Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Protestantism and literature'

ABSTRACT George Gissing has experienced a fluctuating reputation among critics in the period of over one hundred years since his death in 1903. Curiously, during the last decade of his life, many critics put Gissing on a par with Thomas Hardy and George Meredith among writers living at that time. Early in his career, however, his reputation suffered from the notion that Gissing was simply a naturalist with a pessimistic, atheistic streak. To some extent, this appraisal has some merit. Gissing pronounced himself an unbeliever to family and to acquaintances such as Fredrick Harrison as early as 1880. Nonetheless, Gissing maintained an interest in religion throughout his life, a fact made plain by his use of religious material in his novels. Furthermore, he was far from merely dismissing religion, nor did he adopt a uniformly unsympathetic view of belief. My dissertation will demonstrate that, starting with his first published novel, Gissing made extensive use of religious subject matter in the form of imagery, symbolism, plot elements, and characterization. More significantly, he also examined the relationship between religion and capitalism. Often, one detects in Gissing’s work a sense of what I will call economic Calvinism, an idea that has received extensive explication by Max Weber and others. I will show that Gissing’s characters are often divided into class and economic lines, a fact not in itself particularly novel, but one which finds expression in Gissing in terms very evocative of the Christian division of humanity into categories of damned and saved. I will also reveal patterns in Gissing’s work that depict the ongoing dialogue between religious issues and other social concerns such as feminism, philanthropy, poverty, church affiliation, philosophy, and marriage. The dissertation covers selected novels from roughly the first half of Gissing’s career in an attempt to bring to light the pervasiveness of religious reference in a representative assortment of Gissing’s work. My paper will show that more concentrated attention to the use of religion in Gissing will contribute to a greater understanding of him as an artist. It will also suggest that more study in this area needs to be done.

The argument of this dissertation is that a critical reading of the concept of "covenant" in early American writings is instrumental to understanding the paradoxes in the American political concepts of freedom and equality. Following Slavoj Zizek's theoretical approach to theology, I trace the covenant concept in early American literature from the theological expressions and disputes in Puritan Massachusetts through Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of Will and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, showing how the covenant theology of colonial New England dispersed into more "secular" forms of what may be called an American political theology. The first chapter provides an overview of recent attempts to integrate theology and theory, specifically comparing Jacques Derrida and Zizek to better understand the latter's theology of materialism which relies on as well as informs the Reformed Protestant covenantal dichotomy of grace and works. The second chapter establishes the complicated architecture of the covenant concept within seventeenth-century New England Reformed Protestantism, and uses church membership transcripts along with Ann Hutchinson court trial documents to demonstrate how this inherently unstable theology created unintended slippage between God's grace and mankind's works, resulting in a theological formulation remarkably open to Zizek's analysis of political ideology. The third chapter demonstrates how Jonathan Edwards, through his ingenious counter-argument in Freedom of Will, provides a theoretical foundation for an uneasy but necessary alignment of the covenants of works and grace, releasing the subjunctive potential of grace to operate through history as a predeterminer of meaning and, potentially, freedom. In the last chapter, I argue that Emerson finally converts the covenant from a politically conceptualized theological framework for radical grace into a personal institutionalization of grace itself. Stanley Cavell's exploration of Emerson's "constitution" in light of the covenant motif demonstrates the political (im)possibilities inherent in America's self-conceptions of personal liberty and civic equality. In the end, complexities inherent in the concept of the covenant, especially its creative failure to control the radical nature of "grace," are determinative factors in our contradictory American egalitarian ideals.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Cincinnati, 2009.<br>Advisor: Richard Schade. Title from electronic thesis title page (viewed Aug. 12, 2009). Includes abstract. Keywords: Early Modern Germany; Paul Gerhardt; Apocalypticism; Protestant Hymns; Revelations; 17th Century; Thirty Years' War; Poetry; Protestantism. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis tells the story of an historical tradition of radical literacy and literature that is defined as the British radical literary tradition. It takes the meaning of literature at its broadest understanding and identifies the literary and educational relations of what E.P. Thompson terms 'the making of the English working class' through its struggle for literacy and freedom. The study traces the developing dialectic of literary radicalism and the emergent hegemony of capitalism through the dissemination of radical ideas in literature and a groundswell of public literacy. The proposed radical tradition is defined by the oppositional stance of its participants, from the radical intellectual's critical texts to the striving for literacy and access to literature by working class people. This oppositional discourse emerged in the fourteenth century concomitant with nascent capitalism and has its literary origins in utopian vision. This nascent utopian imagination conceived a democratic socialism that underpinned the character of much of the following oppositional discourse. The thesis establishes the nexus of the oppositional discourse as a radical literary tradition and the earliest instances of adult education in autodidacticism and informal adult education. The ascent of middle class power through the industrial revolution is shadowed by the corresponding descent of the working class into poverty. Concomitant with this social polarisation is the phenomena of working class literary agency as the means to political and economic agency. While Protestant dissenting groups such as the Diggers and Levellers were revolutionary activists, it was Methodism that formed a bulwark against revolution. Yet it was their emphasis on self-improvement that contributed to an increasingly literate populace. Radical texts produced and disseminated by individuals and organisations and read by autodidactics and informal reading groups are seminal in the formation of a working class identity. Spearheaded by the Chartist movement, education became a central ethic of working class politics and the civil struggle for economic and political justice throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries. The avant garde movements of the early twentieth century are analysed as a strand of this tradition. The narrative of the thesis then moves to the penal colony of Australia and explores the radical literary tradition's development there. Early colonial culture is seen as having a strong impetus towards a developing a native literary expression of the new land. Where conservative colonial literature struggled to differentiate itself from formal British literary models, the radical heritage and its utopian vision of a working man's paradise gave definitive expression to the Australian experience. This expression was strongly influenced by Chartist ideals. The British radical literary tradition is thus seen to have had a dominant influence in the development of a native radical literary tradition that strove to identify the national character. Socialist thought developed in Australia in concert with that in the parent culture, and anarchist and libertarian trends found a ready home amongst independent minded colonials. Yet, in preventing the formation of a native aristocracy the small radical population made a compromise with liberalism that saw a decidedly conservative streak develop in the early labour movement. There were little in the way of sophisticated radical literary offerings at first, but from the mid-nineteenth century a vanguard of radicals produced a thriving native press and other fugitive text forms. At the turn of the century the native radical literary tradition was vibrantly diverse, with a definitive style that claimed literary ownership of the Australian character. However, exhausted by the battles over WWI conscription and isolated by censorship, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was able to subsume the vanguard position from the socialists. The Party laid claim to the Australian radical literary tradition, at once both strengthening it with the discipline of a Marxist ideology and diminishing its independence and diversity. Party literary theory centred upon the issue of class, developing a doctrine of socialist realism that communist writers were expected to practice. How well a writer adhered to socialist realist principles became a measure of their class position and loyalty. Drawing more from primary sources, the thesis develops an analysis of the intellectual development of the Australian post-WWII writer Eric Lambert through his experience of class instability during Depression and war. The study examines Lambert's decision to join the Party and his literary response to his experiences of war, the Party, the turmoil of 1956 and life after the Party. Lambert's body of work is then analysed as the unintentional memoir of a writer working as an adult educator in the radical literary tradition. Lambert's struggles, for artistic independence within the narrow precepts of Party dogma and with class tensions, were common amongst intellectuals committed to the communist cause. Like many of his peers, Lambert resigned from the Party at the end of 1956 and suffered a period of ideological vacuum. However, he continued to write as a Marxian educator, seeking to reveal that which makes us human in the humanity of ordinary people. It is concluded that, while the Party did much to foster disciplined cohesion, the mutual distrust it generated amongst its intellectuals suppressed the independent thought that had kept the radical literary tradition alive. Although the Party developed an ideological strength within the radical literary tradition, its dominance over thirty years and subsequent fall from grace acted to fragment and discredit that centuries-old tradition which it subsumed. An argument is made for a reinvestment of the centrality of the radical literary tradition in the education of adults for the maintenance of social justice and the democratic project.

This thesis tells the story of an historical tradition of radical literacy and literature that is defined as the British radical literary tradition. It takes the meaning of literature at its broadest understanding and identifies the literary and educational relations of what E.P. Thompson terms 'the making of the English working class' through its struggle for literacy and freedom. The study traces the developing dialectic of literary radicalism and the emergent hegemony of capitalism through the dissemination of radical ideas in literature and a groundswell of public literacy. The proposed radical tradition is defined by the oppositional stance of its participants, from the radical intellectual's critical texts to the striving for literacy and access to literature by working class people. This oppositional discourse emerged in the fourteenth century concomitant with nascent capitalism and has its literary origins in utopian vision. This nascent utopian imagination conceived a democratic socialism that underpinned the character of much of the following oppositional discourse. The thesis establishes the nexus of the oppositional discourse as a radical literary tradition and the earliest instances of adult education in autodidacticism and informal adult education. The ascent of middle class power through the industrial revolution is shadowed by the corresponding descent of the working class into poverty. Concomitant with this social polarisation is the phenomena of working class literary agency as the means to political and economic agency. While Protestant dissenting groups such as the Diggers and Levellers were revolutionary activists, it was Methodism that formed a bulwark against revolution. Yet it was their emphasis on self-improvement that contributed to an increasingly literate populace. Radical texts produced and disseminated by individuals and organisations and read by autodidactics and informal reading groups are seminal in the formation of a working class identity. Spearheaded by the Chartist movement, education became a central ethic of working class politics and the civil struggle for economic and political justice throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries. The avant garde movements of the early twentieth century are analysed as a strand of this tradition. The narrative of the thesis then moves to the penal colony of Australia and explores the radical literary tradition's development there. Early colonial culture is seen as having a strong impetus towards a developing a native literary expression of the new land. Where conservative colonial literature struggled to differentiate itself from formal British literary models, the radical heritage and its utopian vision of a working man's paradise gave definitive expression to the Australian experience. This expression was strongly influenced by Chartist ideals. The British radical literary tradition is thus seen to have had a dominant influence in the development of a native radical literary tradition that strove to identify the national character. Socialist thought developed in Australia in concert with that in the parent culture, and anarchist and libertarian trends found a ready home amongst independent minded colonials. Yet, in preventing the formation of a native aristocracy the small radical population made a compromise with liberalism that saw a decidedly conservative streak develop in the early labour movement. There were little in the way of sophisticated radical literary offerings at first, but from the mid-nineteenth century a vanguard of radicals produced a thriving native press and other fugitive text forms. At the turn of the century the native radical literary tradition was vibrantly diverse, with a definitive style that claimed literary ownership of the Australian character. However, exhausted by the battles over WWI conscription and isolated by censorship, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was able to subsume the vanguard position from the socialists. The Party laid claim to the Australian radical literary tradition, at once both strengthening it with the discipline of a Marxist ideology and diminishing its independence and diversity. Party literary theory centred upon the issue of class, developing a doctrine of socialist realism that communist writers were expected to practice. How well a writer adhered to socialist realist principles became a measure of their class position and loyalty. Drawing more from primary sources, the thesis develops an analysis of the intellectual development of the Australian post-WWII writer Eric Lambert through his experience of class instability during Depression and war. The study examines Lambert's decision to join the Party and his literary response to his experiences of war, the Party, the turmoil of 1956 and life after the Party. Lambert's body of work is then analysed as the unintentional memoir of a writer working as an adult educator in the radical literary tradition. Lambert's struggles, for artistic independence within the narrow precepts of Party dogma and with class tensions, were common amongst intellectuals committed to the communist cause. Like many of his peers, Lambert resigned from the Party at the end of 1956 and suffered a period of ideological vacuum. However, he continued to write as a Marxian educator, seeking to reveal that which makes us human in the humanity of ordinary people. It is concluded that, while the Party did much to foster disciplined cohesion, the mutual distrust it generated amongst its intellectuals suppressed the independent thought that had kept the radical literary tradition alive. Although the Party developed an ideological strength within the radical literary tradition, its dominance over thirty years and subsequent fall from grace acted to fragment and discredit that centuries-old tradition which it subsumed. An argument is made for a reinvestment of the centrality of the radical literary tradition in the education of adults for the maintenance of social justice and the democratic project.<br>Thesis (PhD Doctorate)<br>Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)<br>School of Vocational, Technology and Arts Education<br>Full Text

This thesis seeks to realign Richard Crashaw’s aesthetic orientation with a broadly conceptualized genre of seventeenth-century devotional, or meditative, poetry. This realignment clarifies Crashaw’s worth as a poet within the Renaissance canon and helps to dismantle historicist and New Historicist readings that characterize him as a literary anomaly. The methodology consists of an expanded definition of meditative poetry, based primarily on Louis Martz’s original interpretation, followed by a series of close readings executed to show continuity between Crashaw and his contemporaries, not discordance. The thesis concludes by expanding the genre of seventeenth-century devotional poetry to include Edward Taylor, who despite his Puritanism, also exemplifies many of the same generic attributes as Crashaw.

Cette thèse interroge l’histoire politique des réformés français au début du XVIIe siècle au prisme de la notion de liberté : liberté comme défense des acquis juridiques conférés par le régime de l’édit de Nantes, mais aussi comme capacité d’action. Loin de considérer les huguenots comme les victimes passives d’une « France toute catholique », elle les pense comme des acteurs politiques. Cette capacité d’agir est analysée en deux temps : nous interrogeons d’abord les caractéristiques qui fondent cette liberté d’action dans le contexte du XVIIe siècle, à travers une étude de la place accordée aux institutions, à la mémoire, à l’union et au langage dans leurs pratiques. Nous étudions ensuite la « mise en pratique » de cette liberté politique, en interrogeant les évolutions du parti huguenot, du rapport aux institutions, à la noblesse, aux stratégies langagières à la suite de la mort d’Henri IV. Enfin, nous consacrons une dernière partie à la « mise à mort » de cette culture politique : la fin du parti huguenot, largement documentée, n’est pas le fruit de dissensions internes, mais d’une volonté politique qui cherche à attaquer cette liberté<br>This thesis questions the political history of the French Reformers at the beginning of the seventeenth century through the prism of the notion of freedom : freedom as a defense of the legal gains conferred by the Nantes edict regime, but also as a capacity for action. Far from considering the Huguenots as the passive victims of an «all Catholic France», it considers them as political actors. This capacity to act is analysed in two stages: first, we examine the characteristics underlying this freedom of action in the context of the seventeenth century, through a study of the place given to institutions, memory, union and language in Reformed practices. We then study the «implementation» of this political freedom, questioning the evolutions of the Huguenot party, from the relationship to the institutions, to the nobility, to the language strategies following the death of Henri IV. Finally, we dedicate a last part to the «killing» of this political culture: the end of the Huguenot party, widely documented, is not the result of internal dissension, but of a political will that seeks to attack this freedom

Per establir la configuració del geni schönberguià posarem les bases de la seva ètica a partir del judaisme i el protestantisme i situarem l’estadi “ètic-pre-estètic” com a l’impuls de la seva necessitat creadora, per centrar-nos, posteriorment, en l’estudi de la seva estètica seguint els conceptes de Nova Música, Bellesa, Lletjor, Comprensibilitat i Coherència, per tal de fer una anàlisi del desenvolupament de l’obra del compositor. Amb aquesta base podrem encarar l’estudi del geni, el veritable objectiu d’aquesta tesi, i extraurem dotze categories explicatives de la personalitat de Schönberg a partir dels seus textos. Finalment, establirem un diàleg amb l’Adrian Leverkühn de Thomas Mann i avaluarem què hi ha de Schönberg en el personatge de Mann -tenint en compte que el que nosaltres volem intentar des de filosofia ell ho va fer en el terreny de la literatura- tot contraposant les categories schönberguianes a les de Mann, bo i observant que en Leverkühn hi ha més trets a contemplar.<br>Zur Bestimmung des schönbergschen Geniebegriffs sollen zunächst – ausgehend vom Judentum und Protestantismus – die Grundpfeiler seiner Ethik dargelegt werden, wobei das ethisch-vorästhetische Stadium als Impuls seines schöpferischen Bedürfnisses angesehen wird. Anschließend konzentriert sich die vorliegende Arbeit –anhand der Konzepte Neue Musik, Schönheit, Hässlichkeit, Faβlichkeit und Kohärenz – auf die Untersuchung der Ästhetik, um dann eine Analyse der Entwicklung seines kompositorischen Werkes vorzunehmen. Auf Grundlage der besagten Pfeiler soll anschließend der Geniebegriff – der eigentliche Gegenstand der Dissertation – untersucht werden. Hierfür werden anhand der schönbergschen Texte zwölf erläuternde Kategorien seiner Persönlichkeit herausgearbeitet. In einer abschließenden Gegenüberstellung mit Adrian Leverkühn, der Hauptfigur des Doktor Faustus von Thomas Mann, soll gezeigt werden, wie viel Schönberg in der mannschen Figur wirklich vorhanden ist. Dabei soll jedoch nicht außer Acht gelassen werden, dass die vorliegende Arbeit eine philosophische Herangehensweise verfolgt, wohingegen Mann sich auf literarischem Terrain bewegte. Unter Berücksichtigung, dass es bei Leverkühn noch andere Wesenszüge zu beobachten gilt, werden schließlich die schönbergschen Kategorien mit den mannschen verglichen.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T19:31:24Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Os Nova Seitas.pdf: 717591 bytes, checksum: 3d2b09f1d2c24c3ed14429fe41701920 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005-03-30<br>Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico<br>Analisamos a presença protestante na perspectiva da literatura de cordel produzida nos estados de Pernambuco e da Paraíba, entre as décadas de 1890 e 1930, cujos folhetos traziam como tema, entre outros assuntos, discussões entre católicos e protestantes. Os estudos que trataram da penetração protestante no Brasil ainda não contemplaram o uso dos cordéis como fontes para análise da inserção missionária dos cristãos reformados no Nordeste, tampouco nos referidos estados, para a qual pretendemos contribuir. Em nossa análise dos cordéis, percebemos que os cordelistas, ao versejar sobre a presença e a pregação protestantes, recorriam a fontes escritas e à tradição oral do Nordeste. O recurso às fontes letradas evidenciou-se por certos argumentos contrários aos reformados, cuja similaridade com o discurso oficial da igreja católica demonstramos. Da mesma forma, discutimos a relevância da tradição oral nos cordéis que polemizavam sobre a presença dos cristãos reformados, apontando os elementos presentes nos argumentos antiprotestantes relacionados à religiosidade e à escrita e vocabulário populares. A relevância destas duas tradições, a letrada e a oral, nos ditos cordéis, indicou, de acordo com nossa interpretação, a ocorrência da circularidade cultural, conceito presente em nossa abordagem ao longo de toda a dissertação. Por fim, na análise da presença protestante, nos estados acima citados, através do discurso dos cordéis, percebemos também uma caracterização específica dos protestantes feita pelos cordelistas, os quais destacavam a rejeição do culto a Maria, aos santos, o uso de imagens (a cruz), a polêmica em torno da posse e leitura da Bíblia protestante e a descrição pejorativa dos protestantes.

Les puritains interdisaient généralement de s'exprimer dans un style imagé et exigeaient que la Bible soit interprétée littéralement. Bunyan, écrivain puritain lui aussi, était en revanche en faveur de l'expression spirituelle et de la métaphorisation du texte biblique, convaincu que ce style était celui des Écritures. Cette thèse propose d'étudier ce paradoxe en essayant de comprendre la raison de cette crainte à l'égard des images littéraires, de la part des puritains, et la raison de leur utilisation par Bunyan, notamment dans " The Pilgrim's Progress ". La première partie examine la relation des puritains à la Bible dans trois chapitres. Le premier chapitre traite de la position des puritains face à l'Église Établie et la monarchie. Le deuxième chapitre analyse l'autorité de la Bible chez les écrivains puritains. Le troisième chapitre retrace les étapes scripturaires que Bunyan a traversées, avant et après sa conversion. La deuxième partie, composée de trois chapitres, étudie l'importance de l'image littéraire chez Bunyan. Le premier chapitre traite de la définition du terme " image " pour dissiper la confusion entre celui-ci et les autres figures du style. Il propose aussi au lecteur un bref historique de l'image littéraire et plastique depuis l'Antiquité jusqu'à l'époque de Bunyan, et des débats théologiques que le mot " image " a suscité. Le deuxième chapitre analyse comment et pourquoi l'auteur s'est servi de l'image comme support pédagogique dans l'édification de ses coreligionnaires. Le troisième chapitre traite des matériaux qu'il utilisa pour construire ces images dans " The Pilgrim's Progress ". Enfin, la troisième partie analyse en détail deux images bibliques, le chemin et le lion, que Bunyan utilise dans " The Pilgrim's Progress ". Elle explique les nuances de ces images, leurs origines bibliques, et leur portée théologique, le tout dans le cadre de la foi protestante et puritaine qui était celle de Bunyan.

abstract: “Trauma, Typology, and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern England” explores the connection between the biblical exegetical mode of typology and the construction of traumatic historiography in early modern English anti-Catholicism. The Protestant use of typology—for example, linking Elizabeth to Eve--was a textual expression of political and religious trauma surrounding the English Reformation and responded to the threat presented by foreign and domestic Catholicism between 1579 and 1625. During this period of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, English anti-Catholicism began to encompass not only doctrine, but stereotypical representations of Catholics and their desire to overthrow Protestant sovereignty. English Protestant polemicists viewed themselves as taking part in an important hermeneutical process that allowed their readers to understand the role of the past in the present. Viewing English anti-Catholicism through the lens of trauma studies allows us greater insight into the beliefs that underpinned this religio-political rhetoric. Much of this rhetorical use of typology generated accessible associations of Catholics with both biblical villains and with officials who persecuted and executed Protestants during the reign of Mary I. These associations created a typological network that reinforced the notion of English Protestants as an elect people, while at the same time exploring Protestant religio-political anxiety in the wake of various Catholic plots. Each chapter explores texts published in moments of Catholic “crisis” wherein typology and trauma form a recursive loop by which the parameters of the threat can be understood. The first chapter examines John Stubbs’s Discovery of a Gaping Gulf (1579) and his views of Protestant female monarchy and a sexualized Catholic threat in response to Elizabeth I’s proposed marriage to the French Catholic Duke of Anjou. The second chapter surveys popular and state responses to the first Jesuit mission to England in 1580. The final chapters consider the place of typology and trauma in works by mercantilist Thomas Milles in response to recusant equivocation following the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624) as a response to the failure of marriage negotiations between the Protestant Prince Charles and the Catholic Spanish Infanta.<br>Dissertation/Thesis<br>Doctoral Dissertation English 2015

“Circulating Knowledges: Literature and the Idea of the Library in Renaissance England” pairs literary texts and libraries to illustrate how literary creation and library building in England from 1500 to 1700 were deeply invested in one another. The history of English Renaissance libraries has generally been analyzed from the viewpoints of religious history and historiography, seen by scholars as a story of Protestant librarians attempting to preserve (or invent) a history of Protestant England. Many literary critics —citing Thomas Bodley’s notorious distaste for “stage plaies”—have typically reduced institutional libraries to elitist boogeymen hostile to popular or vernacular literature. Revising these narratives, this dissertation brings together a large corpus, including works by Thomas More, John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and Margaret Cavendish, to illustrate how literary depictions of England’s fledgling libraries shaped their creation and development, while the practices of these inchoate libraries in turn influenced literary texts. “Circulating Knowledges” advances its argument on several fronts. First, I show that developments (or a perceived lack of development) in library organization, access, and use appeared in literary texts, which often depicted literary libraries in response to these developments. Second, I home in on moments when literary texts that seem not at all interested in libraries become unexpectedly fruitful texts through which to develop literary thinking about libraries. In the process of excavating this literary interest in libraries, I demonstrate that Renaissance literature concerns itself not only with depicting, commenting on, or objecting to the developments in library creation happening during the period, but also in imagining alternative possibilities for how libraries might function, conceptions of a library that often outstripped what was materially possible in the period: these conceptions I term “the idea of the library.” In detailing literature’s preoccupation with developments in Renaissance library systems, I offer new perspectives on the period’s literary attitudes toward the creation, transmission, and protection of knowledge, all questions which the building—or imagining—of a library brings to the forefront.

This study revises a dominant narrative of the eighteenth-century, in which a secular modernity emerges in opposition to religious belief. It argues that a major challenge for writers such as Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and for English subjects generally, was to grasp the object world--including the modern technological object--in terms of its spiritual potential. I identify disputes around the liturgy and common prayer as a source of a folk psychology concerning mental habits conditioned by everyday interactions with devotional and cultural objects. Swift and Defoe therefore confront even paradigmatically modern forms (from trade items to scientific techniques) as a spiritual ecology, a network of new possibilities for practical piety and familiar forms of mental-spiritual illness. Texts like A Tale of a tub (1704) and Robinson Crusoe (1719) renew Reformation ideals for the laity by evaluating technologies for governing a nation of souls. Swift and Defoe's Protestantism thus appears as an active guide to understanding emotions and new experience rather than a static body of doctrine. Current historiography neglects the early modern sense that sectarian objects and rituals not only discipline religious subjects, but also provoke ambivalence and anxiety: Swift's Tale diagnoses Catholic knavery and Puritan hypocrisy as neurotic attempts to extract pleasure from immiserating styles of material praxis. Crusoe, addressed to more radical believers in spaces of trade, sees competent spiritual, scientific and commercial practice on the same plane, as techniques for overcoming fetishistic desires. Swift's orthodoxy of enforced moderation and Defoe's oddly worldly piety represent likeminded formulae for psychic reform, and not--as often alleged--conflicts between sincere belief and political or commercial interests. Gulliver's travels (1726) and A Journal of the plague year (1722) also link mind and governance through different visions of Protestant polity. Swift sees alienation from the national church--figured by a Crusoe or Gulliver--as refusal of common sense and problem solving. Defoe points to religious schism, exemplified by dissenters' exclusion from state church statistics, as a moral and medical failure: the city risks creating selfish citizens who also may overlook data needed to combat the plague.<br>text

<div>When, each holiday season, William Shakespeare’s newest plays were presented for King James I of England and his court, they shared the stage with propagandistic performances and ceremonies intended to glorify the monarch and legitimate his political ideals. Between 1608 and 1613, however, the King’s son, Prince Henry Frederick, sought to use the court stage to advance his own, oppositional ideology. By examining the entertainments through which James and Henry openly competed to control this crucial mythmaking mechanism, the present investigation recreates the increasingly unstable conditions surrounding and transforming each of Shakespeare’s last plays as they were first performed at court. I demonstrate that, once read in their original courtly contexts, these plays speak directly to each stage of that escalating rivalry and interrogate the power of ceremonial display, the relationship between fiction and statecraft, and the destabilization of monarchically imposed meaning, just as they would have then.<br></div>

Between Defence and Resistance: Destinies of Eighteenth-Century Protestant Communities in Eastern Bohemia and Haut-Languedoc Abstract Based on archive research and literature the thesis compares the religious life of illegal Protestant communities in the 18th century Eastern Bohemia and Haut-Languedoc. From macroanalytical perspective it assesses the strategies of protestant minorities used to resist the disciplining efforts of the absolutist state. The confessional homogeneity, economic background and social stratification of Protestants in Eastern Bohemia and Haut-Languedoc differed. Yet, the contrasting comparison opens up the way to analyse the divergent resistance strategies. Further, the thesis examines the existence and nature of attempts to simplify the religious doctrine and to modify the liturgy undertaken by the lay and ordained priests and the worshippers. The structure combines the thematic and chronological approach, while keeping a broad perspective that encompasses also the economic and cultural context. First tree chapters outline and conceptualize the problem of prohibited Protestantism in both regions during the 17th and most of the 18th centuries. While in Languedoc the Presbyterian-synodic structure was revived (albeit illegally), in Eastern Bohemia and in whole Bohemia and Moravia...

Die vorliegende Arbeit analysiert den einzigen ernstzunehmenden bewaffneten Aufstand gegen die englische Königin Elisabeth I., der im Winter 1569 in den nördlichen Grafschaften stattfand und sich gegen die elisabethanische Regierung und die neu etablierte protestantische Church of England richtete.Auf den Abriss der Reformationsgeschichte Englands folgt die Darstellung des Aufstandes auf der Basis der Originaldokumente mit kritischer Rezeption der Sekundärliteratur. Die Kapitel 3-5 arbeiten die Vorgeschichte, Chronologie und die Wirkungsgeschichte der gescheiterten Revolte auf, wobei sowohl die lokalen, nationalen als auch europäischen Implikationen ausführlich beleuchtet werden. Was die direkten Folgen des Aufstands für die Bevölkerung in den betroffenen Grafschaften anbelangt, wird deutlich, dass die Regierung Elisabeths hier hart durchgriff und Hinrichtungen anordnete, um von weiteren Erhebungen abzuschrecken. Außerdem nutzte die Regierung die Gelegenheit, die stets leere Staatskasse aufzufüllen, indem sie drakonische Geldstrafen verhängte.Das zentrale sechste Kapitel untersucht die Reflexion des Aufstandes in der zeitgenössischen polemischen Flugliteratur. Während die Staatskirche dieses Medium zu weit reichender psychologischer Beeinflussung der Bevölkerung nutzte, gelang es den aus dem Exil bzw. Untergrund arbeitenden katholischen Theologen nicht, das englische Volk in ihrem Glauben zu bestärken. Die große Unterstützung der Bevölkerung für den Aufstand sowie die Balladen aus der Volkskultur machen jedoch deutlich, dass noch eine starke Affinität zum traditionellen Glauben vorhanden gewesen sein muss.Insgesamt konnte gezeigt werden, wie es der Regierung bzw. Staatskirche durch die Kombination von religionspolitischen Maßnahmen und die Nutzung zeitgenössischer Massenmedien gelang, im Anschluss an den (relativ unbedeutenden) Aufstand wieder Ruhe und Frieden im Land herzustellen, um so weiteren Aufständen oder Verschwörungen vorzubeugen.