Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of History, 2006. / "Title from dissertation home page (viewed July 9, 2007)." Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-08, Section: A, page: 3118. Adviser: Dyan Elliott.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Anthropology, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-06, Section: A, page: 2211. Advisers: Anya P. Royce; Eduardo Brondizio. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 21, 2007)."

<p> This thesis explores the motivations behind the American and Foreign Christian Union&rsquo;s missions to Italy during the American Civil War. The AFCU was a missionary organization founded in New York City in 1849 with the ambitious goal of ridding the world of Roman Catholicism. It was born during a time of nativist fervor when American Protestants saw Catholic immigrants as a threat to American democracy. The AFCU believed they could solve the problem of Catholic immigrants by converting the Catholic world to Protestantism, starting with Italy. The leaders of the AFCU believed the world was engaged in a struggle between Liberty and Tyranny. The war against the Confederacy and the fight to free Italians from the tyrannical Pope were different fronts of the same war. The AFCU entire unsuccessful as a missionary organization. They converted virtually no one. However, their publications were essential to helping American Protestants shape their identity.</p><p>

Created in 1806 by Napoleon, the conseil des prud'hommes were municipal labour arbitration boards established to settle workplace differences between workers and employers in the textile industry amicably and through conciliation. The northern French town of Tourcoing was a comparatively conservative city, where radical politics and confrontational labour relations found little support throughout the nineteenth century. Therefore, the arbitration boards known as the conseil des prud'hommes could be expected to have been a popular method of settling workplace conflicts. Initially, only employers could elect and be board members; reform in 1848 extended these rights to male workers. Other important changes occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century that could potentially affect labour relations: the legalization of strikes in 1864 and the legalization of unions two decades later. This thesis explores the impact these changes had on the use of Tourcoing's conseil des prud'hommes, as well as the outcome of cases brought to their attention between 1848 and 1894. It argues that, although the boards were underused in this period, the presence of workers on the boards was beneficial to Tourcoing's working class, particularly female and unskilled workers, who found themselves losing less and compromising more in order to settle their workplace disputes. However, the growing emphasis on compromise did not please employers who began to abandon the boards immediately after the 1848 reform. The influence of unions and socialist groups in the late 1880s and early 1890s reinforced this trend not only among employers, but also among female and unskilled workers who found the increasingly confrontational attitudes at the boards an obstacle to settling cases through conciliation. As a result, both of these groups of workers also began to turn their backs on the prud'hommes.

This dissertation examines the memorialization of dramatic action in seventeenth-century sculpture, and its implications for the representation of sanctity. Illusions of transformation and animation enhanced the human tendency to respond to three-dimensional images in interpersonal terms, vivifying the commemorative connotations that predominate in contemporary writing on the medium. The first chapter introduces the concept of seeming actuality, a juxtaposition of the affective appeal of real presence and the ideality of the classical statua that appeared in the work of Stefano Maderno, and was enlivened by Gianlorenzo Bernini into paradoxes of permanent instantaneity. This new mystical sculpture was mimetic, not because it depicted events narrated elsewhere, but imitated mutable, time-bound, spiritual activity with arresting immediacy in the here and now. No other form of image could so fully evoke the mingling of human immanence and divine transcendence that was the fundamental basis of sanctity. Chapters Two through Four closely analyze the sculptural construction hagiographic identities for Ludovica Albertoni, Alessandro Sauli, and John of the Cross, and their interplay with political, social, and religious factors. The discovery of connections between marble and wooden statuary further broadens our understanding of the expressive range of the medium. The homology between saintly and sculptural exemplarity reveals a far more dynamic, interactive, and rhetorical conception of the medium than is portrayed in early modern theoretical writings.

This dissertation uses scientific analysis of pottery to examine social and economic process at a Phoenician colony in the Bay of Cádiz, Spain. Previous research on the Phoenician colonial economies has neglected social and diachronic dynamics, due to a lack of adequate data and proper theoretical frameworks. I address these shortcomings by examining the relative effect of the colonial encounter on Phoenician and indigenous potters, and studying changes in the organization of production over the duration of the Phoenician colonization. I accomplish this using a ‘colonial economic history,’ which combines a critical postcolonial perspective, anthropological methods for the study of production and knowledge transmission, and scientific (chemical, microscopic) data. I apply this approach to 169 pottery fragments from the site of El Castillo de Doña Blanca (CDB). The sample is structured to allow a comparison of Phoenician and indigenous practices, and of four chronological phases spanning the 8th to 6th centuries BCE. Visual examination of the samples combined with Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA), portable X-Ray Fluorescence spectrometry (pXRF), and petrographic microscopy provides a basis for identifying technological practices and trends related to raw material use, vessel formation, and surface treatment. These in turn are used to infer the organization of production, and continuity in knowledge transmission among potters. The results shed light on the effect that the colonial environment had on the activities of both indigenous and Phoenician producers, as well as on CDB’s economic development, between c. 750 and 550 BCE. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation examines how the nineteenth-century engagement with medieval Europe changed modern Germany. Drawing from archival and printed primary material, I reconstruct how the Middle Ages gained new explanatory relevance as the origins of nineteenth-century German institutions and phenomena. I consider the historical interpretation of the medieval world at its broadest, not limited to scholarly debate, but also as it encompassed fiction, art, architecture, music, social science, law, and politics. Each chapter examines a figure drawn from these fields and each also moves chronologically through the century. I begin with the historian and statesman Barthold Niebuhr, who invoked the German Middle Ages as a source of patriotism and as an alternative to the Roman legal tradition. I next discuss the politician and architectural theorist August Reichensperger, who used the perceived regionalism of the medieval past as a means to resist Prussian centralization. My third chapter focuses on the intersection of historical research and fiction in the work of Victor von Scheffel, before I then turn to the role of the Medieval in Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. The final chapter of my dissertation treats how assumptions about the medieval world affected the frameworks that early sociologists used. I argue that nineteenth-century conceptions and uses of the Middle Ages retained mythical or profoundly transhistorical elements, even as historians and philologists made the period more historically legible. Furthermore, the protagonists of my dissertation read nineteenth-century categories and concerns onto the Middle Ages. Their agendas shaped perceptions of the past, and, more importantly, influenced the structures and norms of the nineteenth century. These five figures fundamentally believed, however, that their distortions accurately depicted the historical record. I attend to this belief, that their portrayals of the past were true, rather than purely opportunistic bids to shape the present. I conclude by exploring how only in the mid twentieth century did medieval historians – specifically, Ernst Kantorowicz – begin to examine the influence of nineteenth-century vocabularies and frameworks on the formation of their field. / History

This dissertation describes how desiring subjects make devotional worlds in times of radical change. I argue that what is centrally at stake for people who pass through the Şumuleu Ciuc (Hungarian: Csíksomlyó) pilgrimage site in Transylvania, Romania is the question of what makes a good Catholic in relation to the Virgin Mary. Disputes about this question revolve around notions of the desiring subject: What role should forms of sexual, material, and affective self-interest – or lack thereof – play in the life of Mary’s devotees and the life of the Mother of God herself? This formulation of desire and change as intersubjective and relational processes involving divine and human beings breaks new ground among dominantly sociological and symbolic studies of religious change in contemporary Eastern Europe. Chapter One broadly outlines 20th and 21st century social transformations in the Ciuc valley. Chapter Two explores the annual Pentecost pilgrimage event as a ritual intricately caught up in everyday processes of emerging post-socialist masculine subject formation. Chapter Three tells the story of a young woman’s vision of the Virgin Mary that resulted in the installation of a new statue and shrine at the pilgrimage site. Where other scholars have treated similar events in terms of abstract political processes of resacralizing and nationalizing post-socialist space and time, I seek to re-site the “politics” of the shrine in the tension between religious experience and semiotic form. Chapter Four blends phenomenological and pragmatist theories of materiality to address recent infrastructural transformations to the pilgrimage site as efforts to “remodel Mary’s home.” One set of new structures outside at the shrine materialize and enact the ambivalent search for a post-socialist lay Catholic leading class that I introduced in Chapter One. Chapter Five takes up my previous concern with gender in order to examine women’s Marian healing practices in secular post-socialist hospitals. Chapter Six beings with a consideration of the intersubjective politics of storytelling and the new role played at Csíksomlyó by the global Catholic radio network, The World Family of Radio Maria.

A Firestone of Divine Love serves as capstone of two years Jesuit ministry and fifteen of academic study. It extends nine articles into a book project to be published by Gorgias Press. Its original thesis appeared as: In the last decades of the sixteenth century the Society of Jesus prohibited its members the reading of several mystical texts. A theme that cuts across these texts is the use of erotic language to describe the relationship between the soul and God. I argue that behind the prohibition lies the fear that erotic desire would be a threat to a Jesuit masculine identity. “Heterosexual Melancholia and Mysticism in the Early Society of Jesus” Theology & Sexuality 13/2, 1/2007 Working across the disciplines of History of Christianity and Women, Gender and Sexuality studies, I integrate these articles and deepen the original thesis within its 16th century Hispanic context. Chapter One introduces as historical setting the late medieval spirituality that inspired the first Jesuits to compose their order’s earliest spiritual texts, exemplifying it with the mystical doctrines of annihilation and deification. Chapter Two develops the first half of the deepened thesis: late medieval mysticism offered Jesuits of the first generation an erotic discourse that served as a space for grieving loss, even when within the confines of a gestating Jesuit masculine ideal. Chapter Three develops the second half. Jesuits of the second generation succumbed to the popular views dominating in a late 16th c. Spanish atmosphere permeated by the Inquisition's association of heterodox spirituality with women, racial minorities, and sodomites. It links the 1573 edict against mysticism with the 1599 decree against the admission of racial minorities, the de-emphasis on the importance of women's ministry, and the condemnation of erotic interpretations of Christian bridal language as potentially moving Jesuits too close to feminized racial undesirables. Finally, Chapter Four explores the aftermath of 1599 and its impact on the ministry of Jesuits who, living in the margins and borderlands of the Hispanic empire, were able to preserve in their writings the tradition of Jesuit mysticism and ministry.

Abstract not available.