Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Havens And Covens: Pregnancy, Witchcraft, And Female Power In Cotton Mather’S “Retired Elizabeth”, Brittney A. Hatchett

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Over the decades, scholars have been holding two adjacent conversations about witchcraft and gender in Cotton Mather’s works that surprisingly have not been put in dialogue. On the one hand, they have examined Mather’s witchcraft ideology and motivations for involving himself in the Salem witch trials. On the other hand, scholars have discussed how Mather seeks to exert control over women spiritually and physically. However, no one has yet explored how these conversations might converge. I suggest that we can see how Mather intertwines discourses of witchcraft and gender in the section titled “Retired Elizabeth” in The Angel of Bethesda. …

Ghosts’ Stories: Addictive Behaviors And Complicated Grief In George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo, Jc Leishman

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

When experiencing the natural motions of the grieving process, some individuals encounter an inability to pass this process by a phenomenon known as complicated grief. To deal with the cyclical trauma this causes, the human mind seeks to engage in addictive behaviors (both substantive and behavioral) that work to artificially and momentarily circumvent grief. This process, as it appears in George Saunders' experimental novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, reveals a depth of commentary on human attachments and grieving processes through the lives and narratives of ghosts found in the bardo.

New Perspectives On Paul And Marx: William Blake's <">The Chimney Sweeper<"> In <<>I>Songs Of Innocence And Experience<<>/I>, Lianna Jean Manibog

Theses and Dissertations

New Perspectives on Paul and Marx: William Blakes œThe Chimney Sweeper in Songs of Innocence and ExperienceLianna Jean Rose ManibogDepartment of English, BYUMaster of Arts This article explores the function of religion in socio-political spheres. Karl Marx is famously against religion in all its various capacities, arguing that it is a tool used by power structures to control the masses. William Blake, the British poet, is also seen as critical of religion, and because of this his works are often read through a Marxist lens. And yet depictions of Blake as a staunchly anti-religious man dont seem to fit with …

An Annunciation For A Secular Age: The Struggle For Faith In Mary Szybist's Incarnadine, Devin Morgan Theurer

Theses and Dissertations

Mary Szybist's 2013 collection, Incarnadine, uses the Annunciation as a foundational narrative through which to examine the implications of faith and having a relationship with God. Transforming this pivotal Biblical event through metaphor, intertextuality, and different points of view, Szybist showcases what Charles Taylor terms "fragilization" of faith, or the contestable and dubious position of believing among plurality of belief and nonbelief. By repeatedly shifting the framing of the Annunciation, Szybist creates several different visions of who God is. Rather than reinterpreting the Annunciation with a new dictum on exactly who God is and what it means to believe …

Including Religion In Gender: Lds Men’S Experiences In Masculinity-Making, Ashley Brocious, Dr. Leslee Thorne-Murphy

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Studies in masculinity have grown significantly in the last decades as conversations concerning gender have become more conscious of the meanings and constructions of gender in men’s experiences. Masculinity studies at its core questions the assumption that men have already achieved gender equality. Rather than blanketing all men into categories of privilege, patriarchy, or even neutrality, it seeks to give more nuance to men’s experiences and the transactional nature of their masculinity in the world around them. Latter-day Saint feminists have considered differences between men’s and women’s experiences and voices an important topic. The importance of women’s narratives as a …

The Folks Of The Postapocalypse: The Road, Religion, And Folklore Studies, Megan M. Toone

Student Works

Please use abstract submitted to enter conference if possible.

Sacred Or Profane Pleasures? Erotic Ceremonies In Eighteenth-Century French Libertine Fiction, Marine Ganofsky

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In France, the Age of Enlightenment was also an age of literary levity that saw a proliferation of erotic and pornographic narratives in which philosophy often fused with sexual gratification. The famous Choderlos de Lados with his Liaisons dangereuses (1782) and the infamous Marquis de Sade, along with authors such as Crebillon and Vivant Denon, epitomize this moment in French literary history, when erotic freedom paired with intellectual liberty. This "libertine" literature, as it is known, is characterized by its focus on fleshly desires and pleasures. The subject matter of libertine novels, short stories, poems, and paintings is the rendezvous …

Telescopes, Microscopes, And The Problem Of Evil, Christopher Fauske

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Astronomers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries found themselves for a while at the center of an alignment of scientific, cultural, and religious curiosity. Theirs was an endeavor embraced by significant segments of the established churches of England and Ireland who supported the founding of scientific societies in both countries and who drew on their network of contacts with continental Protestants to keep abreast of current developments abroad. In England, for example, works such as the Reverend William Derham's Astro-theology drew on mounting evidence that the universe might well be far larger than could be imagined to raise …

Providential Empiricism: Suffering And Shaping The Self In Eighteenth~Century British Children's Literature, Adrianne Wadewitz

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In "Praise for Creation and Providence" eighteenth-century Dissenting cleric Isaac Watts conveys God's encompassing presence-not only is he in heaven and hell, but he also inhabits (and owns) Earth and everything in it. This poem was reprinted for more than 150 years in Watts's Divine Songs: Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1775). A child reciting this poem is made keenly aware of how much he or she owes to God-soul, planet, and life. Watts emphasizes how one senses God's physical presence ("Beams of love:' "His Hand;' and "his Eye") with the body ("I stand or move" …

The Potential Convergence Of Religious And Secular Interests In Voltaire's Traite Sur La Tolerance, John C. O'Neal

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

When the Toulouse parliament condemned Jean Calas to death on March 9, 1762, and had him executed on the following day, Voltaire took up his pen to denounce what he saw as a brutal act of intolerance against a Protestant. Although Henry IV had signed the Edict of Nantes in 1598, guaranteeing freedom of conscience for all religions, Louis XIV revoked this edict in 1685 and claimed Catholicism as the one official religion of France. Already well known for his anticlericalism, Voltaire questioned a number of religious practices. But in his Traite sur la tolerance he does not reject religion …

Sacred Alliance? The Critical Assessment Of Revelation In Fichte And Kant, Tom Spencer

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Religion encountered a host of problems in the eighteenth century: the decline of Biblical authority, the rise of scientific skepticism, and an emerging spirit of human autonomy. Each of these developments diminished the function of religious institutions in public life, but this is not to say that religion lost its importance. Western modernity has not been able to ignore or replace Christianity- even if modernity generally cannot incorporate it. As Jonathan Sheehan observes, "secularization always is and always must be incomplete. Even as religion seems to vanish from politics and public culture, it never ceases to define the project of …

The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism In England And Wales, 1735-1811: Book Review, Isabel Rivers

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

The Calvinistic Methodists have received far less attention from historians than the Wesleyan or Arminian Methodists, and this book sets out to remedy that neglect. The imbalance is not surprising-Methodism of the Wesleyan kind became and remains a multimillion, worldwide movement, with many variants that retain the Wesleyan emphasis on holiness and salvation open to all, whereas eighteenth-century English Calvinistic Methodism is now represented only by the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, active on a small scale in England and Sierra Leone, while its Welsh co-movement became the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church, now known as the Presbyterian Church of Wales. The …

Philosophy And Religion In Enlightenment Britain: New Case Studies: Book Review, Bob Tennant

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

This collection of twelve individually strong pieces was published in tribute to M. A. Stewart, the former Gifford Lecturer and, until lately, professor of philosophy at Lancaster University. The editor, Ruth Savage, succeeded in putting together an outstanding list of contributors from across Britain, Europe, and North America. This in itself is a tribute to Stewart's eminence in research and evident excellence as a teacher.

Religious Dissent And The Aikin-Barbauld Circle 1740-1860: Book Review, Nigel Aston

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

There has been a remarkable rise of interest during the last decade in Anna Letitia Barbauld's (nee Aikin) significance in the formation of Romantic literature, and Religious Dissent and the Aikin-Barbauld Circle 1740-1860 places her appropriately within the thriving nexus of her intellectually creative Dissenting family. This volume of nine essays has its origins in a conference at Dr. Williams's library, currently the engine room of many initiatives into British dissenting history. The Aikins were a talented, hardworking, group of men and women down several generations, sparking off each other, inspired by their non -trinitarian Christian faith, and making complex …

Madonella's Other Convent: "Platonick" Ladies, Randy Rakes, And The "Mahometan" Paradise, Samara Anne Cahill

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In eighteenth-century England both the Roman Catholic convent andthe Muslim harem were stereotyped as feminine spaces of religious alterity and sexual subversion. As a result, those who wished to defend women's learning often resorted to complex xenophobic representational strategies as a way of disassociating learned women from these spaces. I argue that the stereotypical "Platonick lady:' as a satirical figure that negotiated both these sites of supposed sexual hypocrisy and foreign dominion, ought to be considered a complex but key trope in the history of feminist orientalism. This is because, in her hypocritical obsession with the disembodied "soul;' the …

Under The Cape Of Religion: Herder And Shamanism In The Eighteenth Century, Vera Jakoby

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

I f one were to undertake a genealogy of how Western Europe established a concept of otherness, the eighteenth century would be one of the most rewarding "information hubs" for such a study. Ethnography, ethnology, anthropology, and other new knowledge fields exploring global populations and environs were founded in this century, analyzing and systematizing the waves of travel reports that had been flooding Europe since the time of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. Stories and images of paradisiacal and terrorizing spaces, peculiar humans, and wondrous animals and plants had taken root in the Western imagination beginning in the sixteenth century. …

"Oppressed With My Own Sensations": The Histories Of Some Of The Penitents And Principled Piety, Robin Runia

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Many scholars have observed the sentimentalization of the prostitute throughout the eighteenth century, and while this sentimentalization and its connection to the culture of sensibility have been compellingly theorized, the penitent prostitute's relationship to emotion, sensation, and piety has not been fully developed. The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen House (1760) constructs an anxious equivalency between emotion and sensation, reflecting the vexed nature of sentimental discourse-the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between sensibility and sensuality. Examining this slippage reveals anxieties about women's abilities to accurately interpret and act upon the sensations of their bodies and their corresponding …

Concerning The Mysteries Of The Egyptians, J. V. B. M. V. St.

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

I t is a tragedy for the investigating intellect to have both its own resilience and the power to lift itself to something higher chained when it attempts to track the progress of human knowledge in the annals of the world, the shaping of the intellect, and the refinement of morals. The scholar is fettered in his desire to collect data, which contributed to the enlightenment of nations and which, so to speak, fermented the human mind so that it was able to lift itself up into higher regions and throw off prejudices. He is hindered in his work when …

Melancholy, Medicine, And Religion In Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy Of Melancholy: Book Review, Samara Anne Cahill

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In Melancholy, Medicine and Religion in Early Modern England: Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy (2010), Mary Ann Lund challenges what she sees as the excesses, on one hand, of attempting to shoehorn Robert Burton's idiosyncratic text into a single genre and, on the other, of reader-response interpretations of the Anatomy. Lund tackles the Anatomy's notorious unwieldiness by treating the text as a guidebook intended to combat all types of melancholy for any type of reader. In other words, the excessiveness of the Anatomy's form suggests the generosity of an author and pastor who sought to help everyone, …

Living With Religious Diversity In Early Modern Europe: Book Review, Michael Mclaughlin

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

This volume, consisting of many different approaches to religious diversity and religious coexistence, is part of the extensive series St. Andrews' Studies in Reformation History and is the successful product of a conference on religious diversity held at Carl von Ossietzky Universitat (Oldenberg, Germany) in September 2007. An introduction by C. Scott Dixon and a concluding attempt to theorize religious diversity by Mark Greengrass frame the volume.

Linguistic Behavior And Religious Activity, Wendy Baker-Smemoe, David Bowie

Faculty Publications

Studies have found that Mormons and non-Mormons in Utah exhibit significant linguistic differences. We break this down further by investigating whether there are also differences between Mormons who actively participate in the religion and those who do not, and find significant differences with a medium or larger effect size between the groups for multiple variables. We conclude that when investigating the linguistic correlates of religious affiliation in a community, it is vital to elicit not just respondents’ religious affiliations, but also their level of participation within that religion.

Converting Ovid: Translation, Religion, And Allegory In Arthur Golding's Metamorphoses, Andrew Robert Wells

Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have not adequately explained the disparity between Arthur Golding's career as a fervent Protestant translator of continental reformers like John Calvin and Theodore Beza with his most famous translation, Ovid's Metamorphoses. His motivations for completing the translation included a nationalistic desire to enrich the English language and the rewards of the courtly system of patronage. Considering the Protestant opposition to pagan and wanton literature, it is apparent that Golding was forced to carefully contain the dangerous material of his translation. Golding avoids Protestant criticism of traditional allegorical readings of pagan poetry by adjusting his translation to show that …

Preface, Brett C. Mcinelly

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

As I was breaking into the profession some years ago, religion was a mere blip on my radar of scholarly interests. Having come through graduate school in the 1990s, I naturally followed disciplinary trends in literary and eighteenth-century studies, focusing much of my research on issues of race, class, and gender and examining the relationships between Britain's imperial history and the literature and culture of the period. Religion factored into my queries at times, say, in considering the ways Crusoe's Protestantism informed his sense of self while taking possession of a West Indian island. But religion itself remained on the …

Vice, Virtue, And Industry: The Church Of Scotland's Employment Of Political Economy, C. 1700-C. 1750, Ryan K. Frace

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

When describing the Scottish Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge in 1750, Edinburgh's minister Hugh Blair proclaimed:

It must be the interest of every good man, of every Briton, to encourage this design tending so evidently to make us a happy, a free, and a united nation. Religion and liberty, industry and joy, are sisters, and never appear to such advantage as when in company [together], so that now, Religion and Industry go hand in hand, strengthen and establish one another.

Blair's comment illustrates an intriguing and important development: by the mid-eighteenth century, political economy-a central component of the Scottish Enlightenment-had …

Reading Holiness: Agnes Grey, Ælfric, And The Augustinian Hermeneutic, Jessica Caroline Brown

Theses and Dissertations

Although Anne Brontë's first novel, Agnes Grey, presents itself as a didactic treatise, Brontë's work departs from many accepted Evangelical tropes in the portrayal of its moral protagonist. These departures create an exemplary figure whose flaws potentially subvert the novel's didactic purposes. The character of Agnes is not necessarily meant to be directly emulated, yet Brontë's governess is presented as a tool of moral instruction. The conflict between the novel's self-proclaimed didactic purpose and the form in which it presents that purpose raises a number of interpretive questions. I argue that many of these questions can be answered through …

The Tractarian Penny Post'S Early Years (1851–1852): An Upper-Class Effort "To Triumph In The Working Man's Home", Kellyanne Ure

Theses and Dissertations

The Penny Post (1851–1896), a religious working-class magazine, was published following a critical time for the Oxford Movement, a High Church movement in the Church of England. The Oxford Movement's ideas were leaving the academic atmosphere of Oxford and traveling throughout the local parishes, where the ideals of Tractarian teachings met the harsh realities of practice and the motivations and beliefs of the working-class parishioners. The upper-class paternalistic ideologies of the Oxford Movement were not reflected in the parishes, and the working-classes felt distanced from their place in religious worship. The Penny Post was published and written by Tractarian clergymen …

Religion, Reform, And Modernity In The Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker And The Church Of England: Book Review, Bob Tennant

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Thomas Secker was born in 1693 into a Dissenting family, joined the Church of England in his early twenties, and ultimately served as Archbishop of Canterbury, from 1758 until his death in 1768-the last one to head the communion in an undivided Anglophone political community. Robert Ingram has produced an impressively organized account of his personal and, especially public, life with an unprecedented breadth of research and reading. He has also done it with an obvious, indeed, self-confessed, enthusiasm for his subject and in a free-flowing (though sometimes disconcertingly breezy) style that is a pleasure to read, although the prose …

Monarchy And Religion: The Transformation Of The Royal Culture In Eighteenth-Century Europe: Book Review, Kathleen E. Urda

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Originating with a 2002 international conference given by the German Historical Institute London, this fine collection of essays edited by Michael Schaich seeks to challenge and complicate an enduring master narrative about the eighteenth century "as a period of desacralization of monarchy". Schaich states in his introduction that Monarchy and Religion is not a "revisionist" attempt to suggest that religion remained the only or even the main source of monarchy's power and influence in the eighteenth century. Rather, Schaich excellently delineates gaps that have existed for far too long in the portrayal of the European monarchy. He argues in his …

"Th' Offense Pardons Itself": Sex And The Church In Othello And Measure For Measure, Jeffrey Wayne Windsor

Theses and Dissertations

In 1604, James had newly ascended to the throne and England was now part of Great Britain. The Puritans-largely silenced during Elizabeth's reign-began again to assert political influence and call for reformation to both the state and the church. This is the context in which Shakespeare wrote Othello and Measure for Measure. In both plays, the role of the government in Cyprus or Vienna hinges upon the passions of a single authority figure. Both Angelo and Othello cause political unrest because they mismanage sexuality. In the case of Othello, his unfounded sexual jealousy leads to the death of Desdemona, Emilia, …