The Erklaerung des Vaterunsers is a 337 page meditation and commentary on the Lord's Prayer composed by the fifteenth century German mystic, Magdalena Beutler of Freiburg. This study comprises biographical and critical essays concerning Magdalena and her works, together with a critical edition of the Erklaerung with textual apparatus. Its purpose is to reintroduce Magdalena and her hitherto inaccessible devotional works into late medieval religious and literary scholarship. Previous studies of Magdalena have dismissed her as a deluded, self-dramatizing hysteric and failed to mention either the Erklaerung or her most popular work, the Goldene Litanei, a meditation on the Passion that was widely anthologized from her own time through the early seventeenth century. This dissertation attempts to show that, despite the occasional criticism of contemporaries, Magdalena's actions lay well within a tradition of Franciscan mysticism which centered on the imitation of the life of Christ; that the special emphases of her devotion were characteristic of a strain of female piety that had begun to be voiced as early as the twelfth century; and that her peculiarly literal and physical approach to the imitatio Christi was at the same time orthodox and innovative; and that the Erklaerung represents Magdalena's efforts to share her practices and concerns with her community.

abstract: This work examines the spectrum of Christian attitudes toward yoga as demonstrative of contemporary religious imagination in recent United States history. With the booming commodification of yoga as exercise, the physical and mental elements of yoga practice are made safely secular by disassociation from their ostensible religious roots. Commonly deployed phrases, "Yoga is not a religion," or even, "Yoga is a science," open a broad invitation. But the very need for this clarification illustrates yoga's place in the United States as a borderline signifier for spirituality. Vocal concern by both Christians and Hindus demonstrates the tension between perceptions of yoga as a secular commodity and yoga as religiously beget. Alternatively embracing and rejecting yoga's religious history, Christian yoga practitioners reframe and rejoin yoga postures and breathing into their lives of faith. Some proponents name their practice Christian Yoga. Christian Yoga flourishes as part of contemporary religious and spiritual discourse and practice in books, instructional DVDs, websites and studios throughout the United States. Christian Yoga proponents, professional and lay theologians alike, highlight the diversity of American attitudes toward and understanding of yoga and the heterogeneity of Christianity. For religious studies scholars, Christian Yoga advocates and detractors provide an opportune focal point for inquiry into the evolution of spiritual practice, the dynamics of tradition, experience and authority, and the dialectic nature of evolving cultural attitudes in a religiously plural and complex secular environment. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Religious Studies 2014

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This dissertation comprises a study revealing the differences and similarities between late Roman and medieval Christian conceptions of tragedy and classical Greek ideas of tragedy. Representative of the Roman conception of tragedy is the work of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. As the legends of the martyrs and the teachings of the Fathers made their way into the Middle Ages, they brought with them the mixture of Greek, Roman, and Christian tragical motifs as well as an awareness of, and at times anxiety over, the similarity of pagan and Christian elements. Our failure to understand the Roman conception of tragedy has caused us to miss much in medieval literature that is tragical. To miss the Senecan content of Boethius, for instance, is to miss the Senecan element in medieval conceptions of tragedy. My analysis of the tragedies of Seneca, early and medieval Christian commentaries thereon, and the influence of this tradition on medieval works reveals a direct line of influence from Seneca's Latin plays, through the Consolatione de Philosophiae of Boethius, to de Meun, Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer. My study culminates in a comprehensive, detailed investigation of tragedy as it appears in various of the works of Chaucer. It is my contention that Chaucer recognized the similarity of the pagan and Christian traditions, and explored the significance of this correspondence in his writings. I find evidence, in his Monk's Tale, for example, of a fully-developed understanding of the nature of Senecan tragedy with its characteristic defiance, as well as its shortcomings in light of the Boethian-Platonic interpretation of tragedy which postulates all misfortune as a Good, i.e. a part of the workings of the inscrutable divine plan. The Chaucerian conception of tragedy, I conclude, is the philosophically and artistically inclusive playfulness by which he reveals the surprising similarities and crucial differences between classical and Christian viewpoints. Thus I attempt to reconnect the literatures and attitudes towards tragedy of these periods, by tracing continuities, literary patterns in which pleasure, transcendence, even comedy are merged with motifs that are generally considered tragical.

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