Inaug.-Diss.--Göttingen. / Bibliography: p. 112-114.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1972. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

While a woman’s identity is constructed on multiple sites, it is the Catholic Church which constructs, regulates and ascribes meaning to the life of the Catholic Nun. In this thesis, which adopts a Foucauldian and feminist approach, an examination of six important Church texts relating to Nuns‟ lives identifies three dominant discursive constructions of Nun, namely the Nun as called by God, to sacrifice her life, and to work for the Church in its mission. Individual and focus group interview data from a sample of 43 Nuns in Australia and New Zealand is examined for ways in which Nuns negotiate such constructions in their experience of being Nuns. The Church’s discursive truths of what it is to be Nun, learnt during the process of subjectification of the Novitiate or training process, continue to be taken up by Nuns in this study. Functioning as the Institutional Self, they position themselves as docile Church women, loyal to the Church and its mission. However, they also resist the Church’s truths and material practices for their lives, functioning as the Individuated Self, a self refusing to be regulated by such truths and material practices laid down by the Church. Nuns in this study show evidence of adopting fluid positioning, functioning neither wholly as Institutional Self nor as Individuated Self, since they give accounts of both taking up and resisting the Church’s constructions of Nun. However, it is in the position of resistance that they contribute to the creation of new notions of what it is to be ‘Nun’, namely the Nun as an autonomous woman, exercising personal agency in her life, and working not necessarily for the Church, but for the poor and the marginalised in the world. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oklahoma, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 192-202).

This dissertation examines the lives and material production of the early modern women known as the Nuns of Little Gidding, Mary Collett Ferrar (1603-1680) and Anna Collett (1605-1639). The religious community at Little Gidding, Huntingsonshire (now Cambridgeshire), founded in 1626 by Mary Woodnoth Ferrar and her son Nicholas, housed forty-some members of the extended Ferrar, Collet, and Mapletoft family and their retainers. They devoted their lives to prayer, Bible study and memorization, contemplation, acts of charity, and the production of several unique Bible concordances or harmonies (as well as some Bible histories) of which fifteen are extant. Women were central to the spiritual life of the community, in particular, Mary and Anna who took vows of chastity. They were also the primary creators of the concordances, a task that entailed cutting up printed Bibles, reorganizing the text according to a complex scheme devised by Nicholas Ferrar. The resulting harmonized Gospel suppressed the discrepancies and differences in the four canonical accounts and produced a single, seamless narrative that preserved every detail of the originals. Close study of the relationship between image and text in the Gospel harmonies shows that the women sometimes chose particular images not to illustrate but rather to undermine the authority of the biblical narrative. Images might restore women to an account that minimizes, trivializes, or elides their importance in the life of Jesus. Thus, while their explicit task was to harmonize the Gospel accounts, the women were surreptitiously "deconstructing" them to reveal their discord.

Thesis (MEd) -- University of South Australia

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 2002. / Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008.

Author's inaugural dissertation, Tübingen. / Added title: Darstellungen aus der württembergischen geschichte, hrsg. von der Württe. kommission für landesgeschichte. 27. bd. Added t.p. "Verzeichnis der benutzen quellen und darstellungen": p. [149]-155.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Catholic University of America, 1932. / At head of title: The Catholic University of America. "Select bibliography": p. vii-xxvii.