<p>This dissertation examines the role of Gregory I (r. 590-604 CE) in developing permanent ecclesiastical institutions under the authority of the Bishop of Rome to feed and serve the poor and the socio-political world in which he did so. Gregory's work was part culmination of pre-existing practice, part innovation. I contend that Gregory transformed fading, ancient institutions and ideas&mdash;the Imperial <i>annona</i>, the monastic soup kitchen-hospice or <i>xenodochium</i>, Christianity's "collection for the saints," Christian <i>caritas</i> more generally and Greco-Roman <i> euergetism</i>&mdash;into something distinctly ecclesiastical, indeed "papal." Although Gregory has long been closely associated with charity, few have attempted to unpack in any systematic way what Gregorian charity might have looked like in practical application and what impact it had on the Roman Church and the Roman people. I believe that we can see the contours of Gregory's initiatives at work and, at least, the faint framework of an organized system of ecclesiastical charity that would emerge in clearer relief in the eighth and ninth centuries under Hadrian I (r. 772-795) and Leo III (r. 795-816). Gregory's efforts at caritative organization had significant implications. This dissertation argues that Gregory's response to poverty and want in Rome from 590 to 604 CE permanently altered the trajectories of both ecclesiastical charity and the office that came to oversee its administration. </p>

<p> Remember, remember the Fifth of November, Gunpowder, treason, and plot,I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason,Should ever be forgot. </p><p> This verse, first recorded in Britain in the mid-1820s, makes a plea for the remembrance of November 5, 1605&mdash;the date of the discovery and suppression of a conspiracy to assassinate King James I; detonate Westminster Palace, the house of Parliament; and, ultimately, substitute the anti-Catholic monarchy of England with a protectorate that would favor the Church of Rome. In early 1606, weeks after the collapse of the Plot, the king endorsed and the Parliament passed "An Act for a Public Thanksgiving to Almighty God Every Year on the Fifth Day of November"; some sixty years later the legislative assemblies of the American colonies started doing the same. So was the official memory of "gunpowder, treason, and plot" born on both sides of the Atlantic, first as Guy Fawkes Day in England and then as Pope's Day in America. </p><p> This dissertation provides a new political history&mdash;and a new study of popular religion&mdash;in British North America and the early United States. I construct a long history of the anniversary&mdash;and the historical memory of the Plot, in a variety of texts&mdash;in early America, ca. 1605-1865. I close-read almanacs, diaries, instructionals, letters, newspapers, novels, sermons, and textbooks as a means of understanding the process by which the memory of November 5 was appropriated, reconstructed, and re-politicized. Turning to the mid-eighteenth century, I assess the influence of the Fifth on the Great Awakening and the American Revolution and vice versa. I investigate what became of November 5 after 1783, and I scrutinize the many ways in which the creative arts and the partisan press made frequent use of the memory of the events of 1605. I consider both how that memory arose in new places after the Revolution and in what ways the parties of the republic, like the crowds of the colonies, evoked the Fifth as a warning against absolutism. Finally, I examine what became of "1605" the coming, and the waging, of the American Civil War.</p>

<p> Numerous studies of anti-Catholicism in America have narrated a long dark prejudice that has plagued American society from the Colonial period to the present. A variety of interpretations for anti-Catholic sentiments and convictions have been offered, from theological to economic influences. Though many of these studies have offered invaluable insights in understanding anti-Catholic rhetoric and violence, each tends to neglect the larger anthropological realities which influence social tensions and group marginalization. By utilizing the <i>theory of human identity needs</i> as developed by Vern Neufeld Redekop, this study offers a means of interpreting anti-Catholicism from an anthropological perspective that allows for a multivalent approach to social, cultural, and communal disharmony and violence. Religion has played an important role in social and cultural tension in America. But by utilizing Redekop's human identity needs theory, it is possible to see religion's role in conjunction with other identity needs which help to form individual and communal identity. Human identity needs theory postulates that humans require a certain level of identity needs satisfaction in order to give an individual a sense of wellbeing in the world. These include, Redekop maintains, 1) meaning, 2) security, 3) connectedness, 4) recognition, and 5) action. By examining where these needs have been neglected or threatened, this study maintains one is better able to assess the variety of influences in the formation of identity, which in turn helps to foster animosity, marginalization, and possibly violence towards those individuals or groups defined as outsiders. Having been relegated as outsiders due to differing identity markers, the in group, or dominant social group, tend to perceive the outsiders as threatening if they are believed to be obstacles to the acquisition of one or more of the five identity needs categories. This study focuses on the bloody Bible Riots of 1844 as a case study for applying human identity needs theory in interpreting social violence in American history.</p>

<p> Using theories of nationalism from Anthony D. Smith, Benedict Anderson, and Barry Shenker, alterity as discussed by Kim Knott and Jonathan Z. Smith, and conversion theories from Joseph Rosenbloom, Lewis Rambo, and Andrew Buckser, this thesis examines four "snapshots" of Israelite/Jewish history for evidence of the use of conversion as a necessary component of "nation building." Periods analyzed include the Israelite Period, Post-Exilic Ezra and Nehemiah, Second Temple Hasmonean Kingdom, and the Late Antique Mishnaic Period. By analyzing primary sources and related scholarship, this thesis seeks to show that conversion is not only a necessary component of building an intentional community, but also that the early Jewish community leaders employed conversion as a means to ensure the continuity of their people and history.</p>

<p> On 17 March 1842, twenty-two women of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gathered in Nauvoo, Illinois, under the direction of their prophet, Joseph Smith, to organize a female counterpart to priesthood and patriarchal leadership. The women elected lady leaders and established a purpose: to save souls and provide relief to the poor. "We are going to do something extraordinary," said Emma Smith, first Relief Society president. "We expect pressing calls and extraordinary occasions." The Relief Society engaged in religious, charitable, economic, political, and cultural activity and initiated a new emphasis on recording, remembering, and retaining the authority of the past. </p><p> This dissertation examines the way Mormon women remembered and commemorated the Nauvoo Relief Society for the next fifty years through the lens of material culture. Hair wreaths, quilts, buildings, posters, and hand-painted poetry books illustrate the transition of Mormonism through isolation in Utah to acceptance by mainstream America, based on the way the women presented their identity and their heritage. They selected the pieces of the past that would appeal to their audience, always maintaining a memory of their Nauvoo roots. </p>

<p> In the Anglo-American world of the late 1790s, Thomas Paine's <i> The Age of Reason</i> (published in two parts) was not well received, and his volumes of Deistic theology were characterized as extremely dangerous. Over seventy replies to <i>The Age of Reason</i> appeared in Britain and the United States. It was widely criticized in the periodical literature, and it garnered Paine the reputation as a champion of irreligion. </p><p> This dissertation is a study of the rhetoric of refutation, and I focus on the replies to <i>The Age of Reason</i> that were published during Paine's lifetime (d. 1809). I pay particular attention to the ways that the replies characterized both Paine and <i>The Age of Reason</i>, and the strategies that his respondents employed to highlight and counteract its &ldquo;poison.&rdquo; To effectively refute <i>The Age of Reason</i>, Paine's respondents had to contend not only with his Deistic arguments, but also with his international reputation, his style of writing, and his intended audience. I argue that much of the driving force behind the controversy over <i> The Age of Reason</i> stems from the concern that it was geared towards the &ldquo;uneducated masses&rdquo; or the &ldquo;lower orders.&rdquo; Much of the rhetoric of the respondents therefore reflects their preoccupation with Paine's &ldquo;vulgar&rdquo; style, his use of ridicule and low-humor, his notoriety, and the perception that <i>The Age of Reason</i> was being read by common people in cheap editions. For Paine's critics, when the masses abandon their Christianity for Deism, bloody anarchy is the inevitable result, as proven by the horrors of the French Revolution.</p><p> This dissertation argues that while Paine's respondents were concerned about what he wrote in <i>The Age of Reason</i>, they were more concerned about how he wrote it, for whom he wrote it, and that Paine wrote it. Drawing on J&uuml;rgen Habermas's theories of the bourgeois public sphere, I focus on how respondents to <i>The Age of Reason</i> reveal not only their concerns and anxieties over the book, but also what their assumptions about authorial legitimacy and expectations about qualified reading audiences say about late eighteenth century print culture.</p>

<p> John Adams and Thomas Jefferson proposed that in order for republican values to flourish in the republic virtue must be cultivated in society. They believed a reasonable religion was the necessary foundation to uphold this virtue. The letters they shared suggested a rationally critiqued faith that would provide the necessary foundation for the republic, one at odds with the rising evangelical religion so popular in the republic. The first goal of this project is to examine their correspondence to show how they used enlightened principles of reason and debate to provide an intellectual inquiry into the historical perversions they perceived in their "Christian" society. For Adams and Jefferson, a properly constructed religion emerged from a series of discussions about its content. The language that they used with each other revolved around three intellectual suppositions about religion. First, the essence of understanding religion, for them, was to examine and critique religious writers, materials, and doctrines. Second, such a critique led them to question specific points of religious doctrine and to determine the accuracy or inconsistency in their faith. Third, this questioning of doctrine led them to an enlightened, well-reasoned, and reformed religious belief. </p><p> While this study speaks to the current historiography and the "culture wars" regarding religion during the Revolution presently debated in American politics, it also provides the ancient and colonial religious context into which Adams's and Jefferson's discussion may be placed. Historians must recover the theological meaning behind the religious conversations these men had with one another to explain what they meant when they chose to define themselves as "Christian." The process of recovering their faith by contextualizing the correspondence of Adams and Jefferson is the second goal of this project. </p><p> By contextualizing their correspondence, historians may decipher Adams's and Jefferson's intentions about religion. The language they use in their letters demonstrates four things. First, they viewed themselves as "real Christians," not as "Deists" or "Unitarians" or "Atheists" as they have been labeled at various stages in their lives and by historians since. Second, they were willing&mdash;though privately and only with each other&mdash;to use reason and rationality as the basis for their faith. Third, having reason and rationality as the basis for their faith, they critiqued commonly held beliefs of "Christian" society at the time discovering many of those beliefs to be corrupt. Finally, these letters indicate what they believed was an accurate understanding of the religion of their culture without any doctrinal corruption. Interpreting their letters in this context Adams and Jefferson defined religion very differently in their era: they implemented revolutionary enlightenment thinking to reassess their religious beliefs to arrive at a "rational Christianity" which, to them, represented a "purified and enlightened Christianity." Both men understood that this religion was highly contentious and problematic. The faith that emerged was a very different and unorthodox "Christianity," one that would be wholly unrecognizable and unacceptable to not only their culture, but to the cultures that followed.</p>

Recent textbook studies find the human religious heritage curiously absent from public school history textbooks, an absence perhaps explainable through the development of an ideology of progress, lying at the heart of the modern public educational establishment. This ideology achieves dominance after the Civil War. Antebellum texts, containing a fusion of classical and Judeo-Christian historical outlooks, show no consensus upon overarching historical notions of progress. These texts contain strong Biblical content, including miraculous and supernatural elements, and serve to impress upon the reader moral values of the classical/Judeo-Christian heritage, while justifying the Protestant Reformation. Progressive notions, when present, are usually derived from Christian, post-millennial outlooks. Post-bellum textbooks adopt increasingly secular notions of progress. Biblical and moral content diminish; the miraculous and supernatural virtually disappear. The theme of progress becomes the prime determinant for selecting historical content, a theme increasingly separated from religious development and increasingly linked to political and especially technological advancement.

This dissertation discusses the historical and social aspects of myth to point out the earlier maternal subtexts beneath patriarchal myths. Matriarchal myth permits us to redefine an empowered "feminine" for application to literary texts. The early and persistent worship of female deities in France has led to the periodic resurgence of matriarchal consciousness in French literature; namely, in courtly love, romanticism, and surrealism. In twentieth-century women's work in French, this matriarchal choice may still exist, although in conflict with a discordant patriarchal choice. Because of the historical situation of women in Quebec, her French heritage, and strong female models in her youth, Anne Hebert produces a "mothered," matriarchal text in Kamouraska. Her overly gynocentric narrative universe leads to an unbalanced view of the feminine and gender polarization. Hebert empowers women at the expense of men. The resultant prototype of feminine dominance ultimately resembles male mythic images of witches and vampires. Marguerite Yourcenar's exclusive upbringing by her father and her family myth of the mortal danger of childbearing influence her "fathered" text: L'Oeuvre au noir. Over-identification with the father engenders a disdain for the feminine seen in reductive female portrayal. However, while rejecting the feminine and hardening his rational self, her male protagonist experiences a compensatory resurgence in matriarchal-style consciousness. Desvignes's "parented" text, Les Noeuds d'argile, derives from her balanced childhood in the harmonious landscape of her native Bourgogne, where vestiges of a "religion de la terre" still remain. The horror of the German occupation in her teens also fueled her desire for reconstruction and balance. Desvignes creates a matriarchal man with a clear, unrepressed feminine side and a need for merger with the physical female. However, he eventually succumbs to the pressures of patriarchal society and pursues an obsessive masculine ideal which eventually kills him. Each of these novels sounds a distinctive matriarchal voice arising from the woman author's personal and national origins. Whether strident and exclusivistic, camouflaged and muted, or in harmonious balance, this matriarchal voice is a mythic choice and a gauge of her vision of gender.

The confidence of Confederate evangelicals in the support of providence inspired southern clergymen to demand the transformation of the independent South into a nineteenth-century covenant nation--a "Confederate Israel." Such a Confederate Israel was needed to impede the spread of liberalism in the South and in the world, and also to serve as prelude to the establishment of the millennial kingdom. Nevertheless, disillusionment--due to military defeat, the spread of moral and political corruption in the Confederate States, and the failure of attempts to reform slavery--compelled clergymen to announce the establishment of a "new covenant" based upon redemptive communal suffering and an eschatological--rather than a political and temporal--vindication of the South in the plans of providence. Such an interpretation permitted the evangelical Confederate Israel to survive Appomattox and was also to provide the ultimate theological basis of the post-war cult of the Lost Cause.