Date of Graduation
12-2016
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
English
Advisor/Mentor
William Quinn
Committee Member
Lynda Coon
Second Committee Member
Joshua Smith
Keywords
Language, literature and linguistics, Social sciences, Anchoritism, Beowulf, Chaucer, exempla, Vives, Women
Abstract
This dissertation examines four English texts—Beowulf; Ancrene Wisse; Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales’ Man of Law’s Tale and Second Nun’s Tale; and Richard Hyrde’s English translation, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, of Juan Luis Vives’ De Institutione Feminae Christianae—in terms of their use of exempla related to women. These texts all find women good “to think with,” to use, from The Body and Society, Peter Brown’s appropriation of Levi-Strauss’s famous wordplay. The ways in which these Old English, Middle English, and modern English texts portray women’s lives and bodies as a gateway into thought about the Christian life are also compared with portrayals of the lives of female saints in hagiographic texts of late antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Citation
Pastoor, J. F. (2016). "Good to Think With": Women and Exempla in Four Medieval and Renaissance English Texts. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/1831
Included in
Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Medieval Studies Commons, Women's Studies Commons