Arts (Faculty of)

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Now showing 1 - 9 of 9

Industrial Waste Management and Urban Environments in Medieval England, 1300 - 1600
(University of Waterloo, 2021-09-20) Kurian, Erin; Bednarski, Steven
This paper demonstrates how key industries impacted urban environments in late medieval England from 1300-1600CE through an examination of city laws, ordinances, and rulings. It focuses on the municipalities of Bristol, Coventry, Leicester, London, Northampton, and York, all of which had a considerable urban population in this time and sufficient primary sources to conduct this study. This paper contributes to the historiography by proposing a middle ground between previous economic and public health histories on urban industries. Though English municipalities understood and acted to mitigate the impact of industrial contaminants and resource depletion on people and urban spaces, they often did not have the ability to do so. Authorities pursued trades which produced the most waste and tried to exercise regulatory controls over how and where tradesmen operated, how artisans could dispose of waste, who could buy industrial by-products, and where a trade took place. A consideration of butchery, fishers and fishmongers, tanners and leather workers, and brewers reveals a struggle between artisans and authorities and artisans and themselves in pursuing a hospitable environment. Artisans and authorities had both societal and commercial and societal interests. Artisans also had their reputation to uphold as the informal market threatened their business. Despite a strong pull towards clean spaces, artisans often created waste in pursuit of profit, easier working conditions, and little ability to dispose of necessary by-products in any other way. These industries are inherently resource intensive and wasteful and their position in cities multiplied these unwanted consequences of industry.
Intelligentia Spiritualis: Platonism, the Latin Polemical Tradition, and the Renaissance Approach to the Prophetic Sense of History
(University of Waterloo, 2022-07-25) Attrell, Daniel; Bednarski, Steven; Porreca, David
This study sheds light on key figures and trends in the medieval Latin West that influenced the intellectual lives of the humanist theologians Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), specifically regarding their respective visions of world history, which they understood primarily through the lens of biblical prophecy and the Greco-Roman classics. It highlights continuities over changes from the medieval to the Renaissance period so as to demonstrate how a longstanding culture of interreligious theological and philosophical disputation between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, particularly among converts, served as a vehicle for the exchange (and appropriation) of knowledge across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Among the exchanged and appropriated ideas were not only insights into the history of the world – its beginning, middle, and end – but also deeply intertwined mystical concepts, some of Late Antique Pythagorean and Platonic provenance, and some derived from more recent innovation, such as those derived from medieval Jewish Kabbalah, especially regarding the correct understanding of divine names (what is herein called ‘esoteric philology’). During the Renaissance, humanist theologians reinterpreted, recombined, and redeployed these concepts in various ways to serve their own particular pro-Christian polemical ends. This study, therefore, focuses on the rise, development, and embattlement of a distinctly Latin anti-Jewish polemical tradition, and attempts to demonstrate how the pro-spiritual and anti-carnal attitudes present in Ficino and Pico’s theological works cannot be fully understood without locating them within the wider context of this longstanding culture of interreligious disputation.
Letters from the Boiler House: Conflict and Communication in a Second World War Canadian Internment Camp
(University of Waterloo, 2023-10-30) Wagenaar, Gillian; Bednarski, Steven
In March of 1941, two members of the Veterans Guard of Canada were court martialled for conduct “to the prejudice of good order and Military Discipline.” Their crime: passing letters, “illicit correspondence,” between a small group of “enemy alien” internees, known as the Musketeers, in an internment camp in rural Quebec, and a teenage girl named Winkie in Montreal. The case of Winkie Henson and the Musketeers shows the Canadian internment camp during the Second World War to be a complex, often liminal, space of connection and conflict. It illuminates the tension inherent between official regulation and human action, pitting the needs of civilians, Canadian or otherwise, against governing powers. It highlights the role of correspondence in a pre-internet world and shows how relationships could begin and end by pen and paper. In later reflections and representations of the case, it also shows the selective nature of memory and how our relationship with the past is shaped by both time and emotion. Most importantly, the story of illicit correspondence presents the internment camp and, more widely, the Canadian home front, as a space in which strict social boundaries became fluid and malleable in a wartime context, to both the benefit and cost of young romantic prospects, hopeful fathers, social elites, and supposed “enemy aliens.” In this, the case, told as a microhistory, adds further complexity to the view of Canadian internment camps as simultaneous spaces of oppression and opportunity for those within and beyond their barbed wire bounds.
Manorial Regulation and Negotiation in a Late Medieval Environment: Land and Community at Herstmonceux, 1308-1440
(University of Waterloo, 2021-12-17) Moore, Andrew; Bednarski, Steven
This dissertation examines the role that environment played in the negotiation of rights and responsibilities on a fundamental socioeconomic institution of rural communities in late medieval England — the manor. It analyzes all of the extant documentation generated by the manor, especially a series of fourteenth-century court rolls, and uses it as a lens through which to observe this process. What emerges is a picture of continuous negotiation of power that affected, and was affected by, the environment. Some effects of this process included the creation of new bureaucracies, the increasing standardization of procedure and documentation, and regulations promoting intensive, rather than extensive, land use. This occurred during a period of significant environmental crises, including marshland flooding, disease, and the increasingly unsustainable clearing of woodlands. The manor of Herstmonceux is an especially useful case study for an analysis of the relationship between communities and their environment, as it administered a broad landscape that straddled distinctly different environments, from lowland marshes to upland woods. Prescriptive, often written, initiatives from the seigneurial administration conflicted with custom, much of it oral, and local memory. In this way, the manor court acted as a mechanism of enforcement for the seigneurial administration. Geography also played a crucial role in Herstmonceux manor’s imposition of authority in its periphery. Though much of the demesne utilized lower elevations and wetlands near the manor house, the tenants lived in clustered communities dispersed widely throughout an upland, wooded region. In practice, the court wielded little influence on tenant behaviour over great distances, and especially in dense woodlands, and acted mostly as a source of record-keeping and revenue generation. People grazed their animals widely and trespassed on the demesne frequently, for which the court generally levied a minor access fee, and utilized wood for many purposes, though the sheer lack of prosecutions indicate a lack of enforcement in the manor’s distant woodlands. In contrast, the lord wielded greater control over access to nearby marshland, wherein much of his demesne was located. This influence only grew as royal bureaucracies imposed standardized, written procedures to ameliorate flooding; unsurprisingly, tenants exerted increasingly less autonomy in matters of water management.
The Medical Practice and Licencing of Women in the Late Medieval Kingdom of Naples
(University of Waterloo, 2020-10-21) Faqiri, Zohra; Bednarski, Steven
This paper analyzes the medical licences of women from the Angevin Kingdom of Naples between the late thirteenth to early fifteenth century. While the Kingdom of Naples was home to the first known medical regulatory measures and to an extensive amount of surviving medical licenses, little else is known about the medical profession and practices within Naples and even less of women’s practices. This paper makes up for the deficit by examining Neapolitan women’s medical practice and licences against the late medieval medical practice and regulatory measures of the wider western European world. The examination of the wider social context of late medieval medicine and medical regulation finds that the marginalization of women as legitimate and legal members of the medical profession was a byproduct of larger tensions that were introduced during the professionalization of healthcare. Primarily, cases of conflict occurred between academic practitioners who preferred to maintain the literate, text-based medical standards against empirics and other healers, who found support in local and royal authorities, as well as their communities. Often, the conflict boiled down to providing available and accessible medical care. Although this demand for practitioners ensured the continued survival of women’s medical practice, despite the growing rhetoric and legislation against it, women rarely reached the same degree of professional success as their male counterparts. As the comparison against the medical practices of Jews and clerics illuminates, the gendered differences in literacy played a strong role in hindering women’s acceptance within the medical profession, rather than any prejudices. The additional analysis of the social concept of gender against education, upbringing, economics, professional biases, cultural norms, and authoritative power, also reveals how pervasive gender was in influencing the types of medical licences and practices that state allowed Neapolitan women to have.
Natural Disasters and the Crusades: Framing Earthquakes in Historical Narratives, 1095-1170
(University of Waterloo, 2017-12-07) Casta, Stephen; Bednarski, Steven
This thesis explores perceptions of earthquake causality in the accounts of twelfth-century Syria and the ways that medieval views of natural disasters influenced historical writing. Examining the perceived causes, effects, and significance of cataclysmic seismic events provides insight into shared elements of faith perspectives, the role of nature in medieval worldviews, and how chroniclers framed accounts of natural disasters to reflect their religious and political prejudices. Medieval writers believed that natural phenomena were indicative of important world events and imbued with spiritual significance. Chroniclers perceived earthquakes as omens of future disaster or the apocalypse, and associated them with a need for repentance due to their belief that seismic disasters were divine punishment for moral failings. In addition, Christian and Muslim sources utilized these perceptions on divine causality to criticize the failings of political leaders and rival religious communities. These patterns of portrayal possess great significance in the context of the major conflicts and cultural convergences in the twelfth-century Near East. In addition to the theological perspectives and political criticism present in the sources, terrestrial and astrological explanations for earthquakes were prevalent in the twelfth century and often used to complement, not disprove, perceptions of divine causation. Apocalyptic sentiment and crusading spirituality also influenced portrayals of earthquakes, particularly in the Christian sources. These intellectual patterns are evident in earthquake accounts from the period irrespective of religious and cultural differences, but were firmly grounded in the political realities of the Levant during the Crusades. The sources’ methods of portraying seismic disasters, therefore, provide important insight into the worldviews of medieval chroniclers and the broad effects of earthquakes amidst the complex dynamics of twelfth-century Syria.
The Transformation of a Medieval Sussex Vineyard into a Deer Park, a Case Study: The Arundel "Little Park" 1150-1400
(University of Waterloo, 2021-09-24) Gergal, Jacqueline; Bednarski, Steven
This thesis examines medieval deer parks in West Sussex from 1150-1400 with a thorough case study of Arundel’s “Little Park”. This paper sheds light on the common medieval English practice of imparking to understand its environmental implications, including shifts in landscape management and deforestation, and cultural ideals that shaped medieval hunting practices. As a part of south-east England, West Sussex in the Middle Ages possessed rich and fertile agricultural land, large areas of woodland, and a thriving human population. Located in a prosperous coastal region, the Arundel estate was important because of its proximity to the shores of the continent and its favorable climate. “Little Park,” a former vineyard turned deer park, allows for an investigation into medieval people’s responses to changing climates, social attitudes around agricultural and forestry practices, and provides a unique perspective into the environmental history of medieval Sussex. With the onset of the Little Ice Age around 1300, grapes became difficult to cultivate in England, resulting in changes to landscape management practices. In England, between the mid-twelfth and fifteenth centuries, wealthy landowners embarked upon systematic enclosures of land through a series of imparkments. Due to a cooling and more unpredictable climate, the managers of the Arundel estate decided to convert Little Park into a deer park in 1301. A common trend in the fourteenth century, agricultural land was converted into deer parks and pastoral farmland at an increased rate in comparison to previous centuries since these types of land uses became more profitable and culturally more significant. This thesis approaches the Arundel Little Park from a vantage point of environmental change and transformation to explain the fluid nature of medieval landscapes and how these spaces were frequently modified to remain profitable when faced with variations in weather, climate, and socioeconomic wealth.
The Troubled Life and Loves of Lady Anne Lennard: Illegitimacy, sexuality, and mistressdom at the court of Charles II, 1690-1720
(University of Waterloo, 2016-05-20) MacAlpine, Rebecca; Bednarski, Steven
Despite her infamy, the life of Lady Anne Lennard, formally styled the Countess of Sussex, has never received an in-depth examination. As the natural daughter of King Charles II of England born via his mistress Barbara Palmer, formally styled the Duchess of Cleveland, Lady Anne provides an avenue to examine illegitimate children, paternity, sexuality, marriage, dowry, economic security, and mistresses in early modern England. Through the analysis of three trials, filed in the Chancery court and the House of Lords, between 1690 and 1720, this thesis demonstrates that despite the possession, practice and performance of illicit sexual behaviours by Barbara Palmer her status as an elite woman allowed her to maintain access to material and symbolic capital, and manufacture the same resources for her daughter, Lady Anne. This highlights that despite previous notions of the rigidity of female reputation in the early modern period, women in the upper echelons of society maintained their social agency in instances where they contravened social convention.
Wetland Reclamation in England: Medieval Risk Culture and the 1396 Commission of Sewers for Pevensey Levels
(University of Waterloo, 2017-10-24) Hartmann, Stephanie; Bednarski, Steven
This paper examines wetland reclamation in England between the eighth and sixteenth centuries, with a special focus on the Pevensey Levels during the fourteenth century. Coastal marsh communities had access to significant raw materials and resources as well as increased agricultural productivity on sections of reclaimed land. This paper will examine medieval and Early Modern perceptions of wetland environments over time and evaluate scholarly theories of wetland marginality. Medieval populations could not effectively access the benefits wetlands provided without great exposure to risk factors, including flooding. Medieval coastal marsh communities in England developed a culture heavily influenced by constant exposure to risk that demonstrated high levels of cooperation, resilience, and ingenuity. The medieval risk culture represented in English marshes also produced risk sensitivity that could inform decisions regarding the probable success of reclamation efforts and their potential profitability. The 1396 Commission of Sewers for the Pevensey Levels, East Sussex demonstrates the negligence of landowners, whose economic interests relied upon successful wetland reclamation and flood defences. This legal case, combined with national and local economic analyses and an investigation into the role of climate change and increased storm activity along the English coast during the fourteenth century, will facilitate a discussion relating to negligence within medieval wetland risk cultures during a period of increased risk.

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