This thesis examines the practice of the camp meeting as a significant factor in the growth of the Methodist Episcopal Church in nineteenth-century New England. Such a comprehensive investigation into camp meetings in New England has never been done before. Also, with the exception of one book and one other recent dissertation, the general history of Methodism in New England is a topic that was overlooked for nearly a century. This research helps to fill those gaps. Many scholars give credit to camp meetings for fostering conversion, though the focus has generally been on camps held in the American South and the western frontier. After briefly recounting the rise of Methodism and camp meetings in the United States, the thesis turns to a more specific focus on the rise of Methodism and camp meetings in New England prior to 1823. Zion's Herald newspaper provides a steady and previously untapped source of primary information about camp meetings in New England from its first appearance in 1823 to well into the twentieth century. After discussion of some key developments of New England Methodism relevant to camp meetings between 1823 and 1871, a thick description of one camp meeting in 1823 is presented to show how the many parts worked together. This is followed by an account of aspects of the camp meetings that might be classified broadly as ritual, how these changed over time, and the impact they had on the process of identity formation at the camps. The spotlight is then directed toward the liturgical aspects of camp meetings as practiced in New England. These include components of worship practices common to Methodist congregations of the period as they gathered for prayer meetings, Sunday worship and quarterly conferences, such as preaching, praying, singing, and love feasts, and also those acts of worship developed specifically for camp meetings such as dedicating the grounds, and the closing ritual procession and "parting hand." As with the ritual practices, attention is again given both to how these worship practices influenced worshippers, and how they changed over time. Finally the interpretive framework of "poetic discourse" offered by Stephen Cooley is used to analyze the most potent ritual elements involved in the process of conversion and church growth in conversation with contemporary scholars in the fields of sociology and ritual studies. In the end this study shows not only the factors that fostered conversions and church growth, but also how the camp meetings gradually lost their potency as they changed over time. / 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z

John Eliot (1604-1690) was known as the “apostle to the Indians” in both Old and New England during his lifetime. His goal of inculcating “civility” with religion among “praying Indians” is often noted as representing an agenda by New English missionaries for cultural assimilation. This dissertation argues that an appropriate understanding of Eliot’s motives and methodology in ministry to Native Americans obtains from a consideration of the Congregationalist and sacrament-centered spirituality he indicated in publications before and after King Philip’s War. Eliot’s mission was more shaped by ecclesiology than eschatology or the aim of cultural hegemony. Eliot intended “praying town” settlements in the Massachusetts Bay Colony to provide Native enquirers the kind of communitarian experience he believed essential for the establishment and maintenance of congregations comprised of genuine converts who could as members in good standing together practice the Lord’s Supper. Communal life with sacramental practice would be the ultimate way for them to experience Christ’s presence. This study extends previous scholarship by employing a theological perspective to explicate Eliot’s understanding of covenantal theology and the work of the Spirit of Christ through various “means of grace.” The project incorporates the perspectives of early American historians; Puritan scholars, especially historians of doctrine; literary critics; and recent studies of colonial encounter that posit cultural negotiation. This dissertation suggests that Eliot’s practices in mission reflect the meaning of Congregationalist Puritanism in colonial context. It adds to the emerging picture of a variegated transatlantic Puritanism and suggests that Eliot’s corpus should be considered in studies of Puritan pneumatology, Christology, sanctification, the sacraments, and religious declension. Eliot’s contribution as a contextual theologian becomes clear when his writings are examined alongside select documents from contemporary interlocutors such as Richard Baxter, Daniel Gookin, William Hubbard, Increase Mather, Mary Rowlandson, and Thomas Shepard. The study also suggests that Eliot’s later literary productions in English reflect his experience in cross-cultural ministry more than is currently recognized, especially his Lord’s Supper preparative, The Harmony of the Gospels, in the Holy History of the Humiliation and Sufferings of Jesus Christ (1678).

This dissertation argues that female piety and mission practices shaped the Evangelical Protestantism and the missionary movement that emerged from the Réveil [Revival] in nineteenth century France. It shows that women through their writings, their philanthropic initiatives, and their focus on education and social renewal on behalf of children laid the foundation for French Protestant mission and outreach. This study fills a gap in Anglophone scholarship on the role of women in French Protestant mission history and the history of the nineteenth century Evangelical Revival in France. After the Reformation, Protestant women preserved the Huguenot cultural identity of Protestants both at home and abroad. This continuity was manifested in the nineteenth century when the countries of the Huguenot Refuge sent missionaries of the Evangelical Revival back into France. The ethos of Jan Hus’ Dcerka [The Daughter] present in the work of French Protestant women in philanthropy, education, and social renewal demonstrates the continuity in piety and outreach from the Reformation to the nineteenth century. After the founding of the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society in 1822, the Paris Mission women’s committee, led by Albertine de Broglie and Émilie Mallet, played a crucial role in promoting missions by mediating regional and class differences between Protestants. Late eighteenth century female initiatives on behalf of vulnerable women and children laid the foundation for the work of missions because, through them, women developed networks that served the goals of philanthropy, fundraising, and infant education. Infant school education, pioneered in the Lesotho Mission by Elizabeth Lyndall Rolland, was essential to women’s mission practice. The infant school pedagogy of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, with its religious teaching, the centrality of the female role, and the emphasis on kindness was the key component in the work of the Lesotho Mission. In the 1830s, the arrival of missionary wives launched the work of the Lesotho Mission and energized French Protestant faith. In the 1840s, women once again sparked spiritual renewal with the creation of deaconess communities in Paris and Strasburg that served as models of Christian unity and self-sacrificial service. Overall, women’s piety and outreach were sources of revitalization in the Reformed Church and influenced early Evangelical Protestantism in nineteenth century France. Women’s mission practices that focused on works of mercy, education, and the nurturing of Christian families served as catalysts for renewal.

The eighteenth century in England has long been associated with increasing consumption, trade, luxury, and intellectual exchange. In contrast with the religiously-fueled tumult of the previous century, it is frequently portrayed as a polite, enlightened and even secularising age. This thesis questions this picture. Taking the ambiguous legacies of the so-called "Toleration Act" of 1689 as its starting point, it explores the impact of the complex and uncertain outcomes of the 1689 Act on social relations between Protestant Dissenters and members of the Established Church in England in the first half of the eighteenth century. In connecting broader legislative change with developing social discourses and the practicalities of everyday life, it demonstrates the extent to which the Toleration Act made religious questions integral to the social and cultural development of the period. As a result, it stresses not only that developing modes and norms of sociability were essential to determining the nature of religious coexistence, but also that the changing religious landscape was absolutely integral to the evolution of multiple different social registers in eighteenth-century England. It therefore demonstrates how previously disparate approaches to eighteenth-century England are mutually illuminating, creating an account of the period that is better able to attend to both religious and cultural change. With this in mind this thesis pays particular attention to the language through which contemporaries described their sociability, suggesting that they have great potential to illuminate the nature of religious coexistence in this period. Starting from the premise that the words an individual chooses are in some way both reflective and constitutive of their ways of thinking, several of the chapters that follow draw on and analyse the language contemporaries employed at the intersections between religion and sociability. The thesis as a whole suggests that doing so can give us insight into how their religious lives were socially organised, how groups were formed, bounded, and transgressed, and how that in itself fed back into the structures of sociability.

This dissertation analyzes Mennonite missionary engagement with African Independent Churches in West Africa. The engagement between missionaries and indigenous churches gave rise to a novel mission interaction with a non-western form of Christianity. It led to the early development of mission strategy and theory from an intentionally Anabaptist perspective. Based upon close analysis of archival material, the dissertation examines the extended encounter between missionaries and Independents in southeastern Nigeria between 1958 and 1967. It places the encounter within the context of the religious history of both groups and outlines the influence of the experience on subsequent mission work. This case study sheds new light on the emergence of African indigenous Christian movements and western Christians’ interaction with those movements during the period of decolonization and African nationalism. The history that this study constructs shows that the religious and missiological assumptions that each party brought to the encounter complicated their relationship. The Independents’ religious history led them to expect missionaries to establish traditional mission educational and healthcare institutions that would reinforce their well-being. Missionaries Edwin and Irene Weaver and their colleagues were hesitant to do so, since their experience in India had convinced them that such institutions caused dependency on foreign funds and impeded indigenization. They focused, rather, on encouraging better relationships between estranged Independents and mission churches, capacitating Independent churches through biblical training, and reinforcing Independents’ indigenous identity. Yet some Nigerian Independents insisted on a traditional mission relationship and its accompanying Mennonite identity. Missionaries borrowed mission theory about indigenization from the wider missionary movement, but applied and modified it over time, finally incorporating it into an Anabaptist missionary approach for work in Nigeria, Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire and the Republic of Benin. This study suggests that while relationships between streams of the Christian movement are conditioned by their different religious histories and cultures, they nevertheless generate missiological insights. Through this engagement missionaries articulated an Anabaptist missiology that became influential throughout Africa. In turn, the Mennonite missionary presence enabled some Nigerian Independents to network successfully with the world Christian movement via their Mennonite affiliation.

Although the eruption of religious dissent in Germany touched off by Martin Luther in 1517 began as a theological disagreement, the ensuring years would reveal that these religious ideas had important social consequences. They set into motion a process of reordering society and forming of confessional identities that had significant implications for the nuclear family. Reflecting John Calvin's assertion that "every individual Family ought to be a Little Church of Christ," Reformed Protestants sought to transform nuclear families into spiritual communities, creating domestic microcosms of the larger church. This project examines the religious formation of families among the French Reformed (Huguenot) Churches, demonstrating that this was a cultural offensive as much as it was a religious one. Huguenot leaders wanted far more than their congregants to attend church: this programme transformed the roles and responsibilities of family members, shaped the activities and routines of the household, circumscribed and defined the appropriate associations of family members, and reorganized the family schedule. This study illuminates the Huguenots' conception of a "holy household" by analyzing the four primary characteristics of these godly families - ordered, educational, pure, and pious - and describes how they were conceived of and implemented in Reformed communities across early modern France. In order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the French Reformed family, this dissertation bridges the divide between intellectual history and social history. There was no greater intellectual source for French Protestantism than John Calvin and Geneva: Calvin was one of the primary theologians influencing the development of Protestantism in France, and the Genevan Church served as an advisor and template for many of the Huguenot churches. Accordingly, each chapter examines in depth the theological underpinnings of this effort, analyzing Calvin's sermons, commentaries, Institutes of the Christian Religion, and written correspondence with leaders of the Huguenot churches. This investigation, in turn, provides an understanding of the religious sources for this new emphasis holy family and domestic piety in France, without which it would be impossible to fully appreciate. To balance these prescriptive sources, I analyze descriptive records to understand how the actual reform of the family was carried out on the local level. In particular, my research relies extensively on church discipline records (consistory registers) from churches throughout France: Albenc (1606-1682), Archiac (1600-1637), Blois (1574-1579), Coutras (1582-1584), Die (1639-1686), Le Mans (1560-1561), Mussidan (1593-1599), Nîmes (1561-1564), Pont-de-Camares (1574-1579), Rochechouart (1596-1635), and Saint-Gervais (1564-1568). These records reveal the complex and messy manner of this reform, which was often marked by contestation and negotiation. Throughout, I compare these records to Genevan discipline records to compare and contrast how Calvin's own church instituted this familial reform in the Genevan context. My project, in sum, reveals the heretofore overlooked religious role and significance of the family and home in Reformed churches of early modern France.

<p>My dissertation explores how constructions of memory, space, and violence intersected in the history of early Christianity. It analyzes the crucial roles of memory and space/place in the formation, practice, and understanding of late ancient asceticism in Egypt's northwestern desert (Scetis, Kellia, Nitria, and Pherme). After a "barbarian" raid of Scetis in the early fifth century supposedly exiled Christian monks from the desert, Egypt came to be remembered as the birthplace of ascetic practice. Interpreting texts (in Coptic, Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Classical Arabic) and archaeological remains associated with the northwestern Egyptian desert, my dissertation investigates ascetic ideas about the relationship between memories and places: memory-acts as preserved in the liturgical and literary texts, memory in the liturgical contexts of church and cell, the ascetic use of Scriptural interpretation to thwart "worldly" recollection caused by demonic incitement to abandon the desert, and remembrance of a past moment through the perceived loss of Scetis. Wedding textual evidence, material culture, and theoretical insights, I highlight how the memorialization of a particular moment in the history of early Christian asceticism overshadowed other, contemporary late ancient asceticisms. My dissertation produces a new understanding of the negotiations between memory and space, often a process of contestation, and sheds new light not only on how violence was performed in late antiquity, but also on modern struggles over memorialized locales.</p> / Dissertation

This is a transnational history of the early republic that focuses on religious actors. The early American foreign mission movement was an outward-looking expression of the benevolent network of the early republic. Building on transatlantic connections that predated the American Revolution, it represented American evangelicals’ attempt to transform the “heathen world” into part of God’s kingdom. Using ABCFM missions to in India, the Cherokee Nation, and Liberia as case studies, this dissertation examines the relationship between the church and imperial politics. In the 1800s, Americans, who had focused their evangelism on Native Americans, joined British evangelicals in the work of world mission. In the first decades of their work, they saw the potential of imperial expansion as a conduit for evangelization. In practice, evangelicals found great faults with imperial governments. Everywhere, missionaries struggled to determine how linked the projects of Christianizing and “civilizing” ought to be. With regard to gender norms in particular, missionaries found the introduction of “civilization” to be an essential part of their work. The question of slavery ultimately led to a shift in mission policy. By the mid-1840s, the Board insisted that it was a single-issue organization whose sole purpose was the conversion of the world. In so doing, the Board shifted away from the early 19th century model of foreign missions as bearers of “civilization” to a mid-19th century model of a separation between missions and politics. / History

Crosses made in metal, paint, or stone stand at a singular intersection of past, present and future in the early medieval period. The historical cross of Golgotha is the source of such manufactured crosses’ form and power. Most also represent the theology of the Cross through their form and decoration, describing the soteriology of the crucifixion and anticipating its consummation at the end of time. As manufactured crosses recount the past and look forward to the eschaton, they concurrently function in the age of the Church, offering specific, contemporary points of access to all the larger cross-sign represents. In its multivalent identity, the cross’ status as the Church’s central sign reflects the Church’s own temporal position, simultaneously commemorating sacred history, functioning in the present day, and preparing for the Second Coming. Although rarely recognized, the Church-time form of the cross—which I term the “instrumental” cross—is often a discernable component of early medieval cross-objects and images. I argue that we can recognize the instrumental cross among the commemorative and proleptic aspects of the sign because a formal and conceptual language developed to articulate it. In its instrumental form, the cross becomes the sign of the Church in its role as mediator between Christians, Christ and the eschaton, affirming the indispensable place of man-made artwork in that project. The instrumental cross, in turn, signals the instrumentality of the many artworks into which it is incorporated. It plays a particularly important role in manuscripts. In the first half of the dissertation I define a class of visual strategies that communicate the instrumental identity of the cross. I treat works in many media in Chapter 1 and focus on manuscripts in Chapters 2–3. The second half of the dissertation concentrates upon the case studies of four complex, hitherto neglected gospel codices from ninth–tenth century western France. In each, the deep relationship between Church-time cross and gospel book drives a pictorial program that is crafted to define a specific codex as an manufactured instrument, made to integrate its community with the larger project of the Church for which the cross-sign stands. / History of Art and Architecture

Traditionally recognized as the first of the great Buddhist treasure revealers, Nyang-rel Nyima Özer (1124-1192) historiographically reconstructed the Imperium into a golden age of Tibetan Buddhism. An analysis of his two early biographies demonstrates that he was among the first to recall an unbroken series of preincarnations in real historical time, which was a crucial link that led to the ascension of concatenated reincarnates like the Karmapas and Dalai Lamas. For Nyang-rel, his past life as emperor Tri Song-détsen (d. 800) provided the teleological karmic basis for his life as a finder of the old texts and relics deemed "treasure." According to his biographies and the two narratives that are attributed to him, Nyang-rel’s treasures were uniformly material objects extracted via quite mundane methods, though the discovery of old manuscripts seems to have been only an initial step in a process of compilation, redaction and composition that resulted in their reintroduction. Allegedly among these treasures was the first complete biography of the eighth-century Tantrika, Padmasambhava, which later became renowned as The Copper Palace. Much of this narrative was incorporated into the history of Buddhism entitled Flower Nectar: The Essence of Honey that is also attributed to Nyang-rel. Based on a comparative analysis of available recensions, however, I propose three hypotheses as equally viable alternatives to what has been asserted concerning the composition of these two texts. First, Nyang-rel did not consider his biography of Padmasambhava to be a treasure, but the tradition later manufactured a recovery narrative and accompanying title that promoted it as such. Second, Nyang-rel did not compile the Flower Nectar history. Third, based on oral, textual and mnemonic fragments, Nyang-rel produced a narrative of Tri Song-détsen and Padmasambhava that others developed into The Copper Palace and Flower Nectar. In sum, Nyang-rel was a progenitor of some of the most definitive aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, yet these very innovations ensured that he would be eclipsed by later adepts who, in adopting his claims and methods, revealed new iterations of his scriptures and narratives. He thus remains one of the most influential yet unsung figures of the Tibetan renaissance.