Over the last ten years, a newly created ritual called a Purity Ball has become increasingly popular in American evangelical communities. In much of the present literature, Purity Balls are assumed solely to address a daughter’s emerging sexuality in a ritual designed to counteract evolving American norms on sexuality; however, the ritual may carry additional latent sociological functions. While experienced explicitly by the individual participants as a celebration of father/daughter relationships and a means to address evolutionary sexual mating strategies, Purity Balls may implicitly regenerate existing social hierarchy. This ritual facilitates a sociological purpose by means of re-establishing the role of the male through halting the psychological development of sexual identity in the daughter, and these rituals are enacted in the ownership of the daughter by the father, who is responsible for maintaining the daughter’s purity, for “covering her with his protection.”

This study examines the sixteenth-century English Reformation background of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Book 3. Recovering this material is not simply a matter of opening a Bible, for various groups in the period, both Catholic and Reformer, interpreted its passages differently. The Book's four primary female characters, Belphoebe, Florimell, Britomart and Amoret, embody different aspects of the virtue, and these come into sharper focus in the light of this background. After a general survey of previous discussions of this topic, Chapter 1 examines the virgin Belphoebe and attitudes about celibacy and virginity current in sixteenth-century England, finding that neither Catholic nor Reformer disparaged this state, although in practice they differed dramatically. Chapter 2, considering the plight of Florimell, shows how her actions demonstrate that her chastity is, as these Reformation writers urge, a matter of the mind and soul, the springs from which virtue and its opposites flow. Her quality derives from such inner conviction. Next, Chapter 3, looking at Britomart, shows that Reformation writers generally do not speak of human love, even in marriage, in a way that comes close to Spenser's poem. However, when they deal with spiritual love, the love the soul is to have for God, they describe it in terms which sound very like those of passionate romantic love. The final chapter brings the insights of the preceding essay to bear on the closing cantos and Amoret's distress. Seen against this background, while she may appear helpless, her mind, like Florimell's, is constant and firm; she remains chaste. Indeed, she prefers imprisonment and even death, to surrendering to her captor. Like both Belphoebe and Britomart, what underlies her behaviour is her prior love for her beloved, which is the basis of her chastity, just as the Reformation writers understand it. The perspective on Spenser's poem provided by this Reformation material gives rise to new insights into the text

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Child Development and Family Relationships. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-94).

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Child Development and Family Relationships. / Electronic thesis. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-94). Also available in print ed.

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This thesis examines the depiction of saintly figures within the Latin vitae of twelfth-century England (1066–c.1215). It tests the extent to which these depictions are homogeneous and examines what factors may have shaped representations. Analysis focuses on vitae of twelfth-century saints, a sample of texts that have not previously been examined as a corpus in this way. By encompassing a range of different types of saint, authors and contexts, utilising this corpus allows a comparative examination of how different facets of sainthood could be expressed in hagiography. The textual analysis at the heart of this study aims to unpick individual texts' ideals of saintly behaviour. Whilst hagiographers functioned within a well-established genre, considering a wide range of saints' vitae allows scrutiny of the impact of context in shaping depictions. It will be argued that these portrayals of saintly figures demonstrate thematic harmony which is tempered by individuality and context to form recognisable and yet distinctive depictions of sainthood. The analysis is structured around four common hagiographical themes, each worthy of detailed examination: Outer Appearance, Sexuality and Chastity, Food and Fasting, and Death. Chapter 1 investigates how saintly figures are described in terms of physical appearance, deportment and demeanour, and clothing. Chapter 2 focuses upon sexuality, exploring the manifestations of chastity and virginity within the Lives and testing how this might vary from saint to saint and between the sexes. Chapter 3 examines food and food abstention, previously under-represented in secondary literature on twelfth-century hagiography and on male saints. The thesis ends with a consideration of death, a surprisingly understudied theme in Anglophone scholarship. By examining the process of dying and the moment of mortality, this chapter will fill an important analytical vacuum between lived sanctity and sanctity in death.

Sixteenth century Elizabeth I of England has long been a figure of interest to Renaissance scholars, and their work largely focuses on how her gender impacted the power, politics, and culture of her day. Many have perceived her to be a heroine whose ingenuity and determination circumvented the limitations imposed on a female ruler in patriarchal Renaissance England. In my thesis, I examine the life and work of Elizabeth I, and the self-representations she constructed within the boundaries imposed on highborn women. In the first half of my thesis, I suggest that she embraced and utilized the female roles available to her to secure agency and a degree of safety for both herself and England. In the second half, I suggest that masculine subjects such as Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, in turn, sought to manipulate her later self-representations to negotiate their own agency and identity which was perceived to be beset with anxieties and biases stemming from the ageing Queen's seizure and redefinition of the female gender role allotted to her. A chronological examination of the self representations evident in her personal writing, commissioned portraiture, parliamentary speeches, and sonnets, as well as the poetry of two of her foremost masculine subjects, suggests a shift in gender politics and a tension roused by an ageing Queen regnant in a rigidly patriarchal society. / Graduation date: 2012

Dans la littérature arabo-islamique médiévale, le thème de l’amour a été traité par un grand nombre d’ouvrages en prose. Un véritable genre littéraire des traités d’amour courtois s’est développé à partir du IIIe/IXe siècle. Si les débuts et l’“âge d’or” du genre ont déjà fait l’objet d’études, ses développements tardifs demeurent encore inexplorés. Le Wāḍiḥ al-mubīn fī ḏikr man ustušhida min al-muḥibbīn, écrit par Muġulṭāy (762/1361), présente à ce titre des caractères originaux. A travers l’analyse littéraire de ce texte, il apparaît en effet que le Wāḍiḥ, tout en s’appuyant sur le patrimoine littéraire sur l’amour courtois qui le précède, se fait porteur d’une conception tout à fait nouvelle du Ýišq (amour-passion) ainsi que d’une théorie originale du martyre par amour. Par les déclarations mêmes de son auteur, de même que par sa structure et par son contenu, l’ouvrage se présente comme un manuel de comportement à suivre. La conception de l’amour que l’ouvrage sous-tend constitue donc un véritable tournant dans l’histoire du genre. Le Wāḍiḥ est le seul ouvrage de ce type à avoir été censuré. Les raisons de l’hostilité que l’ouvrage a rencontrée auprès des autorités mameloukes sont à rechercher dans la “théorie de l’amour” prônée par Muġulṭāy. Elle ne se dégage pas seulement de sa longue introduction, mais transparaît aussi dans la comparaison entre les notices du Wāḍiḥ et celles d’autres ouvrages du patrimoine arabo-islamique médiéval. Tout en rapportant des aḫbār très connus, Muġulṭāy réussit à les refondre de manière novatrice. Il présente ses histoires d’amour et de mort comme matière à édifier ses lecteurs. Le comportement des amants mentionnés dans le Wāḍiḥ, qu’ils soient les victimes de l’amour profane (hétérosexuel ou homosexuel) ou de l’amour de Dieu, est toujours présenté comme exemplaire. Ses martyrs deviennent dès lors des modèles de conduite à suivre par tout bon musulman. / In medieval Arabic Islamic literature, the topic of love was treated in a quite big number of prose works. A true literary genre of courtly love treatises started to develop from the 3rd/9th century. While the first period and the “golden age” of this genre have already been quite intensely studied, its later development remains still unexplored. The al-Wāḍiḥ al-mubīn fī ḏikr man ustušhida min al-muḥibbīn written by Muġulṭāy (762/1361), even though it has its place among the treatises of this genre, has its own special features. The analysis of the text shows that, even if it is based on the traditional literary background of courtly love, the Wāḍiḥ defends a very new notion of passionate love and an original theory of martyrdom of love. Muġulṭāy presents his work as a handbook of good behaviour. A confirmation of this intention is to be found in the structure and the content of his treatise. Muġulṭāy’s approach of courtly love represents then a real turning point in the history of the gender. The Wāḍiḥ is the only courtly love treatise that has been censored by political and religious authorities. The reasons of the interdiction that has stricken the book are probably to be sought in Muġulṭāy’s theory of love. The author explains his theory’s main features in the introduction, but also in lover’s stories as the comparison between the aḫbār in the Wāḍiḥ and others books of Arabic literature shows. Even if the stories are very well known and have been told again and again, the fact that Muġulṭāy is presenting his histories like edification matter for his reader changes them in something really new. No difference is made between his lovers who can be the victims of God love as well as of profane love (heterosexual or homosexual). They are all martyrs and became the models of the behaviour that has to be followed by every good Muslim.

The aim of the thesis is to compare the Eastern and Western Christian ascetic practices focused on obedience, chastity and poverty, i.e. the evangelical counsels, in the work of Cardinal Špidlík. It is exactly Špidlík's work that is a significant source for this subject. As an expert of the Eastern tradition and at the same time a member of the Jesuit order, Cardinal Špidlík, the theologian of the undivided Church, is very well familiar with both spiritualities. Subsequently I analyze the possibilities of layman to live according to these counsels, which is also a bonding line of the whole thesis. Last but not least, this thesis aims to reflect through secondary literature the Špidlík's concept of evangelical counsels and also the possibilities of laymen to live according these counsels. Keywords christian spirituality, asceticism, obedience, poverty, chastity, layman, evangelical counsels

‘Chastity on the Early Modern English Stage’ seeks to explain the relationship between tragicomedy’s brief and short-lived English popularity and the royal cult of chastity which spanned exactly the same historical time-frame. This study attempts to define a cultural movement which influenced the political, religious, social, intellectual, aesthetic, and medical fields in the first half of the seventeenth-century and argues that the narrative tropes which structured, and assisted the spread of, the post-Elizabethan cult of chastity were the same tropes governing the tragicomedies so popular in the period. The arguments made for tragicomedy are speculatively extended to all generic forms, with the intention of expanding an area of scholarship still dominated by formalist analysis. By focussing on narrative tropes and locating them within both fictional and non-fictional texts and in the presentation and discussion of significant events (from medical discoveries to liturgical arrangements and royal birthing rituals) this thesis aims to illustrate that the human and cosmic visions articulated by different dramatic genres were as relevant to early modern lives outside the theatre as they were to those within it. Genre is thus less a description of a text’s formal characteristics and more a set of truths governing certain human experiences both in texts and in life. Focussing on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, two plays by John Ford, Caroline court masques and birthing rituals, Milton’s A Maske and a number of non-professional performances (from the Earl of Castlehaven’s trial to William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of the blood), ‘Chastity on the Early Modern English Stage’ describes the four tropes of chastity and their place in tragicomic experience from the death of Elizabeth I to the beheading of Charles I. While Charles’s death and the closure of the theatres are crucial reasons for the abrupt end of the cult of chastity and tragicomedy, this thesis argues that cause must also be attributed to the efforts of pro-Parliamentary and Puritan writers who, throughout the 1630s and 1640s, sought to claim the tropes of chastity for their own rhetoric and cause. Their success resulted in a redefinition of chastity as masculine, individuated, Parliamentarian, Protestant, intellectual, civic and prosaic instead of Catholic, royal, spectacular, feminised, Marian, pietised, and theatrical.