Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program

This thesis offers an Aristotelian reading of <em>Coriolanus, </em>with the goal of assessing the viability of individual self-sufficiency.<em></em> As political and moral treatises, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Politics are valuable intertexts through which Shakespeare's more imaginative work may be analyzed...

The late antique and early medieval period is typically thought of as a time of change. In slavery studies, Marxist historiography argues that the period marks the shift from the "slave" to the "feudal" mode of production, and its detractors...

My thesis investigates two versions of a popular literary legend of the Middle Ages, Ami and Amile, in the context of the growing clerical intolerance for homoeroticism (“sodomy”) in the twelfth century and afterward. The versions of Ami and Amile...