Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item "Pillaged and Robbed so Well": Captains in the Hundred Years War 1350-1380(2024) Ament, Nathaniel; Baron, Sabrina; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Captains were among the most influential military figures of the Hundred Years War. Despite this, there is scant scholarship on captaincy as a position within medieval society. This thesis seeks to rectify this gap in the scholarship by exploring the careers of influential captains serving England and France during the period from 1350-80. Drawing primarily from chronicle sources, this thesis examines the careers of this group of captains chronologically. It examines how their careers progressed and how they interacted with key cultural systems such as territorial lordship, chivalric culture, and the economic mechanisms of war. The overall findings of this paper reveal that these three systems mutually reinforced each other through captaincy by justifying chivalric violence.Item “WHAT PERSONS, MASCULINE OR FEMININE”: EXAMINATIONS OF IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND QUEER POTENTIALITIES IN WESTERN MEDIEVAL EUROPE(2023) Taylor, Erin; Bianchini, Janna; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this thesis, I argue that medieval people in Latin Europe had complex, overlapping identities and experiences of gender and sexuality that developed in their specific temporal and geographical contexts. The internal understandings of identities and the external expressions and interpretations of such identities are sites of historical possibility—and sources of potential inter-and intra-personal conflicts Medieval writings like Le Roman de Silence demonstrate how these identities could be constructed and expressed for literary and rhetorical purposes. Extant court cases, including those of John/Eleanor Rykener, Vitoria of Lisbon, and Katherina Hetzeldorfer, demonstrate the complexity of lived experiences of identity, and how deviation from accepted community and cultural norms could prove dangerous. It is impossible to assert such identities of gender and sexuality for historical figures of the medieval era with complete certainty, but the exploration of these identities is necessary for a fuller understanding and representation of the period and the people who lived throughout it.Item READING DAMNATION THROUGH FORMAL VARIATIONS OF THE MEDIEVAL HELL MOUTH(2021) Abraham, Molly Rose; Gill, Meredith J; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The study of the medieval Hell Mouth, the visual expression of the entrance to Hell, has generally centered on identifying its origins. However, that the visual Hell Mouth finds immense variation in form and context seems to deny any unilateral interpretation of the device. Art historians and scholars of visual culture have not before singly focused on the terrifying and visually compelling portrayal of the Mouth of Hell. While it is a longstanding and powerful referent in western culture, whether in text or image, and from medieval times to the present, no one has carefully examined its visual variants and their inimitable meaning for both Christian viewers and patrons, and for those less familiar with Christian teachings and belief. These four case studies drawn from medieval manuscripts offer close examinations of how the formal qualities of each variation distill the meaning of the Hell Mouth into visually legible form.Item Musicians and Commoners in Late Medieval London(2020) Polson, Simon; Haggh-Huglo, Barbara; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines music making in late medieval London (c.1300-c.1550) from the commoners’ perspective, and with this emphasis, does not discuss royal or monastic musical ensembles or music in aristocratic households, nor does it examine the music of St Paul’s Cathedral in detail. This shifts the focus from mensurally notated, pre-composed music towards monophony and extemporized polyphony which, unnotated, was realized in performance. These kinds of music more than any others were those made by medieval musicians and heard by commoners; through a study of archival documents and their printed editions, including account books, chronicles and other sources, the dissertation identifies the events at which musicians performed and commoners encountered music: civic and royal processions; the Midsummer Watches; processions of criminals with “rough music”; liturgical feast days, and at associated meals. It also locates the music of daily life in the streets and in many dozens of parish churches. The extant notated music from medieval London is mostly in chant books. No complete extant source of polyphony survives, but neither would such a source accurately represent a musical culture in which mensural polyphony and notated music itself were inaccessible to most. Used with methodological caution, documents from London reveal details where little notated music survives and describe or hint at the music that commoners knew. Also examined are two songs (“Sovereign Lord Welcome Ye Be,” “Row the bote Norman”) with surviving texts that may be original. A major appendix lists over 300 musicians who flourished in London in the period.Item Linguistic Orphan: Medical Literacy in Medieval England and the Erasure Of Anglo-Saxon Medical Knowledge(2018) Willis, Margot Rochelle; Bianchini, Janna; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis seeks to answer the question of why medieval physicians “forgot” efficacious medical treatments developed by the Anglo-Saxons and how Anglo-Saxon medical texts fell into obscurity. This thesis is largely based on the 2015 study of Freya Harrison et al., which replicated a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon eyesalve and found that it produced antistaphylococcal activity similar to that of modern antibiotics. Following an examination of the historiography, primary texts, and historical context, this thesis concludes that Anglo-Saxon medical texts, regardless of what useful remedies they contained, were forgotten primarily due to reasons of language: the obsolescence of Old English following the Norman Conquest, and the dominance of Latin in the University-based medical schools in medieval Europe.Item PROCOPIUS OF CAESAREA, PRAGMATIKE HISTORIA, AND THE LIMITS OF IMPERIAL POWER(2017) Frechette, Joseph Raymond; Eckstein, Arthur M; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The implicit assumption in many recent treatments of the sixth century historian Procopius of Caesarea and his history of the wars of the emperor Justinian is that the “classicizing” elements contained in the Wars are a product of mimesis that Procopius deployed for literary or political purposes. These approaches lead to the conclusion that the Wars are disconnected from the realities of the mid sixth century. This dissertation suggests that we may gain a better understanding not only of this important historian and his most substantial work, but also the regime he served and criticized, by suspending our disbelief and taking the Wars on its own terms. That is, as a work of analytical history whose author expected would be useful to its readers in the conduct of military and political affairs. To this end it examines Procopius’ career, the nature and relative dates of his works, the historiographic context in which he operated, the nature of his audience, some of the recurrent issues faced by Roman commanders as described in the Wars and their practical applicability to a contemporary military audience, points of contact between Procopius and the didactic military literature of the period, the inapplicability of discussing Procopius as a critic of a “totalitarian” regime, and the Wars’ portrait, instead, of an imperial regime limited by both external and internal constraints.Item A Better Place to Be: Republicanism as an Alternative to the Authoritarianism-Democracy Dichotomy(2016) Binetti, Christopher; Alford, Charles F; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: A BETTER PLACE TO BE: REPUBLICANISM AS AN ALTENATIVE TO THE AUTHORITARIANISM-DEMOCRACY DICHOTOMY Christopher Ronald Binetti, Doctor of Philosophy, and 2016 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Charled Frederick Alford, Department of Government and Politics In this dissertation, I argue that in modern or ancient regimes, the simple dichotomy between democracies and autocracies/dictatorships is both factually wrong and problematic for policy purposes. It is factually wrong because regimes between the two opposite regime types exist and it is problematic because the either/or dichotomy leads to extreme thinking in terms of nation-building in places like Afghanistan. In planning for Afghanistan, the argument is that either we can quickly nation-build it into a liberal democracy or else we must leave it in the hands of a despotic dictator. This is a false choice created by both a faulty categorization of regime types and most importantly, a failure to understand history. History shows us that the republic is a regime type that defies the authoritarian-democracy dichotomy. A republic by my definition is a non-dominating regime, characterized by a (relative) lack of domination by any one interest group or actor, mostly non-violent competition for power among various interest groups/factions, the ability of factions/interest groups/individual actors to continue to legitimately play the political game even after electoral or issue-area defeat and some measure of effectiveness. Thus, a republic is a system of government that has institutions, laws, norms, attitudes, and beliefs that minimize the violation of the rule of law and monopolization of power by one individual or group as much as possible. These norms, laws, attitudes, and beliefs ae essential to the republican system in that they make those institutions that check and balance power work. My four cases are Assyria, Persia, Venice and Florence. Assyria and Persia are ancient regimes, the first was a republic and then became the frightening opposite of a republic, while the latter was a good republic for a long time, but had effectiveness issues towards the end. Venice is a classical example of a medieval or early modern republic, which was very inspirational to Madison and others in building republican America. Florence is the example of a medieval republic that fell to despotism, as immortalized by Machiavelli’s writings. In all of these examples, I test certain alternative hypotheses as well as my own.Item "You've Really Got a Hold on Me": The Power and Emotion in Women's Correspondence in Fifteenth-Century Italy(2012) McLean, Nicole Lynn; Bianchini, Janna; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the lives of Alessandra Strozzi and Lucrezia de'Medici of Florence. The fifteenth-century in Italy saw women's power declining, and patrician women used letter writing to enter the public sphere and exert power. This study analyzes socially constructed emotional themes in women's correspondence which is in concert with scholars like Barbara Rosenwein in that it seeks to instead situate emotions in specific historical contexts. For Alessandra, we see how she successfully employs the emotions of guilt and shame to manipulate her sons into behaving properly, as these emotions were closely connected to Italian culture. Second, in the patronage letters written to Lucrezia by potential clients, we see the use of motherly emotions by clients in hopes that Lucrezia will essentially fill a mother's role, helping them with their hardships. Even though client's letters represent a "fictive" mother/child relationship, they are a testament to Lucrezia's power as a mother.