This dissertation argues that Protestant Christianity provided the language through which individuals and communities created the political, social, and cultural future of the post-emancipation South. Christian arguments and organizations gave newly emancipated African Americans strong strategies for claiming political and civil rights as citizens and for denouncing racialized violence. Yet simultaneously, white southerners’ Christian claims, based in proslavery theology, created justifications for white supremacist political power and eventually for segregation. This project presents a new history of the creation of segregation from the hopes and uncertainties of emancipation through a close analysis of the Mississippi River Valley region of Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Tennessee. Religious arguments furnished foundations for the work of building a new South, whether in newly formed African American churches and schools, local political debates, or white supremacist organizing. Studying both African American and white Christians during the years when churches quickly became racially separated allows this work to explain how groups across lines of race and denomination responded to each other’s religious, cultural, and political strategies. This dissertation centers these communities’ theological ideas and religious narratives within a critical analysis of race, gender, and political power. Analyzing theology as the intellectual domain of non-elites as well as those in power allows me to demonstrate the ways that religious ideas helped to construct categories of race and gender and to determine who was worthy of civil and political rights. This work draws upon a wide range of archival sources, including previously unexamined material. This dissertation advances several scholarly conversations. It offers the first sustained examination of the life of proslavery theology after emancipation. Rather than presuming that white southern Christians abandoned such arguments after emancipation, this project shows that white Christians reconfigured these claims to create religious justifications for segregation. Within these renegotiated religious claims about social order, African American and white Christians made religious arguments about racial violence, ranging from justifying the violence to arguing that it was antithetical to Christian identity. During the same years, African Americans argued that they deserved civil and political rights both because they were citizens and because they were Christians. This linking of identities as citizens and as Christians provided a vital political strategy in the midst of post-emancipation violence and the uncertain future of African Americans’ rights. Through its five chronologically-structured chapters, this project demonstrates Protestant Christianity’s central role in African American and white southerners’ political lives from the Civil War to the turn of the twentieth century. / Religion, Committee on the Study of

The topic of divine kingship in Mesopotamia, and in the Ur III period (ca. 2112-2004 B.C.E.) in particular, has been the subject of studies focused on aspects such as its ideology, rhetoric, political motivation, and place in the history of religion. This dissertation is concerned with more pragmatic aspects of the phenomenon, and investigates what, if any, effect the institution of divine kingship had on day-to-day life. The Ur III period was selected both because four of its five kings were deified during their lifetime, and over 95,000 administrative, i.e. non-ideologically oriented, records dating to this period are available for analysis. The main focus of this thesis is on cult, the essential signifier of divinity in that society, and, specifically, on the manner in which the cult of the deified king was established, extended, and popularized. The primary source utilized was the Base de Datos de Textos Neo-Sumerios (BDTNS). The first chapter demonstrates that at the center of the cult of the deified king were effigies that underwent numerous ritual treatments and were housed in both their own and in other deities' temples, and that in these respects the king's cult was identical to those of the traditional gods. A list of the individual statues and their locations is provided, in chronological order of attestation. Areas where ramifications of the king's godhood might be identified outside of cult are also addressed. The chapter is bracketed by discussions of divine kingship in the immediately preceding (Sargonic) and following (Isin-Larsa) periods, for comparative purposes. The second chapter provides evidence that processions of cult statues by boat and chariot, and offering before them at specific festivals and sites outside of temples were relatively common events. As cult images of the deified kings were among those so treated, it is clear that the Ur III kings saw the benefit of these practices, with their concomitant festivities, banquets and entertainment, for publicizing their own cult among the largely illiterate populace. In addition, I analyzed the movements and activities of the king himself, as recorded in the administrative archives. These show that the kings were frequently in the public eye as they traveled, mainly by boat, among the cities of southern Babylonia, to ritual events both in- and outside of temple settings. The third chapter addresses the issue of the effect of the concerted efforts to publicize the king's cult on the population at large. settling on onomastics as the best proxy for determining the public's reaction available. Two hundred and sixty-seven individual names in which the name of the deified king was used as a theophoric element are identified, with Šulgi, the second Ur III king and the first of that dynasty to be deified during during his life, the most popular honorée by far. I examine the statements that the holders of these names are making about a particular divine king, and show that virtually all such names have a counterpart incorporating the name of a traditional deity. I also provide a representative sampling of the people who were given or had adopted such names in terms of their sex, ethnicity, and job title or function in order to determine if this practice was limited to a particular demographic, and conclude that it was widespread, affecting all levels of society. From this I deduce that the deliberate efforts of the kings to popularize their cult may be termed successful. An appendix contains two tables summarizing the onomastic material. Table A lists all of the names in which the king's was incorporated as the theophoric element, along with their translation. Table B provides the data that was used to differentiate among the individual persons who bore one of the names listed in Table A. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation examines the explicit and implicit currency of indigenous religious thought on political, moral, and social formations from precolonial through colonial to postcolonial Ghana. It advances new answers to debates in Ghana about the role, if any, indigenous religion has to play in a modern Christian-dominated public sphere that simultaneously defines itself as secular by situating these debates in the history of the suppression and appropriation of so-called “undesirable customs” and their agents by both British and Ghanaian government officials. Based on archival research (colonial reports, government records, legal documents, newspapers, diaries, etc.,) and a dozen oral interviews (with former and current politicians, indigenous religious priests, chiefs, and elders), (Un)Desirable Customs argues that despite its “unpopularity” and decline, indigenous religion critically shaped the construction of the colonial and postcolonial Ghanaian state. I highlight the inherent paradox in how the state morally and culturally stigmatized indigenous religious beliefs and practices, in an attempt to perform certain conceptions of secular modernity and Christian morality, yet, at the same time, appropriated indigenous religious rituals and symbols. These contradictory measures, I argue, are better understood as strategies of purifications that the state has enacted and continues to perform on itself in its attempt to define itself as “modern.” My study fundamentally shifts the attention from Christianity and Islam in relation to politico-moral formations to a focus on indigenous religion. This historical project complicates current scholarship on secularism in both the West and non-West. It challenges us to examine the political, ethical, and conceptual limits of secularism and religious tolerance in the modern period. My research makes clear that the debate about the place of indigenous religion was, and continues to be, couched as an issue of public morality and wellbeing. This approach to the study of indigenous religion also calls into question the longstanding perception about its irrelevance, showing how various elements of indigenous religious beliefs and practices have left their imprint on the political, moral, and social fabric of society. I also attend to how Africans, particularly traditionalists, responded to their marginalization, the appropriation of their symbols, and the changing religious landscape. This work responds to the necessity to complicate the triumphant narrative of the implacable dominance of Christianity and Islam in the African political and public sphere. / Religion, Committee on the Study of

This dissertation explores the nexus between Buddhism and literature in Japan’s early medieval period. Specifically, it elucidates the process by which forms of court literature such as Chinese-language verse (kanshi), Japanese poetry (waka), and romance tales (monogatari) were incorporated into Buddhist rites and liturgies from the tenth through twelfth centuries and attempts to show how this process supported and was supported by Esoteric Buddhist discourse. I call special attention to a discourse on ritual performance that understands the chanting of a mantra, hymn, or poem as an act of giving the joy of the Dharma (hōraku) to the kami and buddhas. By attending to this discourse and the rituals through which it was articulated, this dissertation sheds light on the doctrinal reasons why and the practical paths by which even literary genres that were considered to be “worldly” such as nature poetry, love poetry, and romance tales were reconceived as vehicles for offering the joy of the Buddha’s teachings. The three body chapters examine a variety of rites and liturgies intended for a lay audience—often called “Dharma assemblies” (hōe) in Japanese-language scholarship—and endeavor to demonstrate how they contributed to key transformations in Japanese literature. Chapter 1 investigates the liturgy of the lecture assembly (kō-e) at Shinto shrines and elucidates how it shaped the formation of a key genre of medieval Japanese poetry called “Dharma joy” waka (hōraku waka). Chapter 2 analyzes repentance rites dedicated to Fugen (Sk. Samantabhadra) bodhisattva and considers their impact on the invention of Buddhist love poetry. Finally, Chapter 3 looks at sutra-offering ceremonies and clarifies their role in the consecration of the exemplary Heian-period romance tale, The Tale of Genji, and the imagination of its author, Murasaki Shikibu. In addition to situating a particular transformation of court literature in its ritual context, each chapter also locates a given example of ritual in its discursive locus. I show that at the center of this locus lies a system of Esoteric Buddhist doctrine and ritual concerned with demonstrating the identity of the esoteric teachings (mikkyō) with those of the Lotus Sūtra. Terming this system “Lotus-Esoteric discourse,” I show how it provided the epistemic framework for the practice of using a mantra, hymn, or poem as a medium for giving the joy of the Dharma to others, rather than receiving it for oneself (jiju hōraku), as was stressed in Japanese Esoteric Buddhism of the late ancient period. In short, through its attention to Lotus-Esoteric discourse on Dharma joy, this study offers a corrective to an over-emphasis on the liturgical formula of “wild words and fanciful phrases” (kyōgen kigo), which has been the focus of many previous studies on the relationship between Buddhism and medieval Japanese literature, and clarifies the concrete discursive strategies and ritual practices by which Buddhism in early medieval Japan consecrated new liturgical uses for three representative genres of court literature—kanshi verse, waka poetry, and monogatari tales. In this way, it endeavors to show how Buddhist discourse on Dharma joy—in both its doctrinal and ritual dimensions—may constitute a new paradigm for understanding the early medieval transformation of Japanese literature. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

From the eighth century through the tenth, the ‘Abbāsid capital of Baghdad witnessed the translation, in unprecedented numbers, of Greek philosophical, medical, and other scientific texts into Arabic, often via a Syriac intermediary. Muslim and sometimes Christian patrons from all sectors of ‘Abbāsid high society paid princely sums to small groups of Graeco-Arabic translators, most of whom were Syriac-speaking Christians. In this diverse ‘Abbāsid milieu, who could claim to own the Greek past? Who could claim to access it legitimately? Who were the Greeks for ‘Abbāsid intellectuals and how did the monumental effort to translate them make or fail to make the Greek past a part of the ‘Abbāsid present? This dissertation is divided into three chapters, each investigating a distinct ninth-century approach to accessing the Greek past. Chapter 1 investigates ninth-century narratives attempting to explain how the Greek sciences came to flourish in ‘Abbāsid Mesopotamia. Against this backdrop, I shed new light on the polymath and patron of translation al-Kindī and his attempts to claim direct access to the Greeks via both an abstract teleology inspired by Aristotle and a concrete genealogy that connected his ancestral tribe of Kinda to the Greeks. In Chapter 2, I analyze other Muslim intellectuals, such as the litterateur al-Jāḥiẓ, who radically doubt the ability of Graeco-Arabic translators—the majority of whom, once again, were Christians—to provide such access to the Greek past. I argue that previous commentators on these critiques have missed their subtext, namely the Islamic concept of taḥrīf whereby Christians are held to have corrupted the Bible in order to transmit a distorted version of the prophetic past that contradicts God’s ultimate revelation, the Qur’ān. Finally, in Chapter 3, I investigate the attitudes toward translation and the Greek past of the Ḥunayn circle of Graeco-Arabic translators, who do in fact alter Greek cultural elements in the texts they translate, presenting an idealized version of the Greek past which both Christians and Muslims can claim. / Classics

Even as the Church of England lost ground to political dissent and New England gradually disestablished its state churches early in the nineteenth century, writers on both sides of the debates about church establishments maintained their belief in religion’s role as a moral guide for individuals and the state. “Protestant Institutionalism” argues that writers—from Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe to George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell—imagined through literature the institutions that would produce a religiously sound society as established churches began to lose their authority. Drawing on novels and poems as well as sermons and tracts about how religion might exist apart from the state, I argue that these authors both understood society in terms of institutions and also used their literature to imagine the institutions—such as family, denomination, and nation—that would provide society with a stable foundation. This institutional thinking about society escapes any literary history that accepts Protestant individualism as a given. In fact, although the US and England maintained different relationships between church and state, British authors often looked to US authors for help imagining the society that new forms of religion might produce precisely in terms of these institutions. In the context of disestablishment we can see how the literature of the nineteenth century—and nineteenth-century novels in particular—was about more than the fate of the individual in society. In fact, to different degrees for each author, individual development actually relies on the proper understanding of the individual’s relationship to institutions and the role those institutions play in supporting society / English

The development of the Cistercian Order in the twelfth century came as a product of a number of eleventh-century reforms. These reforms affected all strata of society, and they impacted the way in which medieval European Christians viewed themselves, their social, political, and theological structures, the world around them, and their relationship to the Christian narrative of salvation history and eschatology. The early Cistercians built their “new monastery” (novum monasterium) upon an apostolic foundation of austerity and poverty, informed by a “return” to the Rule of Benedict as the program for their daily ritual and liturgical lives. These Cistercians centered their monastic “way of life” (conversatio) around the pursuit of ascent into God, seeking to become “citizens among the saints and members of the household of God.” The language of twelfth-century Cistercian ascension theology drew from a number of scriptural motifs for its expression. For example, Bernard of Clairvaux described his monastery as the “heavenly Jerusalem” and his monks as “Jerusalemites”; Aelred of Rievaulx spoke of “living stones,” building up the Temple of Jerusalem and rising up as sacred incense; and Helinand of Froidmont exhorted his monks to climb the mountain with Christ and to raise up within themselves a Temple of “living stones,” becoming bearers of Christ like Mary, his holy mother. In the case of these and other Cistercian exegetes, the goal remained the same: by interpreting Christian scripture and tradition, Cistercian theologians sought to transform the monastery into a sacred space, bridging the gap between the human world and the realm of God, so that they, and their brethren, might ascend “as living stones built up, a spiritual house, a holy priesthood.”

This dissertation explores discussions of prophecy in early Christianity focusing on Origen of Alexandria’s works. It argues that Origen engages the contested terms of prophetic activity to persuade his audience(s) toward the cultivation of a particular moral self. The dissertation situates early Christian discourse on prophecy within a larger philosophical conversation in the Greco-Roman world from the first to fourth centuries C.E., in which cultivating a properly religious self involves discipline or askēsis. Some early Christian debates about prophecy are predicated on the idea that certain practices are necessary to be considered worthy of the indwelling of the divine/the Holy Spirit. Using Pierre Hadot’s insights, the dissertation contends that discourses on prophecy in early Christianity call for training in a particular way of living, and thus could be influential to early Christians regardless of whether they would ever attain the status of prophet or not. By encouraging his Christian readers to participate in reading and studying the Scripture as a way to purify their souls, Origen argues that everyone needs to cultivate himself or herself to be worthy to receive spiritual gifts such as prophecy. In his Commentary on Romans, Origen turns Paul’s exhortation to “strive for spiritual gifts, and especially that you may prophesy” (1 Cor 14:1) into a more general call to cultivate virtue through scriptural study. In Contra Celsum and the Homilies on Numbers, Origen invites the readers to participate in disciplined training so that they may become worthy instruments of the divine, just as the prophets are. The dissertation also compares Origen’s arguments with those of the Shepherd of Hermas and Iamblichus’s De Mysteriis, demonstrating that the ancient discussions of prophecy deploy similar strategies to persuade the audiences to participate in particular disciplined training, even if they have different ideas about what the best form of prophecy may be.

This thesis seeks to understand the portrayals of animal sacrifice in the Old Comedy of classical Greece, a genre commonly considered for vulgarity, personal invective, and roots far removed from sacred acts. Recognizing that even fictional representations of sacrifice are based on real religious ritual, and that Old Comedy had a responsibility to present to the polis a reflection of its own attitudes and behaviors, comic sacrifice scenes become a valuable mode of insight on a culture that we struggle to understand through limited evidence. Approaching the plays with this in mind uncovers a richer and more complex relationship between comedy and sacrifice than might initially be expected. Before being able to appreciate the meaning of sacrifice scenes in the plays, the first step is to establish a relationship between comedy and ritual. This study considers a progression of ideas around the identity of Greek drama, beginning with Aristotle’s Poetics and moving through the centuries as scholars identify the likely formative influences of comedy. After establishing comedy as a valid participant in the religious discourse of classical Athens, this study considers a progression of theories about the religious forces behind animal sacrifice as well as how the Greeks incorporated and expressed those forces. From Mircea Eliade’s concept of the sacred to Walter Burkert’s use of sacrifice to peer into the Greek psyche, we come to understand the interplay of ritual and performance as a culture communicates its own beliefs and attitudes. Among the extant comedies of Aristophanes, Frogs, Peace, and Birds receive major focus for their provocative use of sacrifice and related ritual behavior. Encounters with ritual practices move the protagonists toward their end goals, and control over animal sacrifice is an indicator of each character’s power. Sacrifice in each of these cases is presented not as a reverent act but a tool to be manipulated to achieve human aims. Aristophanes is using comedy’s unique license to express a more practical understanding of the human benefits of sacrifice and to demonstrate the shifting attitudes of the polis, away from reliance on traditional models and toward a preference for human action.

Abstract not available.