Henry Suso (c. 1295-1366) and Richard Rolle (c. 1300-1349) were two of the most popular authors in late-medieval England and Germany: their Latin works survive in hundreds of manuscripts owned by both lay and religious readers across Europe. Authority and exemplarity are central to their works, both writers present themselves as eponymous characters in their works, creating "pseudo-autobiographies" which offer their author-characters to the reader as ideal exemplars for imitation. Also central to their authorial strategy is their attention to feminine aspects of both divinity and audience; both imagine themselves as brides of Christ even as they pledge their devotion to Wisdom, a (female) combination of the Old Testament Goddess and Christ incarnate. The imagery of courtly love is employed both as an enticement for readers and as a natural extension of their internalization of the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs; their claims to bear the name of Jesus on their heart lead to iconographic crossover in representations of Rolle in English manuscripts. Music and aurality are repeatedly employed as a fundamental aspect of their descriptions of mystical experience. Suso was read widely in late-medieval England, both in Latin and in English translation; as his popularity grew, so too did his influence on English literature and theology. The chapters of the Horologium Sapientiae on the Eucharist and the art of dying well proved especially popular. Two Carthusians, Nicholas Love and the author of the Speculum Devotorum, for instance, both drew on Suso's treatment of the Eucharist in reinforcing orthodox beliefs surrounding the sacrament of the altar – yet a recently-discovered independent translation of the same text is found in a manuscript otherwise containing Lollard tracts. Suso's liturgy in honor of Eternal Wisdom proved his most popular and enduring contribution to English literature: it entered Sarum Use Books of Hours by the end of the fifteenth century and was printed in English translation towards the end of the sixteenth.

This dissertation looks at an attempt in Buddhist history to theorize the role and status of the body as the prime focus of soteriological discourse. It studies a text titled Explanation of the Hidden Vajra Body (Rdo rje lus kyi sbas bshad), composed by Yang dgon pa Rgyal mtshan dpal (1213-1258). This work, drawing on a wide range of canonical tantric Buddhist scriptures and Indic and Tibetan commentaries, lays out in detail a Buddhist theory of embodiment that brings together the worldly realities of the body with their enlightened transformation. This dissertation analyzes the ways Yang dgon pa theorizes the body as the essential ground of the salvific path, and endeavors to provide a thematic guide to his rich and complex discussion of what the body is and does, from a tantric perspective. The thesis parses a key term, dngos po'i gnas lugs, that Yang dgon pa uses as an organizing principle in Explanation of the Hidden. If taken literally, the term means something like "the nature of things" or "the nature of material substance," but Yang dgon pa deployed the term specifically to refer to the nature of the human psychophysical organism, in its ordinary state. By way of this term, Yang dgon pa argues that the body itself makes enlightenment possible. In the course of this thesis, I consider the prior history of this category as it was gradually developed by a series of Bka' brgyud writers until it reached Yang dgon pa. Then, in light of this category, I explore Yang dgon pa's own vision of embodiment. This vision, I argue, reflects an attempt to refocus soteriological attention on the power of the body, over and above the mind, as the salient basis for non-dual knowing. Finally, I reflect upon the lasting contributions of Yang dgon pa's conception of the body to the ongoing exploration of such topics in the history of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist soteriology, as well as upon why some of the more radical elements of his thinking seem to have been eliminated in subsequent generations of his lineage.

This dissertation identifies a paradox at the heart of the visual culture of Song-dynasty (960-1279) Buddhism. On the one hand, as the celestial pantheon expanded, it was conceptualized in ever more bureaucratic ways, mirroring the growth of the terrestrial government itself. On the other hand, the boundary separating that supramundane realm from the human world became decidedly more permeable; ghosts and deities became an omnipresent part of daily life. How to treat these two contradictory phenomena--one pointing to rational orderliness, the other pointing to unpredictable unruliness--posed a distinct problem for Song visual artists, spurring the development of new strategies of pictorial representation and forcing reflection upon the nature of representation itself. Chinese Buddhist art was never to be the same again. I argue that the key to understanding these new forms of art lies in the Water-Land Retreat (Shuilu zhai), a massive, icon-filled ritual of decidedly cosmic pretensions. The patterns of practice and strategies of visual representation associated with this ritual constitute a system that radically broke with earlier Chinese tradition. Practitioners of the liturgy created an open ritual syntax that allowed it to take on myriad forms in accordance with its sponsors’ needs, while also allowing it to absorb deities and practices from non-Buddhist traditions. This dissertation examines these phenomena in three parts. Part 1 excavates the social place, methods of practice, and visual profile of the Water-Land Retreat in and around the Song. Relying extensively on paintings from the Jiangnan region, cliff carvings from Sichuan, and numerous liturgical manuscripts, I argue that image and practice are inextricably bound in this ritual. Part 2 focuses on the motif of the cloud in Water-Land-related images and texts. Through an examination of images of cloud-borne descending deities, I contend that this nebulous motif became the locus for reflection on the mediational nature of representation. Finally, Part 3 addresses the bureaucratization of ritual practice and pictorial production in Song Buddhism. I argue that practitioners of the Water-Land Retreat simultaneously embraced and transcended a bureaucratic idiom drawn from Daoism and contemporary government to create a new Buddhist vision of the cosmos. / History of Art and Architecture

This dissertation recovers the political histories of New England's historic graveyards. From their early rejection of English burial practices to their modern incarnation as tourist attractions, New England's historic graveyards have been public forums for political posturing and debate. Far from the tranquil sanctuaries of later imagination, burying grounds of the colonial era were places where both the powerful and the relatively powerless could make shows of their strengths and air their grievances.

This thesis is a reflection upon objects of power and their roles in the lives of people through the lens of a single case example: power objects as they appear throughout the narrative, philosophical, and ritual writings of the Tibetan Buddhist ritual specialist Sog bzlog pa Blo gros rgyal mtshan (1552-1624) and his milieu. This study explores their discourse on power objects specifically for what it reveals about how human interactions with certain kinds of objects encourage the flow of power and charisma between them, and what the implications of these person-object transitions were for issues of identity, agency, and authority on the personal, institutional, and state registers in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tibet.

<p>Among the numerous commitments late ancient Christians throughout the Roman Empire shared with their non-Christian neighbors was a preoccupation with justice. Not only was the latter one of the celebrated characteristics of God, the New Testament had charged Christians, particularly those who served as bishops or elders, with ensuring and maintaining justice in their communities from the tradition's very origins. In the early fourth century, this aspect of episcopal responsibilities had received an unexpected boost when the Emperor Constantine not only recognized bishops' role in intra-Christian conflict resolution, but expanded their judicial capacity to include even outsiders in the so-called audientia episcopalis, the bishop's court. </p><p>Christians had, of course, never resolved the question of what constituted justice in a vacuum. Yet bishops' increasing integration into the sprawling and frequently amorphous apparatus of the Roman legal system introduced new pressures as well as new opportunities into Christian judicial discourse. Roman law could become an ally in a minister's exegetical or homiletical efforts. Yet it also came to intrude into spheres that had previously regarded themselves as set apart from Roman society, including especially monastic and clerical communities. The latter proved to be particularly permeable to different shades of legal discourse, inasmuch as they served as privileged feeders for episcopal sees. Their members were part of the Christian elites, whose judicial formation promised to bear disproportionate fruit among the laity under their actual or eventual care. This dissertation's task is the examination of the ways in which Christians in these environments throughout the Latin West at the turn of the fifth century thought and wrote about justice. I contend that no single influence proved dominant, but that three strands of judicial discourse emerge as significant throughout these sources: that of popular philosophical thought; that of biblical exegesis; and that of reasoning from Roman legal precept and practice. Late ancient Christian rhetoric consciously and selectively deployed these threads to craft visions of justice, both divine and human, that could be treated as distinctively Christian while remaining intelligible in the broader context of the Roman Empire.</p> / Dissertation

<p>In this dissertation, I argue that the conceptual grammar of Augustine's thought provides a way of re-thinking the public/private distinction as it has been developed in modernity. The dissertation consists of two parts. The first part is a conceptual analysis and a genealogy of the distinction through focus on specific private characters produced in both antiquity and modernity. I focus on the characters of the "woman" and the "refugee." Conceptually, I argue that the public/private distinction can be seen both as an anthropological distinction and as a socio-political distinction: claims about the structure, nature, and history of selves have implications for how society ought to be organized, and claims about how society ought to be organized have implications about the structure, nature, and history of selves. I show how Christianity changed society by creating new character scripts and with them, new socio-political possibilities. The second part of the dissertation provides one Augustinian conceptual "grammar" that makes sense of the revolution Christianity effected possible, and it responds to problems raised by the genealogy in the first half by providing a close reading of Augustine's texts relating to God and creation, interiority, salvation and beatitude, and the Virgin Mary. I display the logic in Augustine's thought by which, in God, domestic and public come together, how God's relation to creation changes how to think about interiority, what that means for how Augustine understands salvation as a restoration of proper inwardness, and how the character of the Virgin Mary condenses the grammar as a sacrament of human salvation. I draw out the ways that Mary shows how Augustinian thought provides resources to think "beyond" the public/private distinction both as it was given to her in antiquity and how it has been received in modernity.</p> / Dissertation

abstract: Though some scholars have written about place and history, few have pursued the use of place theory in length in relation to the connections between race, religion, and national identity. Using the writings in the United States and Louisiana in the years surrounding the Louisiana Purchase, I explore place-making and othering processes. U.S. leaders influenced by the Second Great Awakening viewed New Orleans as un-American in its religion and seemingly ambiguous race relations. New Orleanian Catholics viewed the U.S. as an aggressively Protestant place that threatened the stability of the Catholic Church in the Louisiana Territory. Both Americans and New Orleanians constructed the place identities of the other in relation to events in Europe and the Caribbean, demonstrating that places are constructed in relation to one another. In order to elucidate these dynamics, I draw on place theory, literary analysis, and historical anthropology in analyzing the letters of W.C.C. Claiborne, the first U.S. governor of the Louisiana Territory, in conjunction with sermons of prominent Protestant ministers Samuel Hopkins and Jedidiah Morse, a letter written by Ursuline nun Sister Marie Therese de St. Xavior Farjon to Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington Cable's Reconstruction era novel The Grandissimes. All of these parties used the notion of place to create social fact that was bound up with debates about race and anti-Catholic sentiments. Furthermore, their treatments of place demonstrate concerns for creating, or resisting absorption by, a New Republic that was white and Protestant. Place theory proves useful in clarifying how Americans and New Orleanians viewed the Louisiana Purchase as well as the legacy of those ideas. It demonstrates the ways in which the U.S. defined itself in contradistinction to religious others. Limitations arise, however, depending on the types of sources historians use. While official government letters reveal much when put into the context of the trends in American religion at the turn of the nineteenth century, they are not as clearly illuminating as journals and novels. In these genres, authors provide richer detail from which historians can try to reconstruct senses of place. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Religious Studies 2011

Pittite politics between the premierships of Pitt and Liverpool has been overshadowed by those long eras of government and by the concurrent Napoleonic Wars. This has particularly caused the neglect of one leading Pittite, the prime minister Spencer Perceval, which is especially surprising given recent scholarly interest in the role of religion in politics and in conservative ideas. He is known either as the 'assassinated Prime Minister', or stereotyped as the 'Evangelical Prime Minister'. This thesis contends that Perceval was a significant, if sometimes unusual, figure in Pittite politics in 1807-12, that this era saw important policies pursued in areas such as church reform, and that Perceval is better understood as an 'Anglican Prime Minister' dedicated to upholding the established Church. Recovering Perceval helps us better understand the Pittites in general. He operated amongst a circle of like-minded politicians who supported church reform and opposed Catholic Emancipation. Each chapter duly recovers a topic which demonstrates the continuities between war-time and peace-time Pittite policies, underpinning the thesis's argument that post-1815 policies need to be understood in relation to the war-time experiences and actions of this generation of Pittites. These arguments are advanced through five chapters. The first chapter shows how Perceval's theological beliefs, contemporary descriptions, and his church patronage emphasise his transcendent Anglicanism. The second chapter stresses Perceval's and his coterie's role in strengthening and expanding the established Churches in England and Ireland. The third chapter highlights the twin importance of theological beliefs and the necessity of upholding the established Church in shaping Perceval's attitude towards Catholics, tithes, and nonconformists. The fourth chapter highlights the pragmatic approach the Pittites took to economic questions, and contrasts Perceval with the later 'liberal Tories' Canning and Huskisson. The fifth chapter illuminates Pittite policies that promoted Christianity in India and suppressed the slave trade.

abstract: Christina of Markyate, a twelfth-century visionary and prioress, has been frequently seen in scholarship as an outsider at her home institution of St Albans, enduring solely under the protection of its abbot, Geoffrey, her spiritual friend and confidant. This characterization appears incorrect when The Life of Christina of Markyate, St Albans' record of Christina's personal history and religious career, is viewed in its original literary environment. The high volume of extant material from twelfth-century St Albans makes it possible to view Christina's depiction in several original ways: as a textual construction (at least in part) influenced by Bede's narratives of holy women in his widely read Ecclesiastical History; as a portrayal of contemporary devotional prayer in the style of Anselm of Canterbury, a major authority on devotional practices of the time; and as a prominent addition to St Albans' own liturgy, the record of its celebrated saints and local patrons, as an object of devotion herself. The strategy of Christina's endorsement in her Life is also notably different from strategies on display in St Albans materials related to Katherine of Alexandria, an important saint for Abbot Geoffrey, which further suggests he was not her sole promoter at the abbey, if he was involved in the process of her textual production at all. Finally, the historical fact that she was employed as a patron of St Albans before none other than Pope Adrian IV, to whom St Albans was appealing for numerous institutional benefits at the time, shows that the prevailing opinion of Christina at the abbey can not have been entirely negative. Placing the Life within the literary and cultural circumstances of its production thus provides a fresh reading of Christina's institutional and devotional roles at St Albans, medieval views of women's spirituality and its place within the western European Christian tradition, and the compositional process of a major work of medieval hagiographical literature. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2012