Browse Items (72 total)

Islamic gardens, with their waterways and beds of plants and trees, are generally regarded as an earthly reflection of paradise. D. Fairchild Ruggles offers a new interpretation, contending that the palace garden was primarily an environmental,…

Awarded the 2009 J. B. Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies "In the course of my research," writes D. Fairchild Ruggles, "I devoured Arabic agricultural manuals from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries. I love…

The Donatio Constantini (ca. 8th CE) is one the most important forgeries in all the western world, arguably the most important in all of human history. Purportedly written in the fourth century, the document’s guarantee was left unquestioned for…

For over two millennia, Jewish and Christian theologians have grappled with the biblical notion that God punishes children for the “sins of [their] parents” (Exod. 20:5).1 This doctrine, found in the Decalogue, has posed an obvious question for many…

Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. Unlike Christianity and Islam, it is said, Judaism endorses a tradition of protest as first expressed in the biblical stories of Abraham, Job, and Jeremiah.…

After earning a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, Edwim Carter Rae began teaching at the University of Illinois in 1939. After a long stay abroad, he received his doctorate in 1943 on "Gothic Architecture in Ireland."

On August 22, 1945, Rae became…

Genealogies of Fiction is a study of gender, dynastic politics, and intertextuality in medieval and renaissance chivalric epic, focused on Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. Relying on the direct study of manuscripts and incunabula, this project…

The Arthurian legend reached all levels of society in medieval and Renaissance Italy, from princely courts, with their luxury books and frescoed palaces, to the merchant classes and popular audiences in the piazza, who enjoyed shorter retellings in…

Since the earliest reception of the Orlando Furioso, the episodes Ariosto set in and around the British Isles have fascinated readers and inspired iconic artistic depictions. This chapter explores these episodes, focusing on Ariosto’s manipulation of…

“Elmer Antonsen was Professor Emeritus of Germanic Languages and of Linguistics at the University of Illinois where he served sequentially as head of two departments, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Department of…

Through state-backed Catholicism, monolingualism, militarism, and dictatorship, Spain’s fascists earned their reputation for intolerance. It may therefore come as a surprise that 80,000 Moroccans fought at General Franco’s side in the 1930s. What…

“For Flom, the study of Old Norse and Old English was part of the same case. He was often preoccupied with details that few others cared about; e.g. In 1915 he wrote an article about how the letter Y was written in Norse documents. He compared solar…

Gertrude Schoepperle graduated from Wellesley in 1903, and in 1909 took the Ph.D. degree at Radcliffe. Her undergraduate life had brought a sharp awakening of mental powers, which ripened steadily as she swept on from university to university, from…

Career of 38 years at the University of Illinois. He came as an English instructor in 1916, which was interrupted by WWI, when he served as a second lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Forces. (1917-1919). He was appointed full Professor of…

Joseph Heatly Dulles Allen, Jr. began his career at the University of Illinois as an instructor of French in 1939. From 1943-1946, he taught French and Spanish at the Naval Academy during WWII. After the war, he became an associate professor of…

The pursuit of truth is universal; so is the demand for evidence. But the method or system whereby truth is recognized, obtained, and transmitted is not. It is important to distinguish “the will to truth” and “the truth claim”—the specific manners…

Spaces and their boundaries—geographical and otherwise—are socially constructed. Travel is a major means for the engendering of geographical spaces. Humans travel for a great variety of reasons, producing different types of spaces, and corresponding…

This volume asks whether there was a common structure, ideology, and image of the household in the medieval Christian West. In the period under examination, noble households often exercised great power in their own right, while even quite humble…

Focusing on language's political power, these essays discuss how representation -- through language norms, plays and spectacles, manipulations and adaptations of texts and images -- both constitutes and reflects a cultural milieu.

Leonard Bloomfield was a leading scholar of American structuralist linguistics. He was an instructor of German at the University of Illinois from 1910 to 1913 and then an Assistant Professor of Comparative Philology and German from 1913 to 1921.…