This thesis examines the writing of Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti in terms of its expression of religious culture and belief. It is my argument that Brontë and Rossetti experienced religion as intellectuals, questioning and exploring doctrine and dogma neither as sentimental lady Christians nor dismissive, secular critics. I contend that by close reading their poetry, the genre both women privileged as most appropriate for the consideration of religious matters, the reader may trace the sermons and theological works they read. Moreover, their writing, I suggest, evinces their intellectual response to theological, ecclesiological and ecclesiastical developments that took place in the nineteenth century. I thus label Brontë and Rossetti 'religious intellectuals,' a phrase suggestive of their intense understanding of, rather than their mild acquaintance with, religious debate. Many women writing within the nineteenth century found that religion granted them a field within which to freely read and research, but were denied the professional title of 'theologian.' Brontë and Rossetti are thus examples of a wider phenomenon wherein women encountered religion like scholars, one disregarded by current criticism unable as it is to categorize a female activity simultaneously religious and intellectual. I use Brontë and Rossetti as examples of what I call the 'religious intellectual' because they represent different sides of this classification. Where Brontë struggled away from her Methodist background, serving as a cultural commentator on its enthusiastic belief-system, Rossetti forged a scholarly identity as a late member of the High Church Oxford Movement. Both poets, I contend, wrote about religion in order to signal their intellectual ability. I conclude that Brontë's interest in Methodism and Rossetti's fascination with Tractarianism reveals the poets to be both independent of family pressures and false consciousness, and fully engaged with a subject central to their age.

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This thesis is centred on the second chapter of the second book of Heinrich Suso's Horologium Sapientiae, the chapter entitled De Scientie Utilissima Homini Mortali quae est Scire Mori, in its three Middle English translations. Two of these are here edited for the first time: the first, here entitled The Lichfield Translation, from Lichfield Cathedral MS 16, and the second, To Kunne Deie; from Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodleian 789 and Glasgow University Library, Hunter 496. Suso's life and works are briefly described together with the date of the entry of the Horologiun Sapientiae into England and the production of the three Middle English translations drawing on this work, one of which is a re-working of the Horologium incorporating the Scire Mori. chapter, the other two (those here edited) translations of this chapter alone. The circulation and ownership in England of the Horologium Sapientiae and of the three translations are also outlined. There follows a detailed examination of the Scire Mori chapter in its three Middle English forms, which endeavours to demonstrate how the text recommends meditation upon death as an efficacious method by which to promote repentance. This argument is further extended by a consideration of the manuscript context in which the three translations appear. The liturgical rites surrounding death as they appear in the Sarum Manuale are also examined in order to shed further light on the way in which the experience and spectacle of death were conceptualised in medieval spirituality. Finally, the conclusions reached in the course of these considerations are examined in the light of recent critical works on medieval attitudes towards death. Detailed descriptions of the eighteen manuscripts containing Middle English translations of Suso's Horologium Sapientiae form one Appendix to the thesis; a second comprises brief descriptions of manuscripts written in England containing the work in Latin.

This thesis examines the work of the award-winning contemporary English short story and novel writer Jane Gardam. It proposes that much of her achievement and craft stems from her engagement with religion. It draws on Gardam’s published works from 1971 to 2014 including children’s books and adult novels. While Gardam has been reviewed widely, there is little serious critical appreciation of her fiction and there are misreadings of the influence of religion in her work. I therefore analyse the religious dimensions of her stories: the language, stylistics and hermeneutic of Gardam’s three religious influences, namely the Anglo-Catholic, Benedictine and Quaker movements and how she sites them within her work. The thesis proposes lectio divina, arguably an ancient form of contemporary reader-response criticism, as a framework to describe the Word’s religious agency when embedded or alluded to in fiction. It also considers and applies critical discussion on the medieval concept of the aevum, a literary religious space. Finally, I suggest that religious writing such as Gardam’s has a place in the as yet unexplored ‘poetic’ strand of Receptive Ecumenism, a new movement that seeks to address reception of the Word between members of different faith communities. Having examined many aspects of Gardam’s writing, its history and potential, I conclude that her achievement owes much to her engagement with particular and divergent forms of religious life and practice.