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Diss. Karlstad : Karlstads universitet, 2007.

Over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, a professional scientific and medical community was coming into being. Exclusive membership, limits to the definition of science, and separation of the professional from the popular sphere became important elements in the consolidation of scientific authority. Studies exploring Victorian scientific authority have tended to focus on professional journals and organs of middle-class culture; this thesis takes a new approach in exploring how this authority is reflected and negotiated across the content of the popular mass-market periodicals which provided leisure reading for working- and lower-class men and women. It uses as examples Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, Reynolds's Miscellany and the Family Herald. The readers of these publications were consumers of scientific information, participants in popularised science and beneficiaries and subjects of new research, but were increasingly excluded from the formal processes of developing scientific theory and practice. Examining representations of anatomy and of mesmerism, health advice and theories of class and gender, the thesis argues for an expanded understanding of mass-market periodicals as communicators of scientific ideas, showing how such material widely informs the content of these publications from fiction to jokes to full-length factual articles. However, the role of the periodicals is much wider than simply the transmission of received ideas, and the thesis reveals a plurality of positions with regard to science and medicine within the popular press. The periodicals engage with modern science in complex and varied ways, accepting, modifying and challenging scientific theories and methods from different positions. The form of the periodical is key, presenting multiple sources of knowledge and ways in which readers may be invited to respond. Chambers's broad support for scientific progress is informed by its useful knowledge identity but tempered by its founding editor's own ambivalent relationship to the scientific establishment. The Herald, influenced by both the periodical's commercial character and its editor's adherence to a spiritual, anti-materialist view of existence, is strongly resistant to modern science, while Reynolds's incorporates it alongside other forms of knowledge in its aim to educate, entertain and empower readers from a socialist perspective.

The Ordination Scroll of Empress Zhang (1493) in the San Diego Museum of Art, a highlight at the Taoism and the Arts of China exhibition in 2000, is an unusual object among surviving visual material from Ming dynasty China (1368 – 1644). At over twenty-seven metres long, the scroll contains meticulously painted images and a detailed inscription that records the Daoist ordination of Empress Zhang (1470 – 1541), consort of the Hongzhi emperor (r. 1488 – 1505) by the Orthodox Unity institution. The event it documents, which elevates the empress into the celestial realm, would be unknown to history if not for the survival of this scroll. This dissertation is an in-depth study of the Ordination Scroll that also considers its implications for understanding the activities of empresses and their representations during the Ming dynasty. The first three chapters of this dissertation closely examine the material, visual and textual aspects of the Ordination Scroll. The remaining two chapters situate the scroll within the broader activities of Ming empresses. A complete translation of the main inscription in the scroll is provided in the appendix.

O obscurantismo da letra lacaniana, as crises institucionais e o hermetismo da metapsicologia podem ser superados em favor das contribuições teóricas que o lacanismo poderia fornecer à historiografia da cultura. Este trabalho defende que esta assertiva já estava inscrita às proposições multidisciplinares tanto da escola dos Annales quanto dos textos ditos sociais de Freud. Assim, em uma estratégia progressiva que contemplaria tanto leitores novos às temáticas metapsicológicas quanto, espera-se, outros já mais experientes, os dois primeiros capítulos são introdutórios ao jargão lacaniano, o terceiro e quarto, reflexões sobre o estado da arte, conquanto os dois últimos constituem casos da metapsicologia aplicada à crítica ao discurso do capitalista, uma das principais contribuições da psicanálise de orientação lacaniana aos saberes ditos sociais. / The obscurantism of the lacanian text, the several institutional crises and the difficulty of the metapsychological vocabulary may be overcome in favor of the theoretical contributions that the lacanism could provide to the culture historiography. This thesis argues that this assumption was already present in the multidisciplinary propositions of the Annales school and in the so called social texts by Freud. Consequently, a progressive strategy that would be useful to new readers of the metapsychological subjects, as much as, to the more experienced ones, the first two chapters are an introduction to the lacanian jargon, the third and fourth chapters, are a reflection about the state of the art, whilst the last two parts are about metapsychology applied to the capitalist discourse, one of the main contributions of the lacanian oriented psychoanalysis to the so called social knowledges.

By analyzing the written documents and the inscriptions of the bronze artifacts excavated in the Ningzhen and Shaoxing regions, the author concludes that there were a long period of cultural dissemination and exchange among the kingdoms in the Central Plain with the Wu and the Yue people between the region of Huai River and the Yangzi River where Wu and Yue were located. Due to the geographical advantage, Wu and Yue gradually merged into a greater cultural entity which eventually had the same religious beliefs and social customs. However, as indicated in the following discussions, both the cultural traditions of the Wu and the Yue reserved their uniqueness in various aspects. First, they adopted different strategies and attitudes in absorbing the Han culture. Second, both the Wu and the Yue discarded part of their aboriginal cultures, while modified their own traditions by integrating cultural elements from neighboring feudal kingdoms. Third, since the cultural strategies of both the Wu and Yue were different, which directly affected Wu's and Yue's cultural and political development. For example, there were conflicts and disputes among the ruling classes, especially during the early period of their contending hegemony with the feudal lords in the Central Plain. After a long period of cultural acculturations, new cultures were formed under the reigns of the Wu and the Yue's rulers. / This thesis focuses on explaining different processes of cultural acculturations among the Wu and the Yue, and the culture between their neighboring countries. By examining the evidences from written literatures and bronze inscriptions, the author emphasizes the internal and external political developments that affected the paces and the directions of their cultural development. / Wu and Yue, were located in the south-east China, contended with the feudal lords in the Central Plain for the hegemony during the Chunqiu and Zhanguo Periods (770 B. C.--221 B.C.). These two neighboring countries had similar cultural characteristics. For instance, they shared the same language, similar living customs and political systems. The author holds the view that the cultural elements of the Wu and the Yue were fairly similar to the Han people in the Central Plain. However, due to the barbaric origins of the Wu and the Yue ethnic groups, they were regarded as outsiders and were rejected to participate in the ritual affairs with the feudal lords of Zhou Dynasty B.C. 1122? until B.C. 585. / 陳月平. / 論文(哲學博士)--香港中文大學, 2006. / 參考文獻(p. 233-247). / Adviser: Ming Chiu Lai. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0685. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / School code: 1307. / Lun wen (zhe xue bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2006. / Can kao wen xian (p. 233-247). / Chen Yueping.

O obscurantismo da letra lacaniana, as crises institucionais e o hermetismo da metapsicologia podem ser superados em favor das contribuições teóricas que o lacanismo poderia fornecer à historiografia da cultura. Este trabalho defende que esta assertiva já estava inscrita às proposições multidisciplinares tanto da escola dos Annales quanto dos textos ditos sociais de Freud. Assim, em uma estratégia progressiva que contemplaria tanto leitores novos às temáticas metapsicológicas quanto, espera-se, outros já mais experientes, os dois primeiros capítulos são introdutórios ao jargão lacaniano, o terceiro e quarto, reflexões sobre o estado da arte, conquanto os dois últimos constituem casos da metapsicologia aplicada à crítica ao discurso do capitalista, uma das principais contribuições da psicanálise de orientação lacaniana aos saberes ditos sociais. / The obscurantism of the lacanian text, the several institutional crises and the difficulty of the metapsychological vocabulary may be overcome in favor of the theoretical contributions that the lacanism could provide to the culture historiography. This thesis argues that this assumption was already present in the multidisciplinary propositions of the Annales school and in the so called social texts by Freud. Consequently, a progressive strategy that would be useful to new readers of the metapsychological subjects, as much as, to the more experienced ones, the first two chapters are an introduction to the lacanian jargon, the third and fourth chapters, are a reflection about the state of the art, whilst the last two parts are about metapsychology applied to the capitalist discourse, one of the main contributions of the lacanian oriented psychoanalysis to the so called social knowledges.

This dissertation examines encounters between humans and snakes from the 1780s to the 1860s, principally focusing upon Britain and British India, to reassess the production and circulation of natural historical knowledge. Serpents were at once familiar and ambiguous in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire, present at every level of society through Scripture, works of natural history, and imperial print culture. They appeared across literary genres - in works of art, as dead specimens in museums, and living attractions in shows and menageries - and their material and figurative presence in London was dependent upon British imperial networks. Snakes loomed disproportionately large in the imperial imaginary, where they were entangled in a discourse of difference. The practices of the natural history of snakes were harnessed to personal ambition and colonial exigencies. By analyzing scientific books and papers, newspapers and periodicals, taxidermy and cartoons, travel accounts, and government archives from Britain and India, this study provides a connected account of how snakes were collected, transported, described, experimented with, and used for a variety of ends. Following an animal around, whether as material, textual, or visual representation, reveals a more comprehensive picture of how people engaged with animals in the nineteenth century, not confined by disciplinary or institutional boundaries at a time when these were being constructed. The cultural and emotive power of snakes makes visible the heterogeneous nature of those contributing to the production of natural historical knowledge. This thesis shows how the moral character of snakes was implicated in how they were encountered and understood by a range of actors, from museum naturalists to imperial agents, and Indian snake-charmers to working-class visitors to the zoo. The chapters examine different but overlapping modes of encounter with snakes: collecting, preserving, and presenting them in museum settings; the imbrication of anthropocentric concerns in attempts to classify and anatomize them; the mechanisms and motivations behind attempts to produce authoritative 'useful knowledge' incorporating vivisectional experiments in the Madras Presidency in the late eighteenth century; Orientalist representations of non-European interactions with snakes in nascent print culture; and the emotional economy of educational displays of living snakes in metropolitan Britain, especially with the emergence of new spaces for natural history, notably the first reptile house at the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park. The approach brings together insights from from history of science, animal history, and new imperial histories to recover an affective dimension of natural history in imperial encounters.

Since 1986, the Catholic Our Lady of Victory (OLV) parish of Lackawanna, NY and the diocese of Buffalo have been working to secure canonization for Father Nelson H. Baker (1842-1936), founder of the North American branch of the Association of Our Lady of Victory and the OLV Basilica and Institutes, which, among other services, included a hospital, orphanage and school. Lackawanna is also the site of the Bethlehem Steel Plant closings of the early 1980s, which have come to symbolize the Buffalo region's difficult and troubled transition to a post-industrial economy. Thus, I frame my dissertation with the overall idea that the possibility of Baker's sainthood offers hope for economic recovery to the city of Lackawanna. Specifically, this work seeks to combine the study of material history with the study of lived religion by using performativity as a theoretical tool. Through a comprehensive presentation of the material history of Father Nelson H. Baker from the 1880s to 2006, I demonstrate that material history is a significant, integral and vital component of lived religion. Further, I make the case that devotional practices include creative acts that both provide evidence of Baker¹s sanctity for his cause and contribute to the performative nature of his material history. As such, this work attempts 1)to fill in a gap in the scholarship about contemporary Catholic sainthood in the U.S. by focusing on a specific cause for sainthood, 2) to further develop an understanding of the communal processes of representing sanctity,3) to offer a way of combining analyses of the built environment, material, print and visual culture with the study of lived religion, and 4) to expand the scope of scholarly approaches to Catholic devotional practices by demonstrating that in the Baker case, devotional practices involve a cooperative effort by both official and popular agents in the creation of material items to promote and further a cause. Visual materials are presented in the body of the text in JPEG format

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