This thesis places Chaucer within the tradition of philosophical poetry that begins in Plato and extends through classical and medieval Latin culture. In this Platonic tradition, poetry is a self-reflexive epistemological practice that interrogates the conditions of art in general. As such, poetry as metapoetics takes itself as its own object of inquiry in order to reinforce and generate its own definitions without regard to extrinsic considerations. It attempts to create a poetic-knowledge proper instead of one that is dependant on other modes for meaning. The particular manner in which this is expressed is according to the idea of the loss of the Golden Age. In the Augustinian context of Chaucer’s poetry, language, in its literal and historical signifying functions is an effect of the noetic fall and a deformation of an earlier symbolism. The Chaucerian poems this thesis considers concern themselves with the solution to a historical literary lament for language’s fall, a solution that suggests that the instability in language can be overcome with reference to what has been lost in language. The chapters are organized to reflect the medieval Neoplatonic ascensus. The first chapter concerns the Pardoner’s Old Man and his relationship to the literary history of Tithonus in which the renewing of youth is ironically promoted in order to perpetually delay eternity and make the current world co-eternal to the coming world. In the Miller’s Tale, more aggressive narrative strategies deploy the machinery of atheism in order to make a god-less universe the sufficient grounds for the transformation of a fallen and contingent world into the only world whatsoever. The Manciple’s Tale’s opposite strategy leaves the world intact in its current state and instead makes divine beings human. Phoebus expatriates to earth and attempts to co-mingle it with heaven in order to unify art and history into a single monistic experience. Finally, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale acts as ars poetica for the entire Chaucerian Performance and undercuts the naturalistic strategies of the first three poems by a long experiment in the philosophical conflict between art and history. By imagining art and history as epistemologically antagonistic it attempts to subdue in a definitive manner poetic strategies that would imagine human history as the necessary knowledge-condition for poetic language.

Between 1648 CE and 1666 CE, news, rumours, and theories about the messiah and the Lost Tribes of Israel were disseminated amongst diverse populations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Employing a world history methodology, this thesis follows three sets of such narratives that were spread through the American colonies, England, the Dutch Republic, the Italian peninsula and the Ottoman Empire, connecting people separated by linguistic, religious, national, and continental divides. This dissertation starts by situating this transmission within a broader context that dates back to 1492 CE and then traces the three-stage process in which eschatological constructs originating in the Americas in the 1640s were transmitted across Europe to the Levant in the 1650s, preparing the minds of Jews and Christians for the return of these ideas from the Ottoman Empire in the 1660s. In this manner, this study seeks to make three contributions to the existing literature. It brings together often isolated historiographies, it unearths fresh archival sources, and it provides a new conceptual framework. Overall, it argues that one cannot understand the growth of apocalyptic tension that reached its peak in 1666 without examining the major historical events and processes that began in 1492 and affected Jews, Christians, and Muslims across the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds.

This study examines the role of history in the writings of the English deists, a group of heterodox religious controversialists who were active from the last quarter of the seventeenth century until the middle of the eighteenth century. Its main sources are the published works of the deists and their opponents, but it also draws, where possible, on manuscript sources. Not all of the deists were English (one was Irish and another was of Welsh extraction), but the term ‘English Deists’ has been used on the grounds that the majority of deists were English and that they published overwhelmingly in England and in English. It shows that the deists not only disagreed with their orthodox opponents about the content of sacred history, but also about the relationship between religious truth and historical evidence. Chapter 1 explains the entwining of theology and history in early Christianity, how the connection between them was understood by early modern Christians, and how developments in orthodox learning set the stage for the appearance of deism in the latter decades of the seventeenth century. Each of the following three chapters is devoted to a different line of argument which the deists employed against orthodox belief. Chapter 2 examines the argument that certain propositions were meaningless, and therefore neither true nor false irrespective of any historical evidence which could be marshalled in their support, as it was used by John Toland and Anthony Collins. Chapter 3 traces the argument that the actions ascribed to God in sacred history might be unworthy of his goodness, beginning with Samuel Clarke’s first set of Boyle Lectures and then progressing through the writings of Thomas Chubb, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Morgan, and William Warburton. Chapter 4 charts the decline of the category of certain knowledge in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the rise of probability theory, and the effect of these developments on the deists’ views about the reliability of historical evidence. Chapter 5 is a case-study, which reads Anthony Collins’s Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724) in light of the findings of the earlier chapters. Finally, a coda provides a conspectus of the state of the debate in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, focusing on the work of four writers: Peter Annet, David Hume, Conyers Middleton, and Edward Gibbon.

This thesis is a cultural history of the early Fabian Society, focusing on the decades between 1884, the Society’s inaugural year, and 1914. The canonical view is that ‘Fabianism,’ which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the ‘doctrine and principles of the Fabian Society,’ is synonymous with State socialism and bureaucratic ‘efficiency.’ By bringing the methods of cultural history to bear on the Society’s founding members and decades, this thesis reveals that ‘Fabianism’ was in fact used as a dynamic metonymy, not a fixed doctrine, which signified a range of cultural, and even literary, meanings for British commentators in the 1890s and 1900s (Part 1). Further, by expanding the scope of traditional histories of the Fabian Society, which conventionally operate within political and economic sub-fields and focus on the Society’s ‘official’ literature, to include a close examination of the broader discursive context in which ‘Fabianism’ came into being, this thesis sets out to recover the symbolic aspects of the Fabians’ efforts to negotiate what ‘Fabianism’ meant to the English reading public. The Fabians’ conspicuous leadership in the modern education debates and the liberal fight for a ‘free stage,’ and their solidarity with the international political émigrés living in London at the turn of the twentieth century all contribute to this revised perspective on who the founding Fabians were, what they saw themselves as trying to achieve, and where the Fabian Society belonged—and was perceived to belong—in relation to British politics, culture, and society (Part 2). The original contribution of this thesis is the argument that the Fabians explicitly and implicitly evoked Matthew Arnold as a precursor in their efforts to articulate a kind of Fabian—latterly social-democratic—liberalism and a public vocation that balanced English liberties and the duty of the State to provide the ‘best’ for its citizens in education and in culture, as in politics.

Through close textual analysis of 20^th century Czech anthropological texts from the Revivalist and Socialist periods and contemporary social research conducted after the Velvet Revolution, I demonstrate certain prominent discourses of identity developed in early Bohemian anthropology and their continuities in present day popular discourses. In each period, identity is deeply intertwined with teleological theories of history with Czech populations at the apex of cultural evolutionary development. In the Revivalist period this apex was believed to be the democratic nation state, transitioning to a Marxist nation state in the Socialist period, and in the contemporary period is conceived of as a neoliberal nation state. A major function of anthropology in the Revivalist and Socialist periods was to legitimate either period’s respective teleological theory and Czech possession of relevant values as 'objective' and 'natural' fact, a general mode of discourse which continued in the contemporary period in numerous editorials in the 1990s on the advantages of capitalism. The contemporary manifestation has particularly noteworthy consequences for the Roma minority, which I argue has provided Czech discourses with an ethnic category 'anti-thetical' to their own identity, providing a 'repository' for negative Czech self-stereotypes emerging from collaboration in the Socialist period.

This thesis provides a fresh investigation of a collection of Roman imperial biographies conventionally known as the 'Historia Augusta'. The thesis supports the authenticity of the texts included in this corpus, in particular the claims they make about their dates, authorship, and scope, through philological, literary, prosopographical, and historical arguments. It shows that this corpus of texts, if the main conclusions are accepted, potentially improves our understanding of the tetrarchic-Constantinian era. It also explores the wider implications for the historiography of the fourth century; the transmission and formation of multi-author corpora in antiquity and the middle ages. It also suggests that the canon of Latin imperial biographies be widened. The thesis has two parts. Part I explores the actual state of the corpus, its textual transmission, and relation to other texts. It shows that the ancient and medieval paratexts presented the corpus as a collection of imperial biographies. The paratexts are compatible with the authorial statements in the main text. It then explores the corpus' medieval transmission, and the interest medieval scholars had in such texts. This part suggests that the corpus’s current state explains well the inconsistencies found in it. Finally, it shows that words and phrases, once thought peculiar to the corpus and the holy grail of the forgery argument, are intertextual links to earlier texts. Part II explores chronological statements and historical episodes relevant to the Diocletianic-Constantinan period. It establishes the actual dates of each author, and suggests that the confusion found in these biographies is similar to that of other contemporaries. The few apostrophes are shown to be authentic, and the historical and prosopographical passages are shown to represent, and improve our understanding of, the zeitgeist and history of the period. The final conclusion weaves the various arguments together, and emphasises the authenticity and significance of the corpus' texts. It suggests separating the composition of the texts from the disinterested formation of the corpus as a whole, as part of a new hypothesis and further lines of enquiry.

During the eighteenth century, the dominant rhetorical and explanatory power of civic humanism was gradually challenged by the rise of a new organising language in political economy. Political economic thought permitted radically different descriptions of what laudable private and public behaviour might be: it proposed that self-interest was often more beneficial to society at large than public-mindedness; that luxury had its uses and might not be a threat to liberty and political integrity; that landownership was no particular guarantee of virtue or disinterest; and that there was nothing inherently superior about frugality and self-sufficiency. These new ideas about civil society formed the intellectual basis of a large body of verse written during the long eighteenth century (at mid-century in particular), in which poets engaged enthusiastically with political economic arguments and defences of commercial activity, and celebrated the wealth and plenty of Britain as a modern trading nation. The work of my thesis is to examine a contradiction in the way in which these political economic ideas were handled. Forward-looking and confident poetry on public themes did not develop pioneering forms to suit the modernity of its outlook: instead, poets articulated such themes in verse by appropriating and reframing traditional genres, which in some cases involved engaging with inherited moral values and philosophical preferences entirely at odds with the intellectual material in hand. This inventive kind of generic revision is the central interest of the thesis. It aims to describe a number of problematic meeting points between new political economic thought and handed-down poetic formulae, and it will focus attention on some of the ways in which poets manipulated the forms and tropes they inherited in order to manage – and make the most of – the resulting contradictions.

Au carrefour de la sociologie des élites, de l’histoire intellectuelle et des études de réception, cette recherche explore les mécanismes par lesquels les discours théoriques et les idées politiques circulent entre pays, entre disciplines, et entre mondes savants et politiques. Elle prend pour objet la réception, dans les champs intellectuel et politique français, de la théorie de la justice sociale de John Rawls et du vaste débat ouvert par celle-ci dans le monde anglophone à partir de 1971. Contribution à une histoire sociale des idées politiques contemporaines, elle combinel’observation in situ de séminaires d’experts, de colloques universitaires, l’ethnographie de discussions en ligne, avecune enquête statistique, et l’étude d’archives administratives, universitaires et éditoriales. La description desréférences à Rawls, Sen ou Walzer dans les publications académiques, la presse, les programmes politiques, l’actionpublique ou les programmes scolaires fonctionne ainsi comme un analyseur de reconfigurations plus globales, comme la domination accrue de l’anglais sur les échanges culturels transnationaux, le déclin des référentiels marxistes et keynésiens au sein de la gauche française, ou la remise en cause du paradigme structuraliste au sein des sciences humaines et sociales françaises. On montre comment les appropriations des « théories de la justice » et leurs circulations se rapportent à la position occupée par leurs médiateurs et la structure du milieu d’interconnaissance qu’ils constituent. Alors que la sociologie de la réception a souvent négligé l’analyse du contenu des appropriations, on montre en outre comment une lecture sociologique de celles-ci permet d’expliquer des affinités ressenties par ces médiateurs pour la pensée de Rawls, par delà les frontières nationales, disciplinaires et sectorielles / Spanning the sociology of elites, intellectual history, and reception studies, this research explores how theories and political ideas are circulated across countries and disciplines, as well as between the academic and political worlds. Starting in 1971, it studies the French intellectual and political reception of John Rawls’s theory of social justice, and more broadly of the debates it sparked in the English-speaking world. Contributing to a historical sociology of political ideas, this dissertation combines ethnography in think-tanks and academic conferences, as well as in online discussions, with a statistical survey, and the study of archives of publishers, academics and administrations. Through the exploration of references to Rawls, Sen or Walzer in academia, the press, political platforms or curricula, we show how this reception is an analyzer of broader changes, such as the growing dominance of English in transnational cultural exchanges, the declining recourse to Marxist and Keynesian paradigms in the French Left, and the questioning of centrality of structuralism in social sciences and the humanities in France. It shows that the very diverse ways in which “theories of justice” have been appropriated and circulated in France depend on the social location of their mediators, and on how their networks are structured. Whereas the sociology of reception has often overlooked the internal analysis of appropriations, this research shows how analyzing them sociologically helps explain why these mediators felt elective affinities with Rawls’s thought, despite national, disciplinary and sectoral boundaries

No description available.

L’étude de la grammaire arabe est restée trop longtemps ancrée à la période fondatrice de cette discipline (IIᵉ-IVᵉ/VIIIᵉ-Xᵉ siècles). Cette thèse veut apporter une contribution sur des aires moins parcourues, telles la période post-classique et les périphéries du monde arabo-musulman ou, plus précisément, ses marges occidentales. Le point de départ est représenté par un Persan du IVᵉ/Xᵉ siècle installé à Damas, ʾAbū al-Qāsim al-Zaǧǧāǧī, un des grammairiens arabes les plus connus aujourd’hui mais n’ayant pas joui, à son époque, d’un succès immédiat. Ce succès s’est construit petit à petit grâce à l’un de ses traités, le Kitāb al-Ǧumal fī al-naḥw. Après une présentation du grammairien et du texte en question, cette étude essaie de suivre la diffusion du Ǧumal à travers les régions et les époques depuis le moment de sa rédaction. Cette recherche mène en al-Andalus : alors que cet ouvrage semble être délaissé en Orient, il est adopté par les savants andalous comme l’un des textes de base pour les études grammaticales. L’analyse des chaînes de transmission du Ǧumal et la recherche de ses commentaires montrent que ce traité n’a pas seulement été le texte grammatical principal dans cette périphérie du monde arabo-musulman, mais qu’il a aussi fini par devenir une sorte de miroir de l’histoire et de l’identité andalouses. En commençant le voyage au IVᵉ/Xᵉ siècle, il est possible de parcourir l’histoire de ce texte de manière presque ininterrompue jusqu’à nos jours : d’Orient en al-Andalus au moment de la formation de la culture andalouse, puis d’al-Andalus au Maghreb (et en Orient) avec les vagues d’émigration andalouses, pour finir avec son editio princeps de 1927 à Alger. / Scholars in the Arabic Grammatical Tradition have mainly been focusing their attention on the formative stage of the Arabic grammatical theory (2nd-4th/8th-10th centuries). This dissertation aims at broadening the scope and is intended to contribute to our knowledge of this discipline at the post-classical period and in the western periphery of the Islamic world.The starting point of research is represented by a 4th/10th century grammarian of Persian origin who settled in Damascus: ʾAbū al-Qāsim al-Zaǧǧāǧī. Nowadays he is one of the best-known Arabic grammarians, but that was not the case in the beginning. Indeed his fame grew steadily thanks to one of his treatises, the Kitāb al-Ǧumal fī al-naḥw. The presentation of al-Zaǧǧāǧī and of his book sets the frame for the study, whose main focus is to trace the history of this text through time and space. This enquiry leads to al-Andalus: whereas the Ǧumal seemed to be abandoned in the Islamic East, it was adopted by Andalusian scholars as one the main texts for grammatical studies.The analysis of its chains of transmission and the presentation of all of its commentaries show not only that this treatise was the main grammatical text in this periphery of the Islamic world, but even that it came to be a sort of mirror of Andalusian history and identity.The journey of this book starts at the 4th/10th century and may be followed almost uninterruptedly until today: imported to al-Andalus from the Islamic East during the formative stage of Andalusian culture, it was then brought to Maghreb thanks to Andalusian emigration flows and was eventually edited in Algiers in 1927.