Thesis advisor: Cynthia Lynn Lyerly / My dissertation examines the process of cultural adaption and change. Nineteenth-century Lutherans in many ways were cultural outsiders and a religious minority. They were confessional in a land of evangelicals. A fundamental divide between Lutherans and their evangelical neighbors was that Lutherans did not believe that an emotionally charged conversion experience was necessary in order to obtain salvation. Whereas evangelicals believed individuals had to decide to accepted Jesus as their personal lord and savior in order to receive salvation and grace, Lutherans believed that God made the decisions to save individuals, and they received God's grace and salvation as a totally free and unmerited gift. Lutherans, therefore, had to decide how to respond to the revival movement that swept across the antebellum south. While Lutheran theological tradition focused on a mystical and yet intellectual relationship with God obtained by studying the Bible, the popularity of revivals forced Lutherans to negotiate their religious differences with their evangelical neighbors. Moreover, since Lutherans placed such value on an intellectual relationship with God, they emphasized the importance of education even when those around them were hostile to education. Unlike evangelicals, Lutherans did not have church courts, but they were still very interested in public morality. My dissertation examines how they negotiated their response to the moral dilemmas of their day such as drinking, dancing and dueling, which were important components of honor culture. Lutherans also found themselves separated from their evangelical neighbors due to the fact that they spoke German while the evangelicals spoke English. For many Lutherans the German language and Lutheranism were inseparable. This language barrier not only separated Lutherans from their neighbors but also acted as a wedge between the older Lutheran generations who spoke German and the younger generations that grew up speaking English. Lutherans had to decide whether to give up German, the language of Luther, or risk losing the youth. Upon arriving in North Carolina, they were confronted with the issue of slavery. While evangelicals at first rejected slavery and only slowly embraced it, Lutherans appeared to have no moral qualms with the institution. Finally, North Carolina Lutherans were members of a national Lutheran church at a time when national evangelical churches were being torn apart due to sectional tensions. It was only after the country was at war that a schism finally occurred in the national Lutheran church. My dissertation examines how North Carolina Lutherans and Lutherans across the country were able to hold their church together as long as they did and how this division finalized North Carolina Lutherans' southernization. This project begins with the Lutherans' arrival in North Carolina just prior to the Revolutionary War and concludes with the aftermath of the Civil War. The majority of German Lutherans lived in the piedmont region of North Carolina, and this study focuses geographically on this region. As a social history this project explores questions of how German Lutherans eventually transformed from outsiders to proud members of the Confederate nation. "Adapting to Dixie" examines the dynamics of rapid cultural change in which Lutherans struggled to retain a sense of their separateness while still conforming to the region's mores. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

This dissertation examines the hagiographical corpus of the Dominican preacher Thomas of Cantimpré (c. 1201–1270), a critical early respondent to the burgeoning women’s religious movement in the Southern Low Countries. Writing at a time when both lay and religious spirituality were being radically refigured in light of new organizational structures and devotional practices, Thomas’s hagiographical corpus reflects the diversity of vocational possibilities available for women and men in this period at a time of great religious experimentation and innovation. Using historical, literary, and theological methods, the dissertation examines the ways in which Thomas’s vitae struggle with the question of how lay and religious, male and female readers might, in Thomas’s words, “take up” the different kinds of figures Thomas offers as models for practice and objects of devotion. Each of the vitae offer unique solutions to this question even as they represent different sorts of persons as exemplary. An important assumption governing the dissertation is that hagiography is a vital part of the spiritual and theological tradition of Christianity. Thomas’s vitae, I argue, attempt to articulate a theology of exemplarity in order to address the issue of what constitutes sanctity, who can become a saint, and by what means sanctity is attained. For Thomas, exemplarity is animated by theological notions of incarnation and scriptural revelation. Christ, as manifest in his life and in the words of scripture, is the great exemplum for embodied lives. For each of Thomas’s saints, Christ is both the singular figure who saves and the one in whom the saint participates, raising the question of how the individual human being embodies and exemplifies Christ’s singularity. Thomas’s Lives will be shown, in the course of their narratives, to illumine the tension between the singularity of Christ and its repetition in the saintly figures represented in the vitae and the readers of those vitae. Exploration of this tension reveals great richness in Thomas’s works, showing that Thomas’s narrative voice often speaks doubly within a single vita, thematizing the limits and possibilities of exemplarity and its hagiographical representation.

The image of love as a burning flame is so widespread in the history of Christian literature as to appear inevitable. But as this dissertation explores, the association of amor with fire played a precise and wide-ranging role in Bonaventure's understanding of the soul's motive power--its capacity to love and be united with God, especially as that capacity was demonstrated in an exemplary way through the spiritual ascent and death of St. Francis. In drawing out this association, Bonaventure develops a theory of the soul and its capacity for transformation in union with God that gives specificity to the Christian desire for self-abandonment in God and the annihilation of the soul in union with God. Though Bonaventure does not use the language of the soul coming to nothing, he describes a state of ecstasy or excessus mentis that is possible in this life, but which constitutes the death and transformation of the soul in union with God. In this ecstatic state, the boundaries between the soul and God--between active and passive, mover and moved, will and necessity--are effectively consumed in the fire of union. This dissertation offers a new approach to the role of affect in Bonaventure’s theology through three lenses: his elaboration of the soul’s union with God as inspired by the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite; Bonaventure’s conception of synderesis or the soul’s natural affective “weight” or inclination to God; and the ecstatic death of the soul that Bonaventure describes in the Itinerarium mentis in Deum and which is witnessed in the body of St. Francis in the Legenda Maior. This dissertation argues that Bonaventure’s “affective" gloss on the Dionysian corpus was not an interpolation but a working out of the Dionysian conception of eros. In elaborating the soul’s natural motion to the good, moreover, Bonaventure situates divine desire within an Aristotelian cosmos. And as the manifestation of this desire in Francis’s dying body makes evident, for Bonaventure affectus plays at the boundary of body and spirit and names a force that is more fundamental than the distinction between the corporeal and incorporeal.

"Christian Slavery" shows how Protestant missionaries in the early modern Atlantic World developed a new vision for slavery that integrated Christianity with human bondage. Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries arrived in the Caribbean intending to "convert" enslaved Africans to Christianity, but their actions formed only one part of a dialogue that engaged ideas about family, kinship, sex, and language. Enslaved people perceived these newcomers alternately as advocates, enemies, interlopers, and powerful spiritual practitioners, and they sought to utilize their presence for pragmatic, political, and religious reasons. Protestant slave owners fiercely guarded their Christian rituals from non-white outsiders and rebuffed the efforts of Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries to convert the enslaved population. For planters, Protestantism was a sign of mastery and freedom, and most believed that slaves should not be eligible for conversion. The planters’ exclusive vision of Protestantism was challenged on two fronts: by missionaries, who articulated a new ideology of "Christian slavery," and by enslaved men and women who sought baptism for themselves and their children. In spite of planter intransigence, a small number of enslaved and free Africans advocated and won access to Protestant rites. As they did so, "whiteness" emerged as a new way to separate enslaved and free black converts from Christian masters. Enslaved and free blacks who joined Protestant churches also forced Europeans to reinterpret key points of Scripture and reconsider their ideas about "true" Christian practice. As missionaries and slaves came to new agreements and interpretations, they remade Protestantism as an Atlantic institution. Missionaries argued that slave conversion would solidify planter power, make slaves more obedient and hardworking, and make slavery into a viable Protestant institution. They also encouraged the development of a race-based justification for slavery and sought to pass legislation that confirmed the legality of enslaving black Christians. In so doing, they redefined the practice of religion, the meaning of freedom, and the construction of race in the early modern Atlantic World.Their arguments helped to form the foundation of the proslavery ideology that would emerge in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This dissertation is an analysis of discursive productions of Kālīghāṭ, a Hindu temple dedicated to the goddess Kālī in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India. It is the most famous temple in what was once the capital of the British Empire in India and what is now India's third largest city. Kālīghāṭ has a reputation for being ancient, powerful, corrupt, and dirty. This dissertation aims to discover how and why these are the adjectives most often used to describe this temple. While there are many stories that can be told about a place, and many words that can be used to characterize it, these four dominate the public discourse on Kālīghāṭ. I demonstrate in these pages that these ideas about Kālīghāṭ are not discoveries made about the site, but are instead creations of it that have been produced at certain times, according to certain discursive practices, toward certain ends.

Tawātur is the concept that if we obtain the same information through a sufficient number of independent channels, we reach certainty about that data. When applied to the transmission of Qur'ān and hadith texts, tawātur can serve as a means by which to assert the truth of a source-text, which in turn has implications for correctness of the religious belief or practice that is conveyed by the text, and hence the orthodoxy of one accepting or rejecting it. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

As the Catholic revival that followed the Wars of Religion in France brought about the proliferation of new monasteries and religious orders, spiritual biographies of the founders and leaders of these houses were composed in unprecedented numbers. These texts, generally written by men about women, described cultural ideals about feminine piety more than the lived experience of nuns. This project seeks to examine the ways that spiritual biographies nevertheless represented literary practices in convents and actual collaboration between religious men and women. The vast array of biographical documents that were produced within convents became the source materials for the male authors of biographies, which allowed the members of convents to exert influence on the subject matter of the published work. The products of these collaborative efforts then served the interests of women as well as men, offering examples of religious communities’ virtues and valuable works to potential recruits and donors in addition to providing models of the ascetic piety and self-examination endorsed by women of the Catholic Reformation. In an era when authorship was a communal, rather than individual, endeavour, the participation of men did not necessarily erase all traces of women’s voices, but rather granted them the legitimacy and spiritual authority to be published before a wider audience. Spiritual biographies are therefore an example of how cloistered women could transcend the barriers of enclosure to influence a broader secular and religious public. / Graduate

Much has been written about the generation of Southern Irish Protestant intellectuals who played such a prominent role in Ireland's public life from the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell in the early 1890s until the rise of Eamon de Valera in the early 1930s. Very little indeed has been written about the generation of Southern Protestant intellectuals following them, those writers, journalists, academics and churchmen who were born around 1900 and who came of age in the decade following Irish Independence. Though few in number, these people represent an important facet of the young nation's cultural history and serve to refute the blanket assumption that the minority community had neither the will nor the ability to make a contribution to the new dispensation. As a particularly eloquent and stalwart member of this community, the Kilkenny man-of-letters Hubert Butler (1900-91) functions as the touchstone of this thesis, an individual worthy of attention in his own right but also compelling as a commentator on the challenges facing Southern Protestants generally during the period 1930-72. For in these years, Protestants confronted the delicate task of adapting to their changed position within Irish society without in the process forfeiting their distinct identity. As a nationalist eager to participate fully in the country's civic life but also as a Protestant fiercely committed to the rights of spiritual independence and intellectual dissent, Butler often struggled to balance the demands of community with those of autonomy. This thesis explores the various contexts in which he and his contemporaries challenged the normative terms of Irishness so that the criteria for belonging might better accommodate their minority values and experiences. In so doing, Southern Protestant intellectuals of this generation made a valuable contribution to the development of pluralistic values on the island.

Scholarly surveys of the medieval Magdalene tend to conclude at the opening of the sixteenth century, dismissing any role she may have had in the teaching of Protestant reformers. Protestant and Catholic attitudes towards sanctity and sainthood have been the object of scholarly work, but my dissertation is the first comparative examination of the different confessions' uses of the Magdalene tradition through the early modern period. Mary Magdalene was of one of several scriptural women to whom Protestants in Germany, France, Switzerland, and England referred in debating the legitimacy of female and lay preaching. Lutheran and Reformed pastors, Anabaptists, and Quakers all adapted the medieval Magdalene tradition to advance Evangelical theologies of the forgiveness of sins, the sacraments, and the priesthood of all believers. Early modern women also seized on these possibilities, claiming for themselves the Magdalene's title as preacher and devoted disciple of the Word. The Catholic cult of the Magdalene shifted as well, serving the needs of the Catholic Reformation. In reaction to the Protestant specter of lay and female preaching, male authors in their sermons and devotional work set aside earlier descriptions of the Magdalene as "apostle to the apostles" and emphasized instead her identity as a penitent prostitute. Catholic women investigated the Magdalene's relation to her sister Martha to develop new images of female sanctity. As the medieval separation between clergy and laity was questioned, reform-minded Christians both Protestant and Catholic explored new understandings of the shape of Christian life. The Magdalene's call to confess the Gospel was a missionary imperative that transcended the boundaries of the ordained clergy. Similarly, the contemplation of Mary's contemplation and the worldly work of her sister Martha could no longer be divided among different groups, but had to be integrated by each individual. Early modern Christians from Luther to Teresa of Avila discussed the terms of this reconciliation, attempting to understand secular work as a vocation, the fruit and expression of contemplation. What have often been taken to be distinct preoccupations of opponents in reform are revealed to have shared a common dialogue, framed by the life of Mary Magdalene.

This dissertation examines the spiritual experiences of the first British Methodist lay people and the language used to describe those experiences. Within the historiography of Methodism, such physical manifestations as shouting, weeping, groaning, visions, and out-of-body experiences have often been relegated to the periphery of scholarship. It would seem, however, that for many laity, they played a significant role in their process of spiritual development. This work aims to explore the perspective of Methodist laity through manuscript accounts of conversions and deathbed moments. It reveals lay people’s first impressions of Methodism, their conflicted feelings throughout the conversion process, their approach toward death and dying, and their mixed attitudes toward the task of writing itself. Relying heavily on firsthand accounts solicited by Charles Wesley in the 1740s, this work features the voices of women and men of varying literate abilities and social status. This study examines firstly the multiple media through which lay people received evangelical messages, expanding the term “media” to include not only traditional printed sources such as sermons and devotional reading, but also such phenomena as divine voices, visions and other direct supernatural encounters. It then turns to the task of expressing spiritual experience, revealing the problematic nature of early Methodist spiritual autobiography and the passive strategies employed by laity to legitimate writing about the self. This dissertation demonstrates the struggle to rely on unreliable “feelings” (both emotions and physical sensations) as an indicator of spiritual progress. Far from peripheral, the body and bodily language played important roles in spiritual transformation, even as they were constantly renegotiated as part of that transformation. For instance, the visualization of the “vile self” signified the activation of the “eye of faith,” which enabled many early writers to transition from a “worldly” conception of self-sufficiency to a new kind of subjectivity based on being subject to a divine authority. This study follows the trajectory of spiritual development into the final moments of life, which often proved a prime opportunity for mutual evangelization between the dying individual and her spectators. Taken together, these experiences offer an intimate perspective on the origins of the evangelical revival.