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Lorraine K. Stock

Associate Professor

Lorraine Kochanske Stock earned a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies at Cornell University in 1975 and has been teaching at the University of Houston since 1976. She was the recipient of the UH Teaching Excellence Award in 1980 and 1996 and the HFAC College "Masterteacher" Award in 1995.

She has served as the President of the South Eastern Medieval Association (SEMA) and is currently an elected member of the Modern Language Association's Executive Committee of the Division on Middle English Language and Literature Excluding Chaucer.  She frequently adjudicates the Jacob K. Javits Graduate fellowship competition for the U. S. Department of Education.

Stock specializes in teaching the interplay between the hilstory, visual images, and literature of the late Middle Ages, including medieval English and Continental writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Gawain-poet, Dante, Chrétien de Troyes, and others. Recently, she developed a new Humanities course, Film and Literature: The Real/Reel Middle Ages, which studies the translation of medieval literature into contemporary films about King Arthur, Robin Hood, Joan of Arc, William Wallace, and other medieval heroes and topics.

Stock's current interdisciplinary research interests combine the visual arts, architecture, costume history, historiography, cultural history, and literary texts of the Middle Ages and medievalism in later centuries. She frequently presents papers based upon her research at national and international conference venues, and has been invited to lecture at other universities, and before local groups such as Houston Early Music and the Houston Culinary Historians about such topics as: the medieval Wild People and their analogues; the medieval Female Other; the Irish Sheela na Gig; the Green Man; the representation of medieval royalty, especially Emperor Wenceslas IV in Bohemia, King Charles VI in France, and King Richard II in England; medieval women in text and film; and King Arthur and Robin Hood in text and film, medieval food, and medieval gardens. Her publications include articles on these and other topics.  She is completing a book titled: The Medieval Wild Man: Primitivism and Civilization in Medieval Culture to be published by Palgrave-Macmillan Press in "The New Middle Ages" Series. In assembly stage are other book projects on such topics as: the Wild Man and the late medieval "royal image"; the medieval female Other; Robin Hood in texts and visual culture.

Education

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Research Interests

Medieval Studies: Middle English, Old French, Chaucer, Arthurian Romance, Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Century British Literature; the medieval Wild People, the Green Man, the Sheela na Gig, the Female Other, medieval women writers, The Roman de Silence , medieval female warriors, Robin Hood and King Arthur in text and film.

Book in Progress

The Medieval Wild Man: Primitivism and Civilization in Medieval Culture. Under contract with Palgrave-Macmillan Press in their "New Middle Ages Series."

Working Synopsis: Cultural Primitivism registers the discontent of the civilized with civilization and proclaims that a simpler life, usually seen as a former or "golden" age, is desirable. My interdisciplinary project disputes the scholarly model posited by Richard Bernheimer in Wild Men in the Middle Ages, which traces the emergence of the competing cultural concepts of "civility" and "primitivism" in Western Europe to a turning point in the late 14c. Using the evidence of literary texts and visual images from 12c-16c, I trace the trajectory of the appearance of and developing medieval attitudes toward the mythic "Wild People"—an example of the "Monstrous Races," an analogue of the giant, and a subspecies categorized somewhere between human and beast—whose "wildness" contributed an antithesis necessary for the West's developing notion of "civilization." Rather than endorse the evolutionary "progress" from the negative homme sauvage to the positive "noble savage" argued by Bernheimer and his followers, I demonstrate instead Europe's continuous ambivalence about the binary of "nature" versus "culture," as expressed in their love/hate relationship with the Wild Man.

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Selected Publications

Articles

Chapters

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Media Appearances

Television

She was featured as a scholarly expert on Arthurian literature and films, in the documentary television program, History VS. Hollywood: King Arthur, evaluating the 2004 film King Arthur (prod. Jerry Bruckheimer; dir. Antoine Fuqua) for its fidelity to the historical and legendary Arthurian tradition and reflection of the historical Middle Ages. The hour-long program was broadcast on The History Channel, a division of A&E Television, on July 6, and July 10, 2004, then repeated on Dec. 13, 2004.

She was featured as an expert on the cultural contexts of the Crusades for the documentary television program, History VS. Hollywood: Kingdom of Heaven, evaluating the 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven (dir.Ridley Scott) for its accuracy about the Third Crusade and its general reflection of the historical Middle Ages. The hour-long program was broadcast on The History Channel, a division of A&E Television, on May 6, 2005 and is included as "Extras" in the commercial DVD of Kingdom of Heaven.

Radio

She was one of 5 Robin Hood scholars whose remarks were included by journalist Seth Feldman in his one-hour radio documentary titled Hunting for Robin Hood, which aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Company's weekly series, Ideas, on October 8, 2001. For the program, Feldman (along with producer Sara Wolch) was awarded the New York Festivals Gold World Medal for Radio Programming. The New York Festivals annually recognizes excellence in communications media that "touch the hearts and minds of readers, listeners and viewers worldwide."

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Teaching

Undergraduate Course

Graduate Seminars

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Affiliations

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