This dissertation explores the function of ekklēsia rhetoric in the Book of Revelation, and demonstrates its role in addressing various issues within the seven ekklēsiai and their inscribed rhetorical situation, including: the participation of eidōlothyta, the blasphemy of the so-called synagogue of Satan, and the pursuit of wealth. Contemporary reconstructions of the rhetorical situation of Revelation cast the assemblies as consolidated Christian churches and view the aforementioned issues as indicative of tensions between heretics and orthodox Christians, between church and synagogue, and/or between church and Greco-Roman society. Yet, such interpretations often reinscribe normative frameworks, the so-called parting of the ways, and obfuscate the role of imperial power. In contrast, I reconstruct the inscribed assemblies Revelation as Jewish groups from the Diaspora in Asia Minor that used ekklēsia rhetoric as well as its topoi of civic reciprocity, civic participation, and the common good to negotiate the socio-economic and political situation of Asia Minor under Rome. In order to map the ways in which the assemblies could have interacted with imperial power, I use epigraphic materials from ancient voluntary associations. Drawing from postcolonial theory, I also read the rhetorical situation of Revelation as a colonial situation and the aforementioned issues as negotiations of power, ethnic identity, and wealth.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Erskine Theological Seminary, 2000. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-91).

This study investigates the expectations various groups in late medieval German society held of their parish priests and how these expectations were mediated through specific relationships. By analyzing the qualities, skills, duties and services required of the parish clergy by those in the priest's own social network--the episcopal and patronal structures above him and the parish and clerical communities around him--this study reveals the mutual obligations and contradictions inherent in the priest's situation. The strategies employed by individuals and groups to articulate and enforce their demands are examined as well as the means by which priests could negotiate or resist in order to protect their own interests. The result is a web of expectations, the individual strands of which are inspected in three major parts of the study, corresponding to the demands of the episcopal hierarchy, the intentions of a late medieval movement to educate the simple priest, and the perspective from the parish. In fifteenth-century Germany, the bishops of Constance sought to reduce their crushing debt by introducing new taxes upon the clergy of the diocese. The parish priests banded together and defied the bishop in 1492, negotiating a payment favorable to them. Another source of revenue directly contradicted diocesan law as bishops tolerated the presence of concubines among their priests in return for the payment of an annual fee. Manuals for parish priests were in high demand throughout the late medieval period; their popularity only increased after the invention of the printing press. Written to inform priests how to carry out their daily duties and avoid sacrilege, these manuals helped to steer the basic training of the parish priest toward a vocational profile combining the aura of the cultic priest with the standardized efficiency of the professional minister. Perspective from the parish encompasses the differing viewpoints of patron, priests and parishioners. The case of Wurttemberg reveals how Count Eberhard (†1496) used parish resources in an attempt to reshape devotion in his lands. In towns and villages served by a number of priests, a local clerical brotherhood often existed alongside lay parish structures. Conflict and cooperation is measured both between the clergy and the laity as well as within the ranks of the priests themselves.

Eighteenth century colonial Mexico hosted a wide number of religious women who put quill to parchment and wrote spiritual letters to their confessors. These texts display impressive subversive rhetorical strategies, five of which are the focal point of this dissertation. The three nuns studied in this dissertation are Sor Maria Coleta de San Jose (?-1775), Sor Sebastiana de la Santisima Trinidad (1709-1757) and Sor Maria Anna de San Ignacio (1695-1756). Chapter one examines the spiritual and literary European foremothers of eighteenth century colonial religious women. This chapter examines the life and letters of Radegund (518-587), Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), Catherine of Siena (1347?-1380), and Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582). Their writings all demonstrate early signs of subversive rhetoric that can be detected centuries later in the nuns' letters examined in this study. The second chapter is divided into two sections. The first part provides an overview of colonial Mexico with a particular emphasis on Mexican nuns and their letters. The second half of the chapter carves out a viable discursive space for nuns' spiritual letters. This section revises and reinterprets the colonial literary canon from a variety of theoretical perspectives including feminist theory and cultural studies. The last three chapters are each dedicated to one of the three Mexican nuns mentioned above. Their letters are analyzed according to the following rhetorical strategies: (1) the rhetoric of humility, (2) the description of penance, (3) the description of fasting, (4) the retelling of visions with Christ, and (5) the retelling of visions with Saint Teresa or the Virgin Mary. In conclusion, due to their precarious situation as religious women under the ever vigilant eye of a patriarchal and misogynist society, these nuns opted to incorporate these strategies within their spiritual letters. Sor Coleta, Sor Sebastiana and Sor Maria Anna deliberately placed subversive rhetorical strategies within their letters in order to express otherwise controversial or questionable ideas.

This study investigates the relationship between apocalypticism, criticism of the church and ecclesiastical reform at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It focuses on Berthold Purstinger (1465-1543), bishop of Chiemsee (reg. 1508-1526), and forms a commentary on his apocalyptic treatise Onus ecclesiae (1519, 1524, 1531), about a demon-infested world in perilous times. Apocalypticism was more than a theological doctrine about the end of the world. It was a terrifying reality, the vestiges of which appeared in monstrous births, blood-red comets and horrific fires. Historians are only beginning to recognize the significance of apocalyptic thinking in late-medieval and early-modern Europe. This study challenges the assumption that apocalypticism grew deepest on the margins of society among radical sectarians. Purstinger was a conservative theologian and a respected bishop, at home in the heart of the church yet convinced of his place in the last days. Secondly, it shows that Purstinger's idea of reform was different from its late-medieval antecedents. He did not think of reform as the dawning of a "new era" before the end of time, nor as the healthy transformation of Christendom "in head and members." For Purstinger, reform and apocalypse were one an the same. He awaited the return of Christ, who, at the end of time, would reform the militant church as the triumphant church. Thirdly, this dissertation argues that anticlericalism in Purstinger's apocalyptic world was a preparation for reform, not only, as hitherto conceived, a manifestation of discontent that sparked reform efforts in reaction. Purstinger criticized the world because Christ was coming to judge it, and because God directed the faithful during the last days to criticize the abysmal lapse. The watchword admonition on the title-page of Onus ecclesiae is the bellicose statement from Ezekiel: "Go make war ... and start at my sanctuary" (Ezek. 9:5). That is to say, on the eve of the apocalypse, anticlericalism fed in part on God's injunction to the forerunners of Christ. Their criticism was a prelude to judgment--to the reformatio Christi.

This study reconstructs the previously unknown history of the most important dissident group within France before the French Reformed Church formed during the 1550s. From edited and unpublished literary, institutional, diplomatic, and epistolary sources from across Europe, the dissertation demonstrates that King Francis I's sister, Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549), and a network of more than two hundred nobles, royal officers, humanists, literary writers, and prelates collaborated to promote a reformation of the French church based on their evangelical views. To this end, they attempted to steer Francis I into alliances with Henry VIII, the Protestant powers of the Empire and Switzerland, as well as, for a time, the Pope that favored the adoption of their reform agenda. Within France they strove to disseminate their beliefs by exploiting their administrative powers, sponsoring evangelical preaching, and publishing hundreds of vernacular books, including many adaptations of German Reformation tracts. An opposing conservative party stymied these efforts, yet Marguerite and her network managed, in turn, to prevent it from unleashing full-scale persecution, thereby enabling a broad dissenting movement to grow. Meanwhile, French reformers in exile, led by Guillaume Farel and John Calvin, former members of Marguerite's network, became critical of their erstwhile colleagues and called on French evangelicals to reject the "papal" church. After Marguerite's death, members of her network and their heirs joined two successor parties during the Wars of Religion (1562-1598): the irenic royalists and the unyielding Calvinist Huguenots. Ultimately, the confessional historiographies of the Calvinist and Catholic 'victors' effaced the record of Marguerite and her network's campaign for moderate evangelical renewal. This account revises the received interpretations of Marguerite and the early Reformation in France. Although Marguerite is well-known as a literary figure with heterodox beliefs, her leadership of a dynamic evangelical network has never been seen or reconstructed. This network's actions reveal, moreover, that early sixteenth-century France was not, as it is universally portrayed, a period of "magnificent religious anarchy." These evangelicals were not divergent in their beliefs, disunified, and hence hopelessly ineffective. Amidst growing persecution they failed to secure the adoption of their beliefs, but they did disseminate them and obtain a foothold for religious dissent without which the Reformed churches could not have emerged.

At some time around the first half of the fifteenth century the Florentine merchant Giovanni Rucellai commissioned the architect Leon Battista Alberti to design a shrine which could serve both as Rucellai's tomb and as a reflection of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In so doing Alberti created a work that could function not only as a family and religious shrine but could also refer to the history of the city of Florence. The Florentines at this time saw their city as the center of commerce, the arts, humanistic studies, and religion. All these activities converged in the idea of Florence as a "New Jerusalem."

Seventeenth-century Lives of colonial saints in Peru reflect the Spanish colony's growing independence and changing missionary strategies. Lives of saints Luis Bertran, Francis Solano, Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo, Juan Macias, Rose of Lima, Martin de Porras and the unrecognized Nicolas de Ayllon reveal the symbolic resolution of alterity as a dominant theme. Concern with alterity appears most prominently in discourses about language and bodies. Hagiography provided Creole communities with religious narratives of self-legitimization and self-definition. This questions a general scholarly assumption that saints of the Early Modern period are the creations of the ecclesiastical powers in Rome. Likewise, the assertion that hagiography is written in order to provide exemplars of virtue for ordinary people is qualified by my study. The Lives mirror two phases of colonial development: the first phase described Spanish evangelization and confrontation with native populations. Saints were strongly identified with Europe and their Lives reflected the cultural struggle with external others and the need to justify Christian missions. Hagiographers focused on the power or language and gave little attention to the physical world of bodies. The second phase was marked by an increasing sense of Creole identity. Hagiographers shifted the focus from words and language--now treated as suspect--to the body itself. Lives of these saints showcased mortifications of the body in order to dissociate the saints from inferiorities associated with their race or gender.

In July 1835, a northern anti-slavery society sent bundles of abolitionist literature through the United States postal service to the South. Arriving at South Carolina's port city, the mailing became the focus of white Charlestonians' fears of slave uprisings and those Who might assist a servile insurrection. During an attack on the post office to destroy the papers, someone in the crowd shouted for a lynching of Charleston's Catholic bishop and the destruction of the Catholic cathedral and surrounding buildings, including a parochial school for free black children. Using the Charleston Post Office Raid as a backdrop, this study explores both the connections between anti-abolitionism, anti-Catholicism, and nativism in the antebellum South and the reaction to these pressures from southern Catholics, mostly recent immigrants, as they made a place for themselves in their new homeland. At the heart of the work is a consideration of the effects of the ethnic and racial stereotypes and cultural assumptions at play in the antebellum South.

Thèse (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke (Canada), 2008. / Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 1 février 2007). In ProQuest dissertations and theses. Publié aussi en version papier.