By showing how the heteroglot and tentative nature of medieval normative worlds furnishes a salutary alternative to contemporary epistemologies of the globe, this dissertation contributes to critical theory that deconstructs the globe as a modern concept defined as a transparent space of circulation and exchange. While studies of the global Middle Ages have enormously enhanced our understanding of the period as defined by sophisticated cross-cultural connectivity rather than fragmentation and backwardness, this scholarship as yet has not engaged deeply with postmodern critical theory of the world and globalization. With reference to the theory of normative worlds – that is, attempts to imagine the world otherwise than it is, as it ought to be – this dissertation argues that medieval pacifism is a form of worldliness that enables medieval literature to reimagine the horizons of political possibility in resistance to such forces as imperialism, crusade, and civil and international warfare. I begin with Late Antique hagiographies and indicate their legacy for medieval Christian writers to show how a transnational pacifism developed and spread across the Mediterranean and beyond, efflorescing in vernacular English critique of the Hundred Years’ War during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I underscore the existence of transnational interactions and imaginaries geared toward peacemaking prior to the rise of modern, European nation-states, in order to interrogate white nationalist, racist, imperialist, and Islamophobic assertions of ethnic or religious purity and of the inevitability of conflict between cultures in contact.

Creator

• Pentz, Stephanie Maria

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-a1jn-rh11

Subject

• Medieval literature

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:14945
• etdadmin_upload_704848

Keyword

• World
• Transnational
• Pacifism
• Literature
• Medieval

Date created

• 2019-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright