English (Medieval Studies)

In the late medieval England, the long futile wars, famine and death tolls caused by the plagues highlighted the value of laboring bodies. Attitudes to labor changed, especially labor for food production. The attitude of the clergy, however, was paradoxical towards labor. According to the Christian doctrine and ethics, work was a virtue, but, practically speakin, in the feudal system of the medieval period, manual work was allotted to the peasants. To cope with this ideological flaw, the clergy triumphed in their (non-productive) clerical labor and services, meditative and ascetic life. Failure in achieving these ideals is depicted and satirized in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, by the pilgrim-Chaucer’s highlighting the significance of both food and foodmakers.

The followmg paper reports on the results of 'the investigation into some aspects of the usage of the Old English preverbal ge- from the point of view of the theory of language changes as strengthenings or weakenings. The investigation served as 'the basis for the author's Ph. D. dissertation (1990).

In this text I want to find out what Billing means in names of places in England. I will trace these names I could find and relate these places to possible central sites in the tribal settlements in Pre - Roman Conquest England. It is thought that these sites relate to “Bill” as sword and hence Billing as a swordsmen or warriors. There are references to Billing in Hávamál and Völuspá that indicate that the meaning of the word is related to men with power and substance. Other places in Scandinavia and Northern Europe are also mentioned without research further the relation to other sites.

This paper sets out the economic change experienced by England in Chaucer's lifetime and discusses the social and ideological conflict that such change provoked. It then asks how Chaucer's poetry engaged with such conflict and looks at three modern critical approaches to Chaucer's work: Chaucer as conservative, as radical and as open-ended. Using the General Prologue and the Parson's Tale, the paper concludes that Chaucer's poetry tends towards a more conservative outlook than many modern critics would like to accept.

This paper focuses on the development of this urban fortification over the late medieval period. It becomes one of the primary defenses of the town of Southampton during this time. It examines how the fortification was adapted for artillery  in the transitional period between non-gunpowder artillery to increasing use of gunpowder artillery and how this was part of a well establish tradition by this point.

Eduardo I de lnglaterra ( 1239- 1307) fue uno de los reyes más eficaces de su tiempo. Su política se basó
en el fortalecimiento de la monarquía frente a los barones y en la expansión territorial sobre Gales y Escocia. Como cruzado, supo ver la necesidad de contar con el
poder de los mongoles frente a los mamelucos de Egipto.

A corpus-based study of the prefix ge- in Old and Middle English, with an interpretation of ge- as a linguistic meme, a "linguistic replicator". Includes a comprehensive account of the English and German literature (with some Russian and Japanese sources) existing literature of ge- prior to 2001.

The Sea
Defined by Isidore of Seville as the “general gathering of waters”, the term “sea” (“mare”, “pelagius”, “aquae”) was mainly applied to the following known bodies of water: the Mediterranean, the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Red Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean, which constituted the only known part of the imagined world-encircling ocean. Other imagined seas were also thought to exist, such as the Libersee (“mare coagulatum”) which marks the northernmost boundary of the North Sea. Besides its exploitation for purposes of commerce, fishing, travel, and warfare (link: seafaring), the sea received considerable attention in the culture and literature of the Middle Ages. Although symbolic uses of the sea are a common feature of medieval art (Jonah and the Whale, the Flood, St Nicholas), it is the literature of the period that has generated the most inventive uses of sea motives.