Though people are beginning to analyze the internet as an active social force, a seemingly insurmountable problem permeates all criticisms of the world wide web: how do we begin to frame the Internet as a subject of inquiry when its role in our lives is constantly shifting, continually slipping from definition, yet undeniably reconstructing a new human condition? I believe an answer may lie in placing the Internet within the context of the Faust Myth \u2014 a legend that has repeatedly been used to explore humanity's obsession with power. For my undergraduate honors thesis, I wrote and performed an adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in which I frame the Internet as a modern Faustian contract, and advocate a new approach to the use of technology.

The following is a fantasy twist on the Christian Bible, set before the time of Adam of Eve. The plot follows the lives of the first humans before Adam and Eve, the Father's first attempt at creating humanity. Additionally, it follows the first generation of archangels on an adventure into the abyss. The work draws on theological, and mythological ideas including Greek mythology, Hasidic legend, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and even Dungeons and Dragons.

Warriors, as all members of society in medieval Scandinavia, were bound by a course of rules that were imposed on them both culturally and by governing entities. In many cases, warriors were able to challenge these prescribed margins that held them in their place with limited success. Many warriors used their strength, wealth or powerful connections to exploit the judicial system and the inconsistent enforcement of legal proceedings. However, most of the warriors, who challenged these societal boundaries were checked either by a local ruler or by the people themselves who were often imposed upon or feuded with. This paper aims to look at what allowed warriors to push the margins in the Icelandic sagas, Hrólfs Saga Kraka ok Kappa Hans, Fóstbræðra Saga, and Egils Saga. It also looks at how this corresponds to the laws outlined in the Icelandic Grágás and the Norwegian Frostathing and Gulathing laws. While the law code postdates the settings in many of the sagas, they are more likely to apply.
This paper aims to give a greater understanding of how these warriors and overbearing men interact with the boundaries pressed upon them by medieval Scandinavian society and how these warriors made their place in a warrior culture. Especially in Iceland, where warriors increasingly fell out of place with Icelandic society, they struggled to fit themselves within the bounds of a society that did not have need of a standing army, but retained the warrior culture that is commonly seen in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark at this time.

This paper argues that the Anglo-Saxons were runic-literate. Although there is scant runic evidence, conclusions are based largely upon an initial learning paradigm (although it is unclear what this paradigm might have been), and the subsequent transmission of runic knowledge orally. Runic evidence includes Cynewulf's poem, the Old English Rune Poem, the Falstone Text, the Coffin of St. Cuthbert, and the Franks Casket. Missionary work and the syncretic approach of the Church is also examined in order to shed light on runic literacy, as well as how a reformation of the futhorc (if it did occur) impacted runic literacy. The state of runic knowledge across the entire Anglo-Saxon period is also considered, since there was, by no means, an overwhelming runic literacy for the entire 500 years under examination. Nevertheless, there is evidence of a consistent knowledge of the runes, which precludes any possibility that runic knowledge was completely lost during this period. The Ruthwell Cross is examined, since it raises an argument against a widespread runic literacy. With all of this evidence in one place, and in no particular order, we can see that it was very probable that the Anglo-Saxons, lay and elite alike, were runic-literate.

As a historical event and a much-loved subject of ancient literature, the Trojan War gave birth to many well-known stories, such as The Iliad, which continue to be enjoyed today. Among these is the lesser known work of Geoffrey Chaucer, titled Troilus and Criseyde. It follows the story of Prince Troilus, youngest son of King Priam and a character who is not seen in literature as often as his brothers Hector and Paris. In the 10th year of the Trojan War, Troilus meets the main protagonist, Criseyde, and falls madly in love. Criseyde herself is not in a position to love, but throughout the pages finds herself warming to the prince's favor. Through a beautifully crafted story, Chaucer evokes themes such as loyalty, selfishness, history, physical love versus spiritual love, and the role of women in society. Although it is a lesser known work of Chaucer's, in his day, Troilus and Criseyde was considered his masterpiece. My spring 2016 creative project is a novel retelling of this story entitled In Loving Criseyda. Following the plot of Chaucer's original, In Loving Criseyda is told from the perspective of an additional character: Criseyda's serving maid, Nadia. Nadia serves as the narrator and follows the plot points of the original story, offering her unique perspective on the events. Although Criseyda and Nadia come from opposite ends of society, the two find similarities in their situation and soon become friends. In befriending Criseyda, Nadia's world opens up as she begins to see the world in a new way. The novel becomes a coming of age story for Nadia in the time of the Trojan War, and her journey through love and loss.

“The Moral Sense of Touch: Teaching Tactile Values in Late Medieval England” investigates the intersections of popular science and religious education in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the project draws together a range of textual artifacts, from scientific manuals to private prayerbooks, to reconstruct the vast network of touch supporting the late medieval moral syllabus. I argue that new scientific understandings of the five senses, and specifically the sense of touch, had a great impact on the processes, procedures, and parlances of vernacular religious instruction in late medieval England. The study is organized around a set of object lessons that realize the materiality of devotional reading practices. Over the course of investigation, I explore how the tactile values reinforcing medieval conceptions of pleasure and pain were cultivated to educate and, in effect, socialize popular reading audiences. Writing techniques and technologies—literary forms, manuscript designs, illustration programs—shaped the reception and user-experience of devotional texts. Focusing on the cultural life of the sense of touch, “The Moral Sense of Touch” provides a new context for a sense based study of historical literatures, one that recovers the centrality of touch in cognitive, aesthetic, and moral discourses.

This study examines the ways in which translators writing in two contemporary medieval languages, Old Norse-Icelandic and Middle English, approached the complicated doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary. At its core this project is dedicated to understanding the spread and development of an idea in two contemporary vernacular cultures and focuses on the transmission of that idea from the debates of Latin clerical culture into Middle English and Old Norse-Icelandic literature written for an increasingly varied audience made up of monastics, secular clergy, and the laity. The project argues that Middle English and Old-Norse Icelandic writing about the bodily Assumption of Mary challenges misconceptions that vernacular translations and compositions concerned with Marian doctrine represent the popular concerns of the laity as opposed to the academic language, or high Mariology, of the clergy.

This study looks at Geoffrey Chaucer's use of the color green as it appears in regards to the settings and antagonists of three of the Canterbury Tales: the Wife of Bath's Tale, the Friar's Tale, and the Merchant's Tale. Following the allegorical approach, it argues that the color green in these tales is symbolic of Fortune, modeled upon Boethian philosophy and the allegory of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's thirteenth century French poem, The Romance of the Rose. It suggests, furthermore, that Fortune is a potential overarching theme of the Canterbury Tales, and that the tales, in turn, should be read as a cohesive unit.

This dissertation focuses on the connections between childbirth and spirituality in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. It argues that scholastic interest in conception and procreation led to a proliferation of texts mentioning obstetrics and gynecology, and that this attention to women's medicine and birth spread from the universities to the laity. This dissertation contends that there is interdependence between spiritual and physical health in late medieval English religious culture, correlated with and perhaps caused by an increasing fascination with materialism and women's bodies in religious practices and rhetoric. The first chapter provides an analysis of birth in medical and pastoral texts. Pastoral works were heavily influenced by the ecclesiastical emphasis on baptism, as well as by scholastic medicine's simultaneous disdain for and reluctant integration of folk medicine. The second chapter examines birth descriptions in narratives of saints' miracles and collections of exempla; these representations of childbirth were used in religious rhetoric to teach, motivate, and dissuade audiences. The third chapter turns to the cycle play representations of the nativity as depicting the mysteries of human generation and divine incarnation for public consumption. The fourth chapter analyzes the abstract uses of childbirth in visionary and other religious texts, especially in descriptions of spiritual rebirth and the development of vice and virtue in individuals or institutions. By identifying their roles as analogous with the roles of midwives, visionaries authorized themselves as spiritual caretakers, vital for communal health and necessary for collective spiritual growth. These chapters outline a trajectory of increasing male access to the birthing chamber through textual descriptions and prescriptions about birth and midwifery. At the same time, religious texts acknowledged, sought to regulate, and sometimes even utilized the potential authority of mothers and midwives as physical and spiritual caretakers.

Jason Bryant Queering Home: Domestic Space and Sexuality in Postmodern American Fiction This dissertation explores narratives of homosexuals and trans men and women occupying domestic spaces, discerning the ways that “home” shapes understandings about sexuality and examining the ways that understandings of sexuality shape how domestic spaces are occupied. Queer artists and intellectuals have deconstructed the legacy of normativity that clings to the metaphor of the domestic realm. Queering Home argues that writers have used the discursive concept of home to cultivate sociopolitical communities (Audre Lorde, Zami) while also insisting upon material spaces of shelter and comfort for individuals queered by gender performance, sexual orientation, and resultant adverse economic conditions (Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues). Two novels, Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Mike Albo's Hornito, challenge the coming-of-age tradition of narrating childhood/adolescence through the redeeming prism of the confident, queer adult; in particular, these novels trouble the problematic notion of domesticated maturation as a heteronormative condition that continues to cling to much contemporary American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics. The third chapter examines Marilyn Hacker's sonnet collection, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons in correspondence with Carl Phillips's collection, Cortège, as they queer the concept of domestic bliss, the goal toward which romantic partners are “supposed” to be committed. Hacker and Phillips revise the same-sex couple as a processing of gay ways of life, which resists positing normative, married futures for lesbians and homosexuals. Finally, the study investigates Terrence McNally's play, Lips Together, Teeth Apart and a series of still life paintings by Joey Terrill for their depiction of narratives of domestic spaces (pools, open-concept design, medicine cabinets), which condition the subjectification and desubjectification of gay male sexuality and domesticity in the era of HIV/AIDS. Throughout, this dissertation draws energy by challenging the “given” and “inevitable” heteronorms that condition domesticity, sexuality, and space, demonstrating how late twentieth century writers and artists have queered the home.