Date

9-25-2025

Department

College of Arts and Sciences

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)

Chair

Martin Scott Catino

Keywords

Parallel Lives, Procedural Cognition Framework, Comparative Analysis, Learning Models, Bloom's Taxonomy, Military History, Intellectual History, Second Punic War, Renaissance History, Rome, Urbino

Disciplines

Adult and Continuing Education | History

Abstract

The Parallel Lives style examination and biography is one of the oldest forms of historical inquiry, providing a comparison between a foreign subject and a more familiar subject as a frame of reference. This style of examination was popular for dissertations in the 19th century among military historians writing about generals who were stylistically known as “Great Captains” for much of history. While the moral comparisons of such histories in bygone eras possess less utility, multimodal comparisons of lives that readers have more and less contextual background to provide a model to bridge the gap between foreign and familiar subjects. The two subjects of this inquiry are Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus of the Middle Roman Republic during the Second Punic War, and Duke Federigo da Montefeltro of the Italian Renaissance, who attempted to live a life modeled on both Caius Julius Caesar and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus. Both subjects were paragons of martial virtue in their respective eras in very different cultures. Given the degree of information contextualization required for adult learning, providing bridging context improves the quality and amount of retention by the reader. It is for these reasons that paralleling two subjects using a multimodal method to parse the components for examination and delivering the information in a contextualizing frame based on Bloom’s Taxonomic Model of Adult Learning is posited as a valid approach to teaching history, one that can speak interdisciplinary languages and appeal to wider audience bases. The use of modern research methods and integrated reasoning creates an updated approach, which delivers a procedural historical example for deep dive, theoretically aligned analysis.

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