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Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Lucas R. Nossaman
Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Lucas R. Nossaman
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation offers a new interpretation of German naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s profound influence on nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Humboldt was a household name in mid-nineteenth-century America, often interchangeable with his most celebrated work, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1845-1859). By demonstrating that Cosmos influenced how a range of scientists and literary writers represented the natural world, this project seeks to dispel the sense of historical inevitability that surrounds the midcentury with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) looming on the horizon. Although Humboldt’s Cosmos did help move natural science into nonreligious territory, the …
The Wilderness Experience: Imitatio Christi And The Demonic Encounters Of Italian Holy Women Of The Quattrocento, Amy Huesman
The Wilderness Experience: Imitatio Christi And The Demonic Encounters Of Italian Holy Women Of The Quattrocento, Amy Huesman
Doctoral Dissertations
During the fifteenth century, when Christian spirituality had become increasingly feminized, a number of women in the northern and central regions of the Italian peninsula chose to embrace fully the vita apostolica, and certain of them led lives of such austere piety in imitatio Christi that they were later deemed worthy of beatification or canonization. They were sante vive—living saints—revered for their miraculous powers and regarded as agents of the divine. These women took vows as nuns or associated themselves with a religious order as tertiaries, and they dedicated themselves to strict lives of prayer, extreme fasting, and …