Poetry, Desire, and Devotional Performance from Shakespeare to Milton, 1609-1667 documents and analyzes the ways post-Reformation devotional and worship practices inflected early modern English poetic conceptions of erotic desire and intimacy. My study focuses on two specific Reformation religious developments—the official Anglican ceremonialism of the state church and the popular Reformed predestinarianism—each of which enjoyed a widespread following during the roughly sixty years bracketed by the lives of Shakespeare and Milton. While religious historians often treat state-sanctioned worship and popular divinity as contradictory or antagonistic, I demonstrate that both cultural arenas reveal one important commonality: each sought to prioritize the body as the most important means for externally verifying inner devotional affect. Whether sanctioned by the state church or only informally practiced, post-Reformation English devotional practices embodied the seventeenth-century’s deep suspicion of outward signs of inner affect—one that that coexisted with an equally powerful impulse to venerate those very outward markers of grace. In a religious culture that regarded outward performance as devotionally suspect, the body and the senses nevertheless remained vital to the way individuals could outwardly demonstrate and interpret their inward affect. I maintain that outward devotional performance did more than provide the material and external scaffolding by which individuals could conceptualize their relationship with God. Moreover, it provided early modern thinkers and poets with a lexicon and a conceptual apparatus for describing and interpreting devotional intention and access within the context of a wide range of earthly entanglements and fleshly negotiations. Most significantly, the religious developments of the English Reformation informed the way poets conceptualized access within decidedly secular, earthly, and erotic relationships—shaping the way English men and women read and interpreted the impulses and desires of both others and themselves. My project examines the role of the body—desired and desiring—at the crossroads of both erotic and devotional life in the poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Greville, Herrick, and Milton. In these poems, God, dead wives, standoffish mistresses, exes, whores, homoerotic boy lovers, and even Satan play distinct parts as both antagonists and objects of longing. Within the space of a few decades of the early seventeenth-century century, the absolutism that characterized nearly every aspect of English religious life opened possibilities for thinking about the role of the body in matters both spiritual and secular that emerged not in opposition to, but as a direct result of, the limitations placed on the ways individuals could conceive of and express their most powerful desires. These articulations of devotional longing—whether for earthly lovers or for God—were enabled precisely by the spiritual and psychological constraints posed by the ever tightening restrictions on public worship and prayer. / English

This dissertation argues that, across her corpus, Christine de Pizan (c.1364-c.1431) advanced a notion of the common good that is both, and inseparably, political and theological. The project critically analyzes Christine’s theological notions of human personhood, moral formation, prudential self-interest, and destructive preoccupation with personal good. It demonstrates that Christine responded to, retooled, and restructured authoritative texts and traditions in order to compose a constructive notion of the common good. It argues that Christine wrote in the interest of peace in the bodies politic within which she counted herself: France, the Church, and Christendom. It concludes that Christine wrote to form persons for peace. / Religion, Committee on the Study of

This dissertation examines the impact of Catholic theology on French politics after the separation of Church and state in 1905, approaching this moment as a beginning rather than an endpoint in the political history of the Church. It argues for the productive relationship between secularization and theology, showing how the secularization of public institutions inspired new politico-theological configurations and opened up new modes of religious engagement in political life. As I demonstrate, the events of 1905 provided both the institutional and intellectual impetus for one of the most important movements in twentieth-century Catholic theology, known as the “nouvelle théologie,” which would eventually become the leading theological force behind the Second Vatican Council. This dissertation tells the story of that movement, which was elaborated in part by a group of French Jesuits around Henri de Lubac. These theologians sought to develop a new approach to Catholic politics—one that would allow the Church to be in the newly secular public sphere, but not of it. Rejecting both secular party politics and the royalist dream of restoring the confessional state, they looked to the Church as an alternative site of collective mobilization capable of transcending the limitations of political ideologies and warring nation-states. It was this vision which inspired these Jesuits to lead the “spiritual resistance” to Nazism in France during the Second World War, just as it led them to oppose Communism in the postwar period. But despite their staunch anti-totalitarianism, these priests also rejected the basic premises of liberal politics, including the distinction between the private and public spheres, the primacy of the individual, and the sovereignty of the state. Instead, I show how de Lubac’s circle deployed the resources ecclesiology, eschatology, theological anthropology, and biblical studies to fashion what I call a “counter-politics”—a way of intervening in questions traditionally classified as political while engaging in a critique of politics itself. As a result, I argue, their work requires us to re-imagine what constitutes a political act and where the boundaries of the political lie, by revealing a dimension of modern European politics beyond the remit of secular parties and ideologies. / History

Karl Barth is frequently named as the poster-child for modern patriarchal and heteronormative theologies. In Church Dogmatics he secures a binary, hierarchically-ordered, marital relationship between a man and woman as the norm for conceptualizing not only sexual difference but all inter-subjective relationships among human beings. Human beings find in the opposite sex their paradigmatic human “other,” and marriage to someone of the opposite sex provides the occasion in which one is able to most fully realize the sort of being-in-encounter that conforms to the self-giving, self-revealing, aid-lending relationship that Christ has established with the Christian community. The asymmetry of the relationship between Christ and his community translates into the super-/subordering of the relationship between the sexes, wherein women are lead, directed, and inspired by men. Barth applies this “ordering” beyond marriage to all interactions between the sexes. Many critics have argued that Barth’s ordering of the sexes exposes a systemic structure of domination and submission instantiated in the many relationships that comprise his theology. Others have sought a corrective to his ordering in his doctrine of the Trinity, but a corrective that demands a reconstruction of his innovative reformulation of the doctrine of election along with his christocentric theological anthropology. Until recently little critical attention has been given to his heteronormative framework. This dissertation advances a fresh approach by shifting focus from the question of the function of “order” in Barth’s theology to Barth’s christocentric understanding of human agency itself. Through contextualized close readings in Barth’s ethics, doctrine of creation, and theological anthropology, I argue that his methodological, dogmatic, and ethical commitments lead to an account of the human agent that is carefully detached from naturalizing and scientific discourses and crafted after the aid-lending, self-revelatory activity of the incarnate Christ. Constituted as a response to the divine address, human beings are called into existence as morally responsible actors and set on the path toward lending aid to and receiving aid from their human neighbors. I mobilize this account of agency to resist, unsettle, and reconfigure Barth’s androcentric and heteronormative construal of sexual difference for the purpose of securing Barth’s Church Dogmatics as a resource for theologies that resist the reduction of all inter-human differences to one overarching hierarchical model of difference. First, I argue that when Barth attempts to order the relationship between the sexes, he turns his christocentric model of agency, along with its ethical impulse, into a male prerogative, and he leaves a truncated and unlivable version for women to appropriate. By foregrounding the self-revealing and critically corrective features of the human agent’s encounter with the other, I argue that Barth’s model of agency, if fully appropriated by women, secures a site for the sort of feminist critique that Barth attempts to quash: a critique that challenges the prerogatives and positions of power that Barth presumes are proper to men alone. Second, I show that Barth’s effort to integrate the Gospels’ figure of the unmarried Christ into his heteronormative framework exposes the tenuous grounds on which he attempts to secure the centrality of sexual difference within his broader christocentric project. As a corrective, I turn to Barth’s discussions of Christ’s relationship to ethnically differentiated others. Here I locate a far more open, fluid, and flexible way of thinking about the self’s relationship to other human beings, which is inclusive of a wide variety of relationships and communal organizations. Finally, while Barth configures sexual difference as an oppositional division that must be carefully policed and maintained, Barth calls for a critical and performative appropriation of the norms, customs, and social mores through which the sexes are differentiated. This appropriation opens up space within Barth’s heteronormative framework for performances that unsettle, subvert, and transgress the reputedly unambiguous dividing line between the sexes that such norms instantiate.

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

Exorcism has been a ministerial component of Christianity from its inception, following the example of Jesus Christ who cast out demons from possessed persons. In the Roman Catholic Church, this ministry is principally carried out by means of the Rite of Exorcism, which is an official liturgical rite celebrated by a priest on behalf of a person who is thought to be possessed by the devil. The rite evolved through the centuries until it was standardized for the first time in 1614. For nearly four hundred years thereafter, it remained virtually unaltered until a process of revision was set in motion in the 1990s. Why was the revision undertaken? Would the liturgical laws contained in the 1614 rite be altered? In response to these queries and others, the author contextualizes the rite of exorcism within a larger historical framework by tracing its development from ancient times to the present. With this context established, the revised rite of 1998 is studied and compared with its predecessor of 1614.

No description available.

No description available.

The early medieval abbey church of Conques, located in a treacherous mountain region of southern France, received few visitors until the relics of the virgin martyr Ste. Foy were brought there. Among her abilities, Ste. Foy was credited with the power to provide protection from capture and to free prisoners. The themes of bondage and liberation are found throughout the church in the sculpture, grillwork and especially in the Liber miraculorum. This paper argues that the repetitive imagery of chains and release from bondage had a twofold function which increased the wealth and power of the monks at Conques. First, the images evoked the power of the Ste. Foy to absolve and release one from the bonds of sin through pilgrimage and donation to this church, and second, the images referred to Ste. Foy's renowned power to provide protection and free prisoners, powers especially attractive to those involved in the Reconquista in Spain.