This dissertation explores the nexus of religious, political, and economic issues that led to the socially and religiously divisive intra-Protestant dispute over the proper interpretation and celebration of the Eucharist during the first years of the German Reformation. This dispute roiled cities and territories throughout Germany beginning around the year 1524 as lay men and women began organizing and agitating to promote a symbolic understanding of the Eucharist. The laity saw in this initially academic debate a vehicle through which they could articulate and fight for their own bundle of religious and social concerns. The imperial free city of Augsburg, one of the wealthiest, most populous and most politically powerful cities in the Empire, serves in the dissertation as the case study for a German-wide phenomenon. Chapter one contextualizes the Augsburg eucharistic disputes both by laying out the course of the academic eucharistic debates that raged among Martin Luther, Huldreich Zwingli, and their various supporters and by describing the social and economic tensions unique to Augsburg. Chapter two investigates the Augsburg preaching of the Franciscan friar Hans Schilling, whose congregation began to make connections between the adoption of a symbolic understanding of the Eucharist and their political and economic interests. Chapter three explores the reasons behind the spectacular success of the Augsburg preacher Michael Keller. Keller articulated a symbolic understanding of Christ's presence in the Eucharist which resonated with the concerns of many Augsburg residents that the clergy were denying them the right of self-determination in religious issues, that the political elites were driving them out of their traditional role in civic life, and that the large Augsburg merchants were destroying their economic independence. Chapter four discusses the role of marginalized groups in Augsburg who formed sectarian cells, articulating their alienation from society through their doctrine of the Eucharist. Eventually these groups transitioned to Anabaptism as they found that their doctrine of the Eucharist would not carry the full weight of their sectarian agenda. Chapter five interacts with a series of historiographical questions in light of the evidence presented in the foregoing chapters.

<p> This dissertation explores the possibility of an early modern cultural materialism in selected dramatic works of Thomas Middleton in which fasting plays a prominent thematic role. The once venerable Christian practice of fasting was compartmentalized into secular and religious components in the wake of the Protestant Reformation in England even as its overall practical contour was preserved largely intact. It was subjected to conflicting representations and programs for reform, and appropriated by differing political and ecclesiastical factions. The vicissitudes that beset fasting offered a fertile ground for cultivating an understanding about the nature of the material basis of cultural formations and the historical dynamic governing their fates. It is this indigenous cultural materialist understanding, I argue, that Middleton's treatment of fasting in his dramatic works exemplifies. </p><p> The first chapter offers a history of fasting from the early church to its secularization under Queen Elizabeth as Protestant <i>status quo ante</i> in reference to which later departures and appropriations took place. One such departure by King James is the subject of the next chapter on <i>A Chaste Maid in Cheapside</i> in which the king's attempt to re-sacralize fasting is subjected to a materialist satire and made into a springboard for imagining a utopia of a specifically materialist kind. The next chapter on <i>The Puritan</i> contextualizes the play in terms of the puritan attempts to incorporate fasting as part of the Protestant prayer regime in the place of cunning folk's witchcraft and Catholic ecclesiastical magic. <i>Masque of Heroes</i> and Christmas keeping at the Jacobean Inner Temple are the subjects of the last chapter. I discuss the prominence in the masque of the anthropomorphized Fasting Day in connection with inter-generational and inter-constituency struggle for the custodianship of the valued custom of Christmas keeping. </p><p> These studies represent a series of historicist contributions to Middleton scholarship on the individual works. More broadly, they constitute an attempt to exploit insights from cultural history and material culture studies to broaden the scope of the study of religion in early modern English drama. </p>

<p>John Dryden (1631&ndash;1700) and George Frederic Handel (1685&ndash;1759) produced literary and musical works that have long been regarded as icons of English culture. Their respective arts merged in the late 1730s when Handel took up two of Dryden's most famous poems, "Alexander's Feast" (1736) and "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day" (1739) and re-set them to music. This dissertation probes the genesis of Dryden's poems through a survey of the religious and political climate of the seventeenth century. I juxtapose Dryden's possible poetic intents in writing the poems with Handel's response to those intents. After offering an interpretive reading of the poems and the music I consider the evolution and significance of the myth of St. Cecilia as musical patroness in early modern England as well as her influence on both men. I also consider Handel's use of fugue in each work, a compositional tact which allowed him to circumscribe the works as quasi-religious. I argue that Handel understood Dryden's literary stature and used his semi-sacred poems to explore the divide of sacred and secular entertainment in England. </p><p> My study indicates that Handel approached "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day" with a greater degree of compositional caution and diffidence than seen in his setting of "Alexander's Feast," thereby possibly honoring Dryden's wish that music should remain a "sensible" art with textual clarity of primary concern. In <i>Alexander's Feast</i>, however, Handel treats the dramatic personae with a sort of inventive wit and pathos that seems lacking in <i>A Song for St. Cecilia's Day</i>. In tracing the evolution and reception of these poems from Dryden's pen to Handel's settings of them, I note how Dryden's words reflect the anxieties of his age regarding the rise of music as an independent entity. Handel's response to this anxiety and the way in which his work was embraced by the English public indicate a major shift in eighteenth-century thought regarding the status of music. <i> Alexander's Feast</i> and <i>A Song for St. Cecilia's Day</i> embody Handel's early creative exploits as he sought, artistically and commercially, to broach the divide of musical entertainment deemed sacred and secular. </p>

<p> A group of early modern German prints related to relic displays, reliquaries, and collecting, though explored by Heinrich Otte in the mid-1800s, has been ignored in recent art historical literature. Though references to the various prints appear in texts on social, cultural, and religious history, a more in-depth consideration of the works is warranted. This thesis, as a preliminary step, categorizes the prints into two sub-groups, narrative and index. It further utilizes the intriguing relationships embodied in the prints to trace societal and cultural changes, including the rise of event reporting, collecting and organization of knowledge, and changes in religious practices.</p>

This dissertation attempts to determine the intellectual, cultural, and social contributions of the European Freemasons who corresponded with, traveled to, or lived and worked in Russia. My study is based on the assumption that eighteenth-century Freemasonry was one of the structures through which the ideas about nature, social order, and science contributed to the formation of a public sphere. Despite Freemasonry's well established presence and, as I argue, instrumental influence on Russia, no academic study along the lines of contextual intellectual history has been undertaken for the study of the transmission of ideas between the European and Russian lodges. Freemasonry, an institution that found response and operated in both European and Russian contexts, provides a unique vantage point for a reconstruction of the intellectual milieu of the society, within which people discussed, disputed, and put into practice ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment. Freemasons in Russia "worked" to adapt various Western models to fit the Russian developmental needs. This fusion of different traditions and concepts is the most original aspect of the Russian movement. In my analysis of several interconnected themes---the creation of a public sphere, Westernization, transmission of ideas, and the transition from the Enlightenment to Romanticism---I organize the chapters of this dissertation around two most important transformations: of Russia and of the Enlightenment. During the course of the century, Freemasons in Russia departed from the original cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment, chose different forms of Freemasonry, and gradually became more involved with in the concept of Russia as a separate national entity. By the end of the eighteenth century, while being closely allied with the intellectual and educational strivings of the Enlightenment, they began producing their own negations of some Enlightenment ideas, providing a transition to the sentimentalism.

The Royal Commissions on the Laws of Marriage and Divorce, 1850-1853 and 1909-1912, are the foundation of this survey of changing public and parliamentary attitudes toward marriage and divorce in England. Religious opinion carried great authority in the 1853 Commission and the parliamentary debates which produced the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. This Act formalized the traditional Parliamentary procedure for divorce, and also legitimized the double standard of sexual behavior. After 1857, religious objectors to reform steadily lost ground, so that in 1912 they carried no weight with the Commissioners and did not, in the end, prevent further extension of the laws of divorce. The public was always divided over the issue, but the evidence shows a growing majority in support of equal grounds for women as well as extended grounds for both sexes as the century progressed. Changes in other areas of law, especially property law, made the double standard ever more contradictory to the advancing status of women in English society.

The Sporazum (Agreement) of 1939 sought to unify Yugoslavia against the threat of foreign aggression by establishing a basis for the resolution of the Croatian question. It failed to achieve its immediate goal of Yugoslav unity because it proved a flawed mechanism for the fundamental reorganization of the state. The agreement's tentative provisions for resolving the interdependent problems of state organization, territorial demarcation, and free parliamentary elections provided no adequate basis for their consensual resolution. In actuality, however, the Sporazum's provisional nature did not cause the ensuing impasse so much as it resulted from the gridlock of conflicting goals which marked the previous century of Serbian and Croatian national development. The very real danger of Axis attack played a major role in the Sporazum's development and eventual failure; however, the foreign threat is more correctly viewed as one agent of the agreement's failure, rather than as its root cause.

Riefenstahl's career is examined through criticism which only allows two images: Riefenstahl as a Nazi film propagandist or Riefenstahl as a pure artist. My research shows that Riefenstahl is a complex person; therefore, it is impossible to place her into categories. Through her memoirs, Die Macht der Bilder, Das Blaue Licht, Triumph des Willens, Olympia, Tiefland, her Nuba material, and her underwater work it becomes clear that her career must be examined within the context of its time. Her films and photographs are considered for their artistic qualities as well as for their innovative elements.

Women in the medieval English law courts have too often been regarded as passive objects of legal restrictions. Their true position in the courts is best revealed by their own actions as seen in the plea rolls, the records of proceedings in the royal courts. A study of only one form of legal action gives a limited view of women's prospects; this study explores both civil and criminal actions in order to determine the true extent both of the restrictions on women and the accomplishments they were able to make. In the civil law, actions of right highlight the additional restrictions placed on women by the distinctive patterns of sharing by which women held land, as well as the pervasive interest of males in women's landholding. The widow's actions of dower, however, strongly favored her by removing some of the defendant's advantages of delay and choice of proof; the result was that widows won over seventy per cent of the cases they brought to a conclusion. Even here, however, there was a small but growing male presence. In the criminal law, women who complained of rape, though they fared most poorly of all women at law, were only slightly worse off than were male victims of wounding, the only other non-fatal crime against the person, and were active in restoring any loss to their marriageability the rape might have caused. Women who brought other criminal charges, on the other hand, found the court so sympathetic that it overrode its own stated principles to aid them. Though more subject to more restrictions than has been realized, women were capable of more activity on their own behalf than has previously been imagined. There were women who overcame all the obstacles the law could place in their way; in some areas women were favored by the court in unexpected ways; and throughout the courts women were using the system to win from it more than, on the face of things, the system was ever prepared to grant them.

John of Biclar, a Gothic abbot (later bishop) in sixth-century Spain, wrote a chronicle in Latin for the years A.D. 567 to 590 in the tradition of Christian chronicles begun by Eusebius of Caesarea. He records a period of political consolidation of the Spanish peninsula under the Arian Visigothic king, Leovigild, as well as events during the reigns of the contemporary Roman emperors. John's accomplishment is unusual for a Goth at this time, as is his education in Greek and Latin, received during a stay of seventeen years in Constantinople. John's Chronicle reflects ideas from his predecessors (Victor of Tunnuna and Prosper of Aquitaine) as well as Byzantine and Gothic influences. An English translation of the Chronicle is included in this study.