This dissertation traces the reception of Greek mathematics by practicing mathematicians in England and France, ca. 1580-1680. The period begins with the newly widespread availability of works by Pappus, Apollonius, and Diophantus; it concludes with the invention of calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. The dissertation focuses on a philological imaginary created by François Viète (fl. 1580-1600) that I call “the myth of Greek algebra”: the belief that the ancient Greek geometers concealed their heuristic method and only presented their results. This belief helped mathematicians accommodate ancient Greek works to their own mathematical ends; it helped mathematicians sustain the relevance of Greek texts for their own inventions. My study focuses on Viète, Rene Descartes, John Wallis, Isaac Newton, and Gottfried Leibniz: I show how these mathematicians continually renovated the relationship between ancient and modern mathematics in order to maintain continuity between their discoveries and the past. In order to do so, I argue, they became increasingly conscious of their professional identity as mathematicians, and they asserted their unique right—over philologists and philosophers—to interpret ancient mathematical texts. Mathematical community with the ancients was purchased at the cost of community with one’s non-mathematical contemporaries.

The Khārijites are usually regarded as the first faction to separate from the early Islamic community. They are viewed as rebels and heretics, constituting the first sect within early Islam. This thesis seeks to examine the narrative role and function of Khārijism in the historiographical tradition of the formative period of Islam. To that end, it looks at the major Islamic chronicles of the 3rd and 4th centuries AH/9th and 10th centuries CE and investigates their portrayal of Khārijite history. The analysis covers the period from the apparent emergence of the Khārijites at the Battle of Ṣiffīn in 37 AH/657 CE until the death of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān in 86 AH/705 CE. The thesis’ methodological approach is based on the premise that the historiographical works under study need to be approached as literary artefacts, as texts rather than databanks that can be mined for hard facts in order to reconstruct early Islamic and thus Khārijite history ‘as it really was’. This literary analysis of the source material on Khārijism leads to two major conclusions: first, there is hardly any narrative substance to the Khārijites as presented in the sources. Instead, the reports on Khārijite activities are mostly made up of structural components such as names and dates on the one hand, and topoi and schemata on the other. Consequently, no distinct and tangible identity, literary or otherwise, emerges from the material, pointing out the pitfalls of positivist approaches to Khārijite history and by extension early Islamic history in general. This phenomenon is directly connected to the second conclusion: the historiographical sources approach Khārijism not as an end in itself, but as a narrative tool with which to illustrate, discuss and criticize other actors and subject matters. The thesis is divided into six chapters. Chapters One and Two address those characteristics of and topoi in the representation of Khārijism that pervade the source material across the entire period investigated here. It emerges that the historiographers’ major concern in the depiction of Khārijism is the discussion of the perils of the rebels’ militant piety that threatens the unity and stability of the Islamic community. Chapters Three to Five look at the periods of ʿAlī’s caliphate, Muʿāwiya’s rule and the second fitna as well as t he reign of ʿAbd al-Malik, respectively, and identify the specific narrative purposes of Khārijism in the portrayal of each period. Chapter Six offers a number of observations on the early historiographical tradition as derived from the analysis over the preceding five chapters, addressing issues such as whether it makes sense to distinguish between proto-Sunnī and proto-Shīʿī sources. The Conclusion summarizes the main findings of this thesis and provides some suggestions regarding future research on Khārijite history and thought as well as early Islamic history in general.

Magister Artium - MA / Muslim women’s lack of access to mosque space has left them with few opportunities to direct or influence the interpretation of the theological texts. The mosque is an almost strictly gendered space that is seen as a key platform from which Muslims are exhorted to fulfill existing obligations and where new practices emerge as part of the creation of tradition in the Muslim community. I would further like to argue that it is the acts and interventions of the women who have claimed Islam and its belief system in its entirety as their own and then shaped this to fit their lives that will enable Muslims to rethink existing attitudes to women in Muslim communities.

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This thesis is a socio-economic history of the relationship between music technology and organisational practices in twentieth-century Australia. It argues that the history of technology in the Australian music economy is dependent not only upon the changing technical characteristics of musical instruments and electronic consumer goods but also upon government policy-making, management practices in music technology manufacturing firms and patterns of music technology consumption. The thesis examines economic statistics regarding the import, export and local production of music technology in Australia. The economic statistics have not previously been examined in relation to the history of music technology in Australia. The historical analysis is structured according to a four-part periodisation which includes the Electric Age (1901-1930), the Electronic Age (1930-1950), the Transistor Age (1950-1970) and the Information Age (1970-1990). This periodisation enables the analysis to continually be refocussed as the key technological and socio-economic dynamics change. With this perspective, the history of the relationship between technology and organisation in the Australian music economy has been demonstrated to be dependent on a number of key technological changes. The thesis examines changes including the shift from acoustic to electric recording; the development of transistor-based consumer electronics goods; and the advent of digital information technology. However, a number of key social determinants, particularly organisational modes, are examined including changes from protectionist to more deregulated trade policy; lack of business skills in areas such as marketing, manufacturing technique and industrial research and development; and the development of a sense of popular modernity which is expressed in the consumption of new, technically advanced and glamorous music technology. In addition to the new perspectives on the history of music technology provided by the analysis of empirical economic data, this thesis contributes to the historiography of technology. The analytical framework it proposes locates music technology within what is described as an assemblage of technologies: technologies of production, technologies of sign systems, technologies of power and technologies of the self. This approach makes clear the interdependence of technological and social factors, and the inadequacy of narrow technological determinist and social constructivist accounts. The notion of an assemblage of technologies is further embellished by drawing upon key elements of recent theories of systems analysis: the seamless web, evolution and chaos theory. Through this analytical framework and the socio-economic analysis of the relationship between music technology and organisational practices, the thesis demonstrates that the history of technology cannot be understood unless it is seen as part of a complex and interacting technical, social, economic and institutional system.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis presents a new assessment of the identity and historical significance of Marguerite Porete, burned for heresy in Paris in 1310, and reconnects her to a vigorous, lay, discourse community that threatened the authority of the later medieval church. The thesis argues that a bilateral annihilation of Porete as an historical subject has been brought about by medieval and modern representations, and that this has served to obscure the presence of a subaltern religious discourse in the period. The historiography of Porete has followed distinctive stages of development that reflect, and are affected by, concurrent advances in the study of medieval female religious participation. This interplay has led to the development of a particularly influential hermeneutics that serves to exclude Porete from her contemporaries. Analysis of documentation issuing from Porete’s condemnation has similarly been influenced by hermeneutic issues that manipulate the ways in which Porete is perceived as an identity. This thesis challenges dominant representations of Porete in the scholarship and argues that Porete’s identity and discourse reflect a particularly vigorous, fluid and cross-discoursed lay engagement with religiosity that has roots in the precocious socio-religious environment of the Southern Low Countries. Central to the aims of this thesis is the question “how did Porete ‘fit’ the religious landscape of her period?” A seeming obstacle to this pursuit are claims from within the scholarship that Porete did not ‘fit’ at all, but was, rather, as an aberration amidst other female mystics of the period. Clear links, however, have suggested a wider discourse community and some have identified her, in conjunction with those that condemned her in Paris, as a beguine. Yet this affiliation is refuted by Porete within her book and the term, as an indicator of identity, is highly problematic. This thesis explores the historiographical issues that cloud Porete’s case and offers a reassessment of the possibilities her reconnection to the major religious currents of her day presents. It will be argued that her condemnation represents a major historical development wherein the boundaries of institutionally accepted discourse were hardened at the very moment when the possibilities for religious discourse were at their peak. Porete will thus be reassessed as a major figure in an alternative religious discourse that represents the excluded voice of lay engagement in the later Middle Ages.

Abstract Annie Heloise Abel (1873–1947) was one of only thirty American women to earn a PhD in history prior to the First World War. She was the first academically trained historian in the United States to consider the development of Indian–white relations and, although her focus was narrowly political and her methodology almost entirely archival-based, in this she was a pioneer. Raised in the bucolic atmosphere of a late-Victorian Sussex village, at the age of twelve she became an actual pioneer when her parents moved to the Kansas frontier in the 1880s. She was the third child and eldest daughter among seven remarkable siblings, children of a Scottish gardener, each of whom obtained a college education and fulfilled the American dream of financial stability and status. Annie Abel’s academic career was one of rare success for a woman of the period and she studied at Kansas, Cornell, Yale, and Johns Hopkins universities. She was the first woman to win a Bulkley scholarship to Yale, where her doctoral thesis won her an American Historical Association award and was published in its annual report. As well as college teaching, for a short time she was historian at the Office (now Bureau) of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, and was also involved in women’s suffrage issues. She reached the peak of her academic teaching career as a history professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, one of the country’s most prestigious women’s institutions of higher learning. She combined her teaching with research and wrote some minor pieces prior to her major work, a three-volume political history of the Indian Territory during the American Civil War, which was published between 1915 and 1925. Her life took an unexpected turn while on a research sabbatical in Australia when, aged nearly fifty, she found romance and then experienced a disastrous, short-lived marriage. Undeterred, she returned to America and continued to pursue her primary professional interest as an independent researcher, winning grants that took her to England and Canada, until her retirement to Aberdeen, Washington, in the 1930s. During this latter period of her life Annie Abel-Henderson (as she now styled herself) produced no original works but continued to publish editions of historically important manuscripts, work she had begun early in her career. Her research interests also covered early North American exploration narratives and, as an extension of her work on Indian–white relations, she had planned an ambitious, comparative study of United States and British Dominion policy towards colonised peoples. As a reviewer, her historical expertise was long sought by the leading academic history journals of the day. Before her death at seventy four from carcinoma, her final years were busy with war relief work and occasional writing. No full-length work has yet appeared on this pioneer historian and this dissertation seeks to evaluate Annie Heloise Abel’s work by a close reading of her textual legacy—original, editorial and commentarial—and to assess her importance in American historiography.

Abstract This thesis aims to discuss the confrontation between providentialism and nationalism in Walter Ralegh¡¦s History of the World in light of the development of the writing of history. Ralegh¡¦s proclamation in the Preface to write a universal history demonstrates his endeavor to accord the medieval tradition of divine providence with the new concept of nationalism in the English Renaissance. Yet, the integration of the two ideas reveals the polemics intrinsic in the rooted classical tradition resulted from the humanist revival of antiquity in the Renaissance. Nationalism in terms of its increasing emphasis on men as individual entities here is interpreted as a transformation of the classical patriotism towards the special political structure of city-states. Therefore, the former part of the first chapter is focused on the primitive formation of the history from epic to the classical historiography in which men and their activities are the primary concerns in the writing of history. The latter part of the chapter then turns to the maturation of the medieval historiography with the rise of Christianity, in which God is considered to be the first cause leading men to the perfect happiness in heaven. Aside from the different emphases on men and God, these two traditions vary from their discrepant assertions of time. The classical historians insist on the cyclic nature of history in correspondence to the wax and wane of the world, while the medieval theologians hold the notion of a lineal sequence of time. Chapter Two then proposes to depict the historiography of the Renaissance as an integration of these two traditions and a renovation due to the humanist movement and the Protestant Reformation. Chapter Three deals with the theme of divine providence as is theorized in Ralegh¡¦s long exposition of the Preface in his History. Here, the religious application is purposed to inform the readers of two things: God has directed in the course of history the victory of Protestantism; worldly happiness is only finite while the heavenly bliss is eternal. Men shall turn to God for the final salvation by renouncing the pursuit of the worldly desires. Chapter Four is attempted to study the nationalistic elements in Ralegh¡¦s miscellaneous digressions in which many of his political opinions and military advice are delineated. In contrast to his outline of divine providence, Ralegh shows an inconsistent attitude constantly vacillating from his insistence on the Christian belief to his nostalgia of his past glories. This thesis concludes with a further investigation of Ralegh the person and his success and frustration between the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. Ralegh¡¦s undeserved imprisonment becomes one of the reasons that motivates him to write a history as a self-expression to justify his life as a courtier, as a soldier, as an adventurer, and as a Christian man to face his difficulties in a ¡§resolved¡¨ manner. Finally, I shall return to my argument that the conflict between God and men comes from the confrontation of the classical and the medieval focuses. Though Ralegh advocates to live a moderate life that well-balances the two traditions, he still manifests a dilemma in his presenting the incompatibility between providentialism and nationalism in The History of the World with respect to the changeful political powers.

Focusing on new-journalistic nonfiction novels by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and John Hersey, this dissertation conceptualizes the discursive practices of news-storytelling as a necessary matrix of storytelling and truthtelling activities. Despite the dominant postmodern emphasis on storytelling over truthtelling in such disciplines as literature, historiography, journalism, and legal studies, storytelling-in-the-discipline is also constrained by a set of assumptions and practices about what constitutes professional storytelling. Since news-stories report on events in a public arena where numerous competing stories abound, they are highly aware of other neighboring stories and so relate, compete, and negotiate with other stories to make their stories not merely repetitive but argumentative and re-tellable. As a socially regulated and conditioned discourse, news-storytelling in its enterprise is predicated upon different sets of discursive authorities, material conditions, and audience expectations, where various facts and interpretations are argued, tested, and judged. Chapter I briefly surveys the ways in which news-stories’ claim to referentiality is problematized and even stigmatized by the postmodern ethos of storytelling. Chapter II then explores the discursive dynamics of newsstories, which arise from the paradoxical status of being simultaneously news and a story. Particularly, this chapter highlights the discursive practice of “source marking” and “counter-storytelling” through which news-storytellers foreground their reliability as able researchers, analysts, and contenders. Chapter III discusses the issue of (inter-) textuality in the vectors of storyteller and the world, and examines how news-storytellers draw on, blend into, and counter competing and neighboring stories to situate their own stories in the web of intertextuality and to reinforce the competency, honesty, and quality of their news-stories. Chapter IV is a historical examination of a “transcript” mode, a particular discursive practice of news-storytellers, through which they try to uphold the empirical status of their news-stories. Chapter V concludes the dissertation by arguing that news-stories provide a clarifying vantage point from which to understand the transactions of historical discourse, where newsstorytelling replaces (story) knowledge with argument, poetics with rhetoric, and a story with a discourse.