College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Inspiring a Choral Revolution? The Polyphonic Music of Edward IV’s Burgundian Exile, 1470–1471(2021) Allies, Patrick; Haggh-Huglo, Barbara; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the second half of the fifteenth century, at least half a dozen prominent polyphonic choirs in England were transformed, both in terms of their numbers and their vocal range. The most prominent example was at St. George’s Collegiate Church, Windsor, where under Edward IV the number of boy choristers and lay clerks doubled, and the boys were trained to sing polyphony for the first time. One possible contributory factor to this burst of choral development is the polyphonic music Edward is likely to have experienced during his exile in the Burgundian territories from 1470–1471. Edward’s principal host while in exile was the nobleman Louis de Gruuthuse. While staying at Gruthuuse’s Bruges palace, Edward would have been able to hear polyphonic music at the neighboring Church of Our Lady, in the Lady Mass, guild services and during the concert-like “lof,” established in 1468. At around this time, Gruuthuse began constructing an upper-level oratory looking into Our Lady’s Church, and Edward subsequently built a similar space at St. George’s Windsor. These structures are part of a wider Anglo- Burgundian pattern of music patrons building raised oratories in the period 1450–1500. Oratories may have been built, in part, to improve the experience of listening to larger, louder choirs. Listening from the oratory would have both reduced the initial-time-delay gap and created an unobstructed line of listening to the choirboys, allowing their higher frequencies to be heard more clearly. Despite complex political circumstances, Edward did spend time at Charles the Bold’s court. His visits followed a period in which Charles was especially concerned with expanding his choir. The duke’s chapel ordinances of 1469 specify six upper voices for singing polyphony. This may have been part of a wider phenomenon in the Burgundian territories and later, in England, of groups of six choirboys being established in choirs where their role specifically included polyphony. The choir at St. Donatian’s in Bruges had at least fifty years of history of boys and men singing polyphony together by 1470, and its recruitment and training allied to an attractive income and career prospects for its singers made this one of the finest choirs of its kind in Europe by the late fifteenth century. The years 1470–1471 would have been a peak in the choir’s activity due to the unprecedented spending on copying of music by Gilles de Joye in the year’s 1468–1471. The arrangements of St. Donatian’s choir are a possible model for the changes Edward went on to make to his choir at Windsor.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 The Great House of Benjamin West: Family, Workshop, and National Identity in Late Georgian England(2014) Fox, Abram Jacob; Pressly, William L; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Anglo-American painter Benjamin West (1738-1820) holds a unique position in the history of Western art. Active during the foundational periods of not one, but two, national schools of art to which he could rightfully claim membership, West recognized his inimitable position in the development of English and American art and sought to position himself at the forefront of each nation. This dissertation examines his fluid national and artistic identities over the course of his instructional relationships with his American students, and the shifting personal and professional goals harbored by each party. While scholars have acknowledged the relation of West's pedagogical practice to his identity as an artist, this study presents an organic account of the relationships between teacher and students as an embodiment of West's ongoing and unprecedented attempts at fame, fortune, and legacy. This legacy was central to Benjamin West's identity as an artist. His professional career was dedicated to the self-aggrandizement of his identities as an (exotic) American, a prolific painter of high-minded scenes of history and religion, and the head of a workshop teeming with artists who shared his heritage, though not always his aesthetic inclinations. Over his career he cultivated a reputation as a welcoming instructor, always willing to give advice or lessons to any artist who approached him. This was not solely an act of altruism. Instead, it was the cornerstone of his construction of a proverbial House of West, a workshop-family whose members and their works would reflect back on the genius of the master, just as strongly as his own oeuvre. Through the examination of four case studies of his instruction of American students – that of Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, and a circle of students led by Washington Allston – this study integrates Benjamin West's teaching practice with his career aspirations, positioning his pedagogy within the greater framework of his self-presentation. In doing so, it presents a history painter engrossed in the promulgation of his name throughout history, through his own artistic output and those of his children and students, as the progenitor of American artists working in the European tradition.Item "Is this your manly service?": Religion, Gender, and Drama in Early Modern England, 1558-1625(2011) Moretti, Thomas J.; Leinwand, Theodore; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project argues that the interplay between religion and gender on the early modern English stage was a crucial means toward religious mediation and theatrical affect. Playwrights exploited the tensions between gender and reformed Christianity to expose the inconsistencies and contradictions within the period's religious polemic, to combine various religious expressions and habits of thought, to deepen sensitivity toward England's tenuous religious settlements, and to advance their art form. Furthermore, this project argues that the theater was better equipped than any other cultural and political institution to handle England's complex religious situations. This study, then, engages a broader scholarly effort to understand the relationship between theater and religion during England's ongoing reformations. Chapter 1 discusses how reformed biblical exegesis underwrote the staging of female piety in Lewis Wager's Calvinist Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene (1566). Because this play surprises audiences with its endorsement of Mary's devotion, Wager qualifies our sense that the Reformation was relentlessly committed to repressing sensual worship and stamping out iconophilic fervor. To heighten theatrical affect, his play inverts associations between femininity and sin even as he defends the theater in Calvinist terms. Chapter 2 assesses the interaction of religion, gender, and kingship in Shakespeare and company's three Henry VI plays (~1592-95). By heightening the tensions between militant Protestantism and Christian humanism, the playwrights ask searching questions about the compatibility of reformed Christianity and kingship and about the place of Christian piety on the popular stage. To test various dramatic paces, to tap the theatrical possibilities of a weak and peaceful Christian king, and to unsettle audiences, Shakespeare and his collaborators show what is lost and gained by a culture that cannot reconcile masculine rule to reformed Christian piety. Chapter 3 argues that Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger's The Virgin Martir (1622) takes advantage of Jacobean religious compromises and impasses. By staging a martyrdom that invokes sensual beauty and physical vulnerability, this play stresses reform, recalls John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, and endorses what Lancelot Andrewes called "the beauty of holiness": the iconic splendor that reformers stripped from the Mass. As it bears witness to Jacobean England's vexing religious settlement, the play exploits the recurring post-Reformation conflict between text, reform, and godly masculinity on the one hand, and spectacle, ceremonialism, and feminized piety on the other.