J.R.R. Tolkien’sThe Lord of the Ringsis suspended between the medieval and the modern world. In this thesis, I attempt to explore what makes this enormously popularly novel so indelibly relatable to modern audiences. To begin, I look at weapons as the crux between the medieval and the modern elements of the text through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura. By comparing the depiction of medieval weapons within theSong of Rolandto similar weapons inThe Lord of the Rings, I demonstrate that they differ in the level of aura they possess and their transferability between cultures. This difference indicates an impulse to preserve cultural distinctions. Within the context of the historical realities occurring while Tolkien was writing this novel, including World War II, fascism, and industrialization, the impulse to preserve cultural distinctions becomes a direct critique against cultural hegemony.

This dissertation takes a critical look at the theories of readerly engagement and literary pedagogy that Christine de Pizan and Geoffrey Chaucer articulate throughout their bodies of work, examining the ways in which they utilize these theories to develop practical strategies for cultivating readerly engagement and personalized learning in diverse new audiences of vernacular readers. The later Middle Ages in England and France bore witness to a striking expansion of vernacular literacy, as advances in education and book production made written materials more accessible beyond the clerical classes. This spread of literacy to a growing group of lay readers meant that late-medieval writers were compelled to grapple with diverse new audiences, containing individuals of varied social classes, genders, and educational backgrounds. I argue that de Pizan and Chaucer used their writing to open up educational opportunities for these audiences. Recognizing that these new readers, despite their access to the written word, still faced social, cognitive, and emotional barriers to their ability to learn from literary works, these writers sought to facilitate practices of engaged reading and break down these didactic barriers.

In the first half of my dissertation, I explore de Pizan’s depiction of readerly identification, arguing that she presents the experience of identifying with a literary figure as a profound facilitator of personalized learning. Having established the pedagogical benefits of identification, I move to analyzing how de Pizan encourages identification in her female readers in order to teach them practical lessons in reading and in life. In the second half of this dissertation, I examine the ways in which Geoffrey Chaucer models problematic reading strategies in order to encourage a diverse body of readers to overcome their proclivities for interpretative self-sabotage. I conclude by exploring how Chaucer offers the experience of wonder as an alternative reading methodology.

A number of recent studies have focused on medieval writers’ responses to an expanding vernacular readership, emphasizing writers’ attempts to manage readers’ interpretative authority. My own work shifts the focus from authority to access, expanding opportunities to theorize late-medieval strategies of literary-educational inclusion.

Sensing Empire assembles a new literary history of the Mongol empire (1206–1368) by exposing the epistemological intersections between disparate cultural productions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Stemming from an interest in medieval philosophies of mind and cultural phenomenology, the dissertation explores how Mongol imperialism formed and reformed notions of self and the world across Middle English, Latin, and Classical Chinese “contact” literatures. Through a methodology that centers the perceptive body as the locus for cross-cultural encounter, Sensing Empire demonstrates the intimacy of the Mongol empire as a medieval global network. This work challenges Eurocentric approaches to medieval studies as it contributes to the burgeoning fields of medieval affect studies, premodern critical race studies, and the Global Middle Ages.

Scholars examining captivity in the medieval and early modern periods have laid a strong foundation of work that explores both historical details (the layout of prisons, the laws of ransom) and individual captive voices (especially in martyr stories and captivity narratives). Recently, definitional and theoretical questions have risen out of such specific analyses. For example, what is the difference between a “captive” and a “slave”? Can captives be best categorized by the reason they are held, the duration of their loss of freedom, their social status, or something else?

In response to these challenges, To Yield or Die identifies and explores a persistent discourse about captive characters in English late medieval and early modern texts including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Malory’s Le Morte Darthur; Spenser’s Faerie Queene; Marlowe’s Edward II, The Jew of Malta, and two Tamburlaine plays; and the works of Shakespeare (with particular focus on Richard II, Measure for Measure, and The Rape of Lucrece). When characters face the literal or figurative sword’s point and are ordered to “yield or die,” texts treat their answers as permanently characterizing choices. The discourse thus creates three categories of captive character based on those choices: those who yield, those who risk death by resisting, and those who reply illegibly (or not at all) and thus negate the question’s definitional power. These categories operate within each story’s world to explore selfhood and establish relationships; they also operate at the formal level of textual construction (characters who yield are almost never protagonists; illegible characters often provoke interpretive confusion for fellow characters and readers alike).

While exploring this discourse, To Yield or Die also examines how texts manipulate and subvert its conventions, especially when the discourse collides with others including those involving gender, religion, chivalric culture, and so forth. The yield-or-die discourse both celebrates unexpected means of resistance (for example, it respects patient suffering) and is also cruelly oppressive (for example, it labels as “slavish” those who yield to save their own lives). To Yield or Die provides a clarifying lens through which to study texts about enslaved people, prisoners, and other captive figures.

This dissertation uncovers an overlooked history of women’s utopian thought that has its foundations in the medieval period. Challenging scholarly narratives that position Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) as the foundation of utopian thought, I argue that medieval and early modern women’s writing produced and/or read in English contexts engaged in unrecognized forms of utopianism that reemerge in contemporary conversations about gender and sexuality. I thus trace an earlier lineage of what Mary Louis Pratt calls “feminotopias,” idealized worlds of female self-realization and social harmony, from the fifteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. But I also expand Pratt’s notion of feminotopia by showing how writers from French author Christine de Pizan to religious leader Mary Ward extended utopia beyond its narrow generic definition as an ideal world into a heuristic for imagining the world otherwise. Through such utopian thinking, women generated gynocentric models of identity, friendship, and community. Writing at moments of social and political tensions, the women in my project collectively imagine ways for communities to negotiate difference—between individual women, between the past and future, humans and nature, and religious and secular life. Reading their writings together builds a picture of how early women engaged in radical, political thought that uses the past to map the future. Placing early women’s writings into conversations with post-modern feminist and queer theory, my project reveals how the past can illuminate the present by offering insight into a transhistorical effort to resist oppression and imagine new possibilities. This dissertation thus generates a literary history that is not exclusively informed by geography or periodization but rather focuses on structures of feeling that strive for a better future.

My dissertation, "Marvelous Generations: Lancastrian Genealogies and Translation in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and Iberia," traces the legacy of dynastic internationalism in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early-seventeenth centuries. I argue that the situated tactics of courtly literature use genealogical and geographical paradigms to redefine national sovereignty. Before the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, before the divorce trials of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon in the 1530s, a rich and complex network of dynastic, economic, and political alliances existed between medieval England and the Iberian kingdoms. The marriages of John of Gaunt's two daughters to the Castilian and Portuguese kings created a legacy of Anglo-Iberian cultural exchange that is evident in the literature and manuscript culture of both England and Iberia. Because England, Castile, and Portugal all saw the rise of new dynastic lines at the end of the fourteenth century, the subsequent literature produced at their courts is preoccupied with issues of genealogy, just rule, and political consent. Dynastic foundation narratives compensate for the uncertainties of succession by evoking the longue dur�e of national histories--of Trojan diaspora narratives, of Roman rule, of apostolic foundation--and situating them within universalizing historical modes. At the same time, they reconfigure national space and geography in fantasies of imperial mapping that spatialize their genealogical (re)constructions. The dynastic internationalism characterizing late medieval royal marriages contributes to emerging discourses of the nation and sets the stage for the imperial rivalries between England and Iberia during the Renaissance era.

Within this Anglo-Iberian context, my dissertation tracks an understudied aspect of the legacy of Lancastrian kingship: its claims to the throne of Castile and the multiple Iberian marriages that materialize those claims as they shape late medieval and early modern international historiography. In the early stages of Lancastrian rule, the prestige of foreign kingship reinforced Lancastrian claims to England, claims which in turn fueled political ambitions in France. In the process, English and Iberian historiographies become entangled. I argue that common dynastic descent is mobilized as an alternative way of understanding national relations, thus positioning the consanguinity of royal houses against cultural, linguistic and religious difference--the international claims of dynastic affinity over the specifically national ones of the polity. In both cases, the political fantasy of a moment of dynastic origins reinforces political theories that render the "king's body" as proximate to the nation, while at the same time destabilizing the relationship between the monarch and the polity. In excavating the sometimes-repressed matter of Spain as a determinant in the domestic imaginings of England, my project works against insular nationalism to reveal a "sceptered isle" whose political integrity is both reinforced and troubled by its deep and unavoidable genealogical and geographical proximity to realms outside.

Medieval culture, like modernity, was obsessed with sex: who has it with whom, how, and is it right or wrong. Queer Magic: Sodomy, Sin, and the Supernatural, 1150-1650, interrogates medieval narratives that use the supernatural to experiment with non- normative depictions of bodies, relationships, and sexual acts. By bringing together magical handbooks, alchemical instruction books, religious conduct manuals, scientific treatises, canon law, and courtly romances and allegories, my project demonstrates that, for medieval writers and thinkers, magic and deviant sexual and gendered behavior are inextricably linked. Queer Magic uses the guiding framework of medieval natural philosophy and sins contra naturam to argue literary magic functions as a licit form of heresy for authors to engage in queer imaginings of bodies, genders, and sexual acts. This project, in other words, clarifies how the operative function of magic in past and current forms of conversations about gender, sex, and the body has been forgotten. My analysis reveals that for premodern writers and thinkers, literary depictions of magic functioned as a heuristic for grappling the boundaries of naturalness. These depictions contribute concretely, I reveal, to premodern understandings of fictionality.

This dissertation argues that Chaucer’s early poems pluralize subjective experiences of time to challenge the singular, authoritative temporal models Chaucer inherited from antiquity, and to theorize about how the past serves the present. It emphasizes the distinctive deployment of anachronism and the philosophical intertext of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, as these formal features help Chaucer entangle past, present, and future dimensions in his narrative worlds to different ends, sometimes to highlight the virtues of remembering and forgetting, and at other moments, to solicit distrust of established historical and etiological texts.

Anachronism in Chaucer’s works confronts readers with the simultaneity of past and present temporalities. Through anachronism, Chaucer familiarizes his readers with history, eliciting their sympathy with characters whose visions of time are fragmented by virtue of their position within the text. However, anachronism also links his readers’ perspective to an omniscient eye by establishing a sense of temporal estrangement, which incites recognition of the human individual’s position in the scheme of time and encourages readers to make critical judgments about the uses of history. The fantastical realms of Chaucer’s dream visions appear to transcend the confines of everyday human experience, and the world of ancient Troy seems distant from medieval London, but the constant interplay between past and present in all challenges the conventional ways in which readers and characters “see time.”

Chaucer appropriates the notion and vocabulary of “seeing time”—wherein the literal ability to see determines the metaphorical insight into time—from the Boece, his Middle English adaptation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. This dissertation argues that the metaphorical discourse of sight permeates Chaucer’s poems, but beyond the religious parameters of Boethius’s Latin original, displacing its transcendent authority. This work bases consolation on the premise that the human subject can use distance to ethicize the way in which he sees time, transforming the fragmented vision of time as a collision of temporal moments into a divine-like perspective in which past, present, and future appear as a continuous whole. Chaucer’s poems show how the distant and idealized Boethian perspective helps to shape the past into an ethical dimension through which to understand the present and future. Chaucer’s Boethius exposes the fragmented nature of the human perspective, which prevents characters within the narrative from foreseeing the macrocosmic patterns of rise and fall of human experience, and which forces readers to confront their own limited vision of time. Nevertheless, these poems also highlight the universality and adaptability of the Boece, occasionally validating the temporally-entrenched perspective and proliferating constructions of time. This dissertation thus seeks not to trace Chaucer’s adoption of a single specific Boethian philosophical position, but rather to emphasize how multi-functional, plural, and disruptive Boethius is in Chaucer’s works, and to argue that reading these works through the Boethian lens pluralizes ways of understanding time.

Finally, this dissertation pays special attention to anachronism and Chaucer’s Boethian intertext, rather than to explicit content and allusion, in order to expose the profoundly political and social nature of Chaucer’s early works. Scholars have tended to look for evidence of Chaucer’s stake in political claims in his late oeuvre, the Canterbury Tales, given the obliqueness of direct historical references in his early works. However, anachronism and the Boethian intertext in the dream visions and Troilus and Criseyde reveal the pressure that Chaucer places on his contemporary readers to reflect upon their own position within the historical cycle. Particularly in Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer blurs the temporal distinction between past and present to reinforce the political recursiveness that haunts Ricardian London and invites identification with an idealized Boethian perspective that demands distance from the political chaos of Troy and London alike. Simultaneously, these techniques resist the moralizing tendencies of the panoptic perspective and advocate the idea of making virtue out of necessity. By emphasizing the dialectical movement between positions of nearness and farness, Chaucer highlights his complicated relationship to his historical place and time. He ultimately suggests that he settles on the value of a loving distance from his city and time, and on a viewing position protected from the tumult of a politically-charged urban London and yet never fully aloof from its situatedness and chaos.