Summer Research Awards 2005

Nell Champoux, 05
Department of Religion

In the prologue to the Liber Visionum, a magical and visionary text composed by the French monk, John of Morigny (active 1304-1323), sculptures of the Virgin Mary provide a means by which he could interact with the divine.  These statues, in effect, elevated John, both by the teachings he received through the many manifestations of Mary related to these statues and through the bare fact of his personal contact with the mother of God.  In architecture –  a key element through which John’s visions were mediated –  John found, not so much a path to elevate himself towards the divine, but rather a means by which his own life could be understood in terms of divine patterns and symbolism. I have already completed some work on John’s relation to images and architecture.  By giving a complete account of John’s magical practices and the magical milieu from which he emerged, my work this summer will provide a more nuanced context in which to frame my interpretations of John’s relation to images.

Breaking Down Walls: Mental Imaging and the Imagination in Medieval Monasticism  
Benedictine monasticism is characterized by its three-fold vow of obedience, stability, and fidelity to monastic life. The vow of stability often confined the monks to the monastery, a cloistered area secluded from worldly indulgences. But increasingly in the medieval period, devotion took place in sites at a great remove from the insular location of the monastery. To experience the religiosity of this outside world medieval monks had to embark on imagined voyages. Imagined pilgrimage – one of the ways a monk could breach the confines of the monastery – began through the performative act of reading. I see Matthew Paris’ Chronica majora and John of Morigny’s Liber visionum as providing two examples of thirteenth and fourteenth-century imagined pilgrimage. Both texts trigger mental imaging, and thus the reader’s ability to visually recreate verbal descriptions in the imaginative space of their mind. The borderless mind provided the ideal space for monks to participate in the rich experience of pilgrimage.  By placing these texts within the larger context of monasticism, memory, and the visual monuments of pilgrimage, I plan to increase our understanding of how medieval devotional practices took visual form.

I am investigating the morphology of jaw protrusion in a representative minnow (Cyprinidae) the Creek Chub, Semotilus atromaculatus.  I will analyze the kinematics of the strike by using a high-speed video camera to record feeding events for each of several fish.  The recordings will be broken down frame-by-frame and reference points will be assigned to key structures in the cranium and jaw.  These points will be used in statistical tests to determine the peculiarities of strikes in these fishes.  Comparison to other previously studied jaw protrusion events will give key insight into the evolution of this protrusible jaw in a wide range of Teleost fish.

Christine de Pizan (1364-1431) wrote about politics, morals, philosophy and poetry in early-modern France.  She is best known, however, her proto-feminist tracts, in which she developed, for the first time in the West, a feminist consciousness.  She was aware of the misogyny in contemporary works such as the Roman de la Rose, an “encyclopedic satire” about women.  While intellectuals tended to regard woman in the realm of the abstract, Christine saw that misogyny had an answer in concrete reality.  She analyzed her culture’s understanding of sex and used it to her advantage, creating a feminist consciousness.  La Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc represents Christine’s mature vision of feminism as developed early in her career.  Due to her personal struggle in society after the death of her husband and to her frustration with such misogyny as found in the Roman de la Rose, Christine engaged in the querelle de la rose where she debated the nature of woman in a five year epistolary exchange amongst several leading Parisian intellectuals.  Her principal proto-feminist is the Book of the City of Ladies, a universal history of women that uses such misogynist sources as the Bible and Boccaccio’s Decameron to prove misogynist stereotypes wrong.  She also wrote a manner’s guide for women, The Treasury of the City of Ladies, which maintains that women would not have to try to improve their place in society if men gave them the credit they deserve.  After writing the Treasury, she turned to other topics.  In 1429, not having written specifically on women for twenty years and having been in retirement for ten, she wrote the Ditié of Jehanne d’Arc, the only vernacular biography written about her during her lifetime.  It was an illustration of the feminist principles she developed early in her career.  The first author to seriously dispute the Western cultural view of woman, she created the essence of a feminist consciousness that would be carried through the early modern period and thus used to form the root of modern feminism.

The purpose of this study is to determine the effects of sexual conditioning with an ecologically relevant auditory stimulus on the fertility rates of female Japanese quail coturnix coturnix japonica.  A series of pilot studies will be run in order to obtain a quality recording of the male Japanese quail’s crow, to record the unconditioned responses of other quail, both male and female to the pre-recorded male crow, and to determine a method of hormonally inhibiting the male quail from crowing without inhibiting copulation. 

Of all the misused words in the English language, the word “mad” may top the list. Used for centuries and across cultures as a modifier of actions and people, this word has no consistent definition; is a madman mentally ill or is he a visionary who sees reality from a different perspective? When used to describe an overwhelming rage, is a madman a normally composed individual placed in an extreme situation? In the varied nature of the term ‘madness’ is the constant factor anger, illness, or ignorant misidentification of something not understood? These are important distinctions that are given even more weight when one considers the plethora of historical figures condemned as ‘mad’. Few ‘madmen’ stand out more than the early Julio-Claudian emperors and the characters surrounding their spectacular reigns. In examining the context of these emperors and their actions, including the unusually powerful and ambitious women of the time, through primary and secondary sources, I hope to be able to, if not pinpoint an essential element of madness, at least ascertain the context(s) in which the term is applied.

Verbesina alata has been classified as a medicinal herb due to its therapeutic properties. This investigation explores its bioactive (antibiotic) properties, as well as synergistic potential as a result of combining its extracts with known antibiotics in certain ratios. It focuses on the extraction processes carried out to prepare the extracts for bioactivity/synergy testing and includes results obtained upon completion of the tests.

Topics discussed will include the ideas of racial purity, national identity, managing white supremacy in Virginia, and a study of Jim Crow before the Great Depression. I will research the UVA archives for manuscripts from 1905-1922. I will also analyze his Sonatas for form, harmony, and motivic development. Earlier, his Suites used Indian and African elements such as ragtime or a blues scale. However, in the Twenties, he became outspokenly critical of the use of African American or Indian elements in American music, and he even criticized his own early works. He turned instead to Appalachian Folk Music, which in his view was a better representation of mainstream America. Due to the ideas of racial purity and race relations after World War I, John Powell's opinions were so extreme that his music suffered. The analyses of his Sonatas and the ideas discussed above will be combined in an attempt to show that the effects of white extremist views limited Powell's later compositions.