Renaissance Scotland.(2023) Conant, Charlotte; Bianchini, \Janna; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Tam Lin, a medieval Scottish Ballad tells the story of an unusually forceful young Lady Janet. Janet does many of the feats of strength in her story, defies her father, refuses to behave as a ‘good Christian woman’ might and suffers no consequences for her actions. She ends her story successfully married to a noble Christian man, having saved him from the evil pagan Fairy Queen. This ballad has been popular for centuries, and has been cited as a ballad unique to Scotland that represents Scottish culture. The ballad contains ideas that one might think contradictory to the ideas of a medieval Christian society, yet the ballad was so popular it had a ballet (now lost) and has survived for at least four hundred years. This dissertation examines the differences and similarities between the lack of consequences Janet suffers and what real women in Scotland from the Medieval Ages to the Early Modern period would have experienced. It also will delve into the various cultural groups that contributed to the ‘Scottish Nature’ of the ballad. Stories are told by humans all across the world, a ballad, likely sung in a group, in order to continue being told, must not go against the inherent social rules of the people performing it, or else act as a cautionary tale. However, since Janet does not end her story suffering, Tam Lin is not meant to be a cautionary tale. Why then, was this ballad, that might appear to be so contradictory to the society that was telling it, have managed to survive (and be so popular) to the current day and age.Item Staged Magic in Early English Drama(2013) Lellock, Jasmine Shay; Cartwright, Kent; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In late medieval and early modern England, magic was everywhere. Although contested, occult beliefs and practices flourished among all classes of people, and they appeared regularly as a subject of early English drama. My dissertation focuses on staged magic in early English drama, demonstrating the ways in which it generates metacritical commentary. It argues that magic in drama serves more than just a symbolic function, but rather, some early English drama saw itself as performing a kind of magic that was also efficacious. To this end, this project theorizes that drama participated in forms of contemporary magic that circulated at the time. This dissertation focuses on representations of magic in early English drama, specifically in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament (ca. 1471), Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1588-92), William Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610-1), and John Milton's A Maske Performed at Ludlow Castle (1634). These early English plays stage their magic as socially and personally beneficial, not just illusory, flawed, or demonic. Whether staging magic as a critique or apology for its own medium, however, the plays suggest that theater draws upon magic to depict itself as efficacious. This project thus reads magic as both a metaphoric, literary convention and its own entity with accompanying political and cultural effects. Examining magic and its representation as part of a continuum--as contemporary audiences would have done--offers a clearer picture of what magic is doing in the plays and how early observers might have apprehended its effects. This dissertation offers a textually based cultural context for the magic found within its central plays, bringing extraliterary magical texts into conversation with literary, dramatic texts. Because the borders between natural philosophy, religion, and magic were not clearly defined in early modern England, this project draws as well upon scholarship and primary materials in the history of science and religion. The motivation of this project is to reanimate early English theater with a sense of wonder and magic that it historically offered and that it continues to bring to readers and audiences to this day.Item NO COUNTRY FOR OLD WOMEN: BURIAL PRACTICES AND PATTERNS OF HUNGARIAN QUEENS OF THE ÁRPÁD DYNASTY (975-1301)(2010) Mielke, Christopher Michael; Wasilewski, Janna; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent studies of Árpádian queens of Hungary have shown promise. Unlike previous research however, the goal of this thesis is not to examine the lives of the Hungarian queens, but rather their deaths and their burials. Utilizing what little information is known, the queens will be divided into four groups of individual case study. Considering that the vast majority of Hungarian queens were buried outside Hungary, the central issue to this thesis will be researching the causality for this. Ultimately, all twenty-four women in this study have two main factors in relation to their burial. First, their close familial link with particular branches of the Árpád dynasty could prove problematic upon the death of their husband. Second, the perceived danger of the widowed queen is a testament not only to fears of her as a foreigner and a woman, but also fears of power she exercised in her own right.Item The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Narrative, 1377-1422(2008-04-22) Coley, David Kennedy; Coletti, Theresa M; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines representations of speech in narrative poetry in English between 1377 and 1422, a four-and-a-half decade span marked by almost constant political, religious, social and economic upheaval. By analyzing the work that late medieval writers imagined the spoken word to perform - or, alternately, by examining how speech acts functioned performatively in medieval literary discourse - the author demonstrates how the spoken word functioned as a defining link between the Middle English text and the cultural tumult of the late medieval period. More important, by focusing on speech as a distinct category within linguistic discourse, the study allows for a reappraisal of the complicated relationships between text and cultural environment that have been illuminated by scholarship on the politics of vernacularity and the development of the English language. Chapter one uses The Manciple's Tale to probe Chaucer's engagement with the nominalist philosophy of William of Ockham, a philosophy which opposed the via antiqua and threatened to overturn the linguistic, epistemological, and ontological hierarchies that had been prevailed in various forms since the writings of Augustine of Hippo. Chapter two analyzes representations of sacramental and priestly speech in the anonymous Saint Erkenwald. By doing so, it redirects the critical conversation about the poem away from the role of baptism in redeeming the righteous heathen and toward the eucharistic theology that undergirds it, a critical that shift extends our understanding of the poem's engagement with the emerging Wycliffite heresy and with typological notions of medieval Christian identity. Chapter three focuses on the works of Thomas Hoccleve, fifteenth-century Privy Seal clerk and would-be court poet. By examining the overtly performative speech acts in Hoccleve's Marian lyrics, particularly "The Story of The Monk Who Clad the Virgin," it establishes the existence of an idiosyncratic economy of speech within the poet's canon, an economy that becomes paradigmatic for the mingled systems of monetary and interpersonal exchange that prevailed in the Lancastrian dynasty's early decades.