abstract: Religions, following Max Müller, have often been seen by scholars in religious studies as uniform collections of beliefs and practices encoded in stable “sacred books” that direct the conduct of religious actors. These texts were the chief focus of academic students of religion through much of the 20th century, and this approach remains strong in the 21st. However, a growing chorus of dissidents has begun to focus on the lived experience of practitioners and the material objects that structure that experience, and some textual scholars have begun extending this materialist framework to the study of texts. This dissertation is a contribution in that vein from the field of Daoist studies. Now split between two separate texts, the Most High Scripture of the Rectifying Methods of the Three Heavens began as a 4th-century collection of apocalyptic predictions and apotropaic devices designed to deliver a select group of Chinese literati to the heavens of Highest Clarity. Later editors during the early medieval period (ca. 220-589 CE) took one of two paths: for their own reasons, they altered the Rectifying Methods to emphasize either the world’s end or its continuation. Detailed study of these alterations and their contexts shows how individuals and groups used and modified the Rectifying Methods in in ways that challenge the conventional relationship between religious text and religious actor. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Religious Studies 2019

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The Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa is the primary Armenian-language historical source for the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Matthew was a monk who lived in the ethnically mixed city of Edessa; within his Chronicle, he describes the apogee of independent Armenia, its fall to piecemeal Byzantine annexation, the subsequent loss of Byzantium's eastern territory to the newcomer Saljuq Turks, and the sectarian tension that accompanied the First Crusade. This thesis sets out the methodology adopted for the construction of a critical edition of the text, addresses the approach that Matthew took to the composition of the Chronicle, and gives the edited text of the prophecies attributed to Yovhannēs Kozeṙn and the author's prologues to Books Two and Three of the Chronicle. Chapters 2 and 3 comprise a review of the scholarship to date on the Chronicle, and a discussion of the approach taken to a critical edition of the text. The Chronicle survives in a large number of relatively recently copied manuscripts; it was therefore necessary to devise an approach to text collation and editing that takes full advantage of recent advances in computational methods of philology. I have developed a set of software tools to assist in the task of editing the Chronicle; these tools are useful for the creation of text editions in any language that can be represented through the TEI XML standard. Chapters 4–8 give an examination of the overall framework of Matthew’s Chronicle, and of his interpretation of recent history within that framework. Following a long tradition of the use of prophecy to explain Armenian history, Matthew uses two prophecies attributed to the eleventh-century clerical scholar Yovhannēs Kozeṙn, themselves extended in the twelfth century under the influence of the Apocalypse attributed to Methodius, to frame his argument that both the Byzantine emperors and the Armenian kings had abandoned their responsibility toward the Armenian people. His attitude toward recent history, and particularly toward the Latins of Outremer, may be used to demonstrate that he wrote the Chronicle no later than 1137.