Matching Items (6)
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- All Subjects: Religious history
- Creators: Henn, Alexander
- Creators: Newhauser, Richard
- Resource Type: Text
- Status: Published
Description
This dissertation project addresses one of the most critical problems in the study of religion: how do scriptures acquire significance in religious communities in ways that go beyond the meaning of their words? Based on data collected during ethnographic work in Maharashtra, India, in 2011 and 2012, I analyze the complex relationship between a religious text and its readers with reference to ritual reading of the Gurucaritra, a Marathi scripture written in the sixteenth century. I argue that readers of the Gurucaritra create a self-actualized modern religiosity both by interpreting the content of the text and by negotiating the rules of praxis surrounding their reading activity.
In particular, this dissertation analyzes the ways in which members of the Dattatreya tradition in urban Maharashatra ritualize their tradition's central text-- the Gurucaritra--in terms of everyday issues and concerns of the present. Taking inspiration from reader-response criticism, I focus on the pArAyaN; (reading the entire text) of the Gurucaritra, the central scripture of the Dattatreya tradition, in the context of its contemporary readings in Maharashtra. In the process of reading the Gurucaritra, readers become modern by making a conscious selection from their tradition. In the process of approaching their tradition through the text, what they achieve is a sense of continuity and a faith that, if they have the support of the guru, nothing can go wrong. In the process of choosing elements from their tradition, they ultimately achieve a sense of being modern individuals who work out rules of religiosity for themselves.
This dissertation contributes to the study of scriptures in two major ways: first, by bringing forth how religious communities engage with scriptures for reasons other than their comprehension; second, by showing how scriptures can play a crucial role in religious communities in the context of addressing concerns of their present. Thus, this research contributes to the fields of scripture studies, Hinduism, and literary criticism.
In particular, this dissertation analyzes the ways in which members of the Dattatreya tradition in urban Maharashatra ritualize their tradition's central text-- the Gurucaritra--in terms of everyday issues and concerns of the present. Taking inspiration from reader-response criticism, I focus on the pArAyaN; (reading the entire text) of the Gurucaritra, the central scripture of the Dattatreya tradition, in the context of its contemporary readings in Maharashtra. In the process of reading the Gurucaritra, readers become modern by making a conscious selection from their tradition. In the process of approaching their tradition through the text, what they achieve is a sense of continuity and a faith that, if they have the support of the guru, nothing can go wrong. In the process of choosing elements from their tradition, they ultimately achieve a sense of being modern individuals who work out rules of religiosity for themselves.
This dissertation contributes to the study of scriptures in two major ways: first, by bringing forth how religious communities engage with scriptures for reasons other than their comprehension; second, by showing how scriptures can play a crucial role in religious communities in the context of addressing concerns of their present. Thus, this research contributes to the fields of scripture studies, Hinduism, and literary criticism.
ContributorsYeolekar, Mugdha (Author) / Feldhaus, Anne (Thesis advisor) / Henn, Alexander (Committee member) / Codell, Julie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Christina of Markyate, a twelfth-century visionary and prioress, has been frequently seen in scholarship as an outsider at her home institution of St Albans, enduring solely under the protection of its abbot, Geoffrey, her spiritual friend and confidant. This characterization appears incorrect when The Life of Christina of Markyate, St Albans' record of Christina's personal history and religious career, is viewed in its original literary environment. The high volume of extant material from twelfth-century St Albans makes it possible to view Christina's depiction in several original ways: as a textual construction (at least in part) influenced by Bede's narratives of holy women in his widely read Ecclesiastical History; as a portrayal of contemporary devotional prayer in the style of Anselm of Canterbury, a major authority on devotional practices of the time; and as a prominent addition to St Albans' own liturgy, the record of its celebrated saints and local patrons, as an object of devotion herself. The strategy of Christina's endorsement in her Life is also notably different from strategies on display in St Albans materials related to Katherine of Alexandria, an important saint for Abbot Geoffrey, which further suggests he was not her sole promoter at the abbey, if he was involved in the process of her textual production at all. Finally, the historical fact that she was employed as a patron of St Albans before none other than Pope Adrian IV, to whom St Albans was appealing for numerous institutional benefits at the time, shows that the prevailing opinion of Christina at the abbey can not have been entirely negative. Placing the Life within the literary and cultural circumstances of its production thus provides a fresh reading of Christina's institutional and devotional roles at St Albans, medieval views of women's spirituality and its place within the western European Christian tradition, and the compositional process of a major work of medieval hagiographical literature.
ContributorsVanGinhoven, Bryan (Author) / Voaden, Rosalynn (Thesis advisor) / Newhauser, Richard (Committee member) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
In order to illuminate the role written documents played within medieval monastic life, this project takes as a case study the monastery of Cluny and some associated houses during the central Middle Ages. I approach these documents as signs, drawing on anthropological and philosophical work on semiosis, and as media technologies, using history and cultural studies centered on orality and literacy, and conclude that the monastic use of texts was essentially ritual, and as such exerted an important influence on the development of literacy as a tool and a set of practices. Nor did this influence flow in just one direction: as monastic ritual transformed the use of documents, the use of documents also transformed monastic ritual.
To study the relationship between document and ritual, I examine what medieval documents reveal about their production and use. I also read the sources for what they directly report about the nature of monastic life and monastic ritual, and the specific roles various documents played within these contexts. Finally, these accounts of changing monastic scribal and ritual practice are laid alongside a third—that of what the monks themselves actually enunciated, both directly and indirectly, about their own understanding of semiosis and its operation in their lives.
Ultimately, my dissertation connects valuable theoretical and philosophical work on ritual, semiosis, and orality and literacy with manuscript studies and with a wide range of recent historiography on the complex transformations remaking society inside and outside the cloister during the Middle Ages. It thus serves to bring these disparate yet mutually indispensable lines of inquiry into better contact with one another. And in this way, it approaches an understanding of human sign-use, carefully rooted in both material and institutional culture, during a key period in the history of human civilization.
To study the relationship between document and ritual, I examine what medieval documents reveal about their production and use. I also read the sources for what they directly report about the nature of monastic life and monastic ritual, and the specific roles various documents played within these contexts. Finally, these accounts of changing monastic scribal and ritual practice are laid alongside a third—that of what the monks themselves actually enunciated, both directly and indirectly, about their own understanding of semiosis and its operation in their lives.
Ultimately, my dissertation connects valuable theoretical and philosophical work on ritual, semiosis, and orality and literacy with manuscript studies and with a wide range of recent historiography on the complex transformations remaking society inside and outside the cloister during the Middle Ages. It thus serves to bring these disparate yet mutually indispensable lines of inquiry into better contact with one another. And in this way, it approaches an understanding of human sign-use, carefully rooted in both material and institutional culture, during a key period in the history of human civilization.
ContributorsMcCaffray, Edmund McGraw (Author) / Green, Monica H (Thesis advisor) / Clay, Eugene (Committee member) / Henn, Alexander (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
“The Moral Sense of Touch: Teaching Tactile Values in Late Medieval England” investigates the intersections of popular science and religious education in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the project draws together a range of textual artifacts, from scientific manuals to private prayerbooks, to reconstruct the vast network of touch supporting the late medieval moral syllabus. I argue that new scientific understandings of the five senses, and specifically the sense of touch, had a great impact on the processes, procedures, and parlances of vernacular religious instruction in late medieval England. The study is organized around a set of object lessons that realize the materiality of devotional reading practices. Over the course of investigation, I explore how the tactile values reinforcing medieval conceptions of pleasure and pain were cultivated to educate and, in effect, socialize popular reading audiences. Writing techniques and technologies—literary forms, manuscript designs, illustration programs—shaped the reception and user-experience of devotional texts. Focusing on the cultural life of the sense of touch, “The Moral Sense of Touch” provides a new context for a sense based study of historical literatures, one that recovers the centrality of touch in cognitive, aesthetic, and moral discourses.
ContributorsRussell, Arthur J. (Author) / Newhauser, Richard G (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Malo, Robyn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This dissertation analyzes presentations of death in late-medieval English Arthurian literature through the optic of the Ricardian and 15th-century English vernacular ars moriendi tradition. The period under examination begins in 1380 and ends with a discussion of the gradual loss of the artes moriendi and reimagining of King Arthur in Tudor England. The Arthurian texts examined are the Alliterative Morte Arthure (AMA), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK), and Malory’s Morte Darthur. The theological texts examined include the following: De visitacione infirmorum (A Text), BL MS Royal 18 A.X and The Book of Vices and Virtues (both ME translations of Friar Laurent’s Somme le roi), Learn to Die (a ME translation of Heinrich Suso’s Horologium sapientiae), A Tretyse of Gostly Batayle supplemented by illuminations from MS Harley 3244 (Summa de vitiis f.27v-f.28r), The Boke of the Craft of Dying, Martin Luther’s Sermon on Preparing to Die, Thomas Lupset's A Treatise of Dying Well, Richard Whitford's Daily Exercise and Experience of Death, and Desiderius Erasmus's Preparation of Death. My methodology combines Comparative Literature, New Historicism, and Jane Gilbert’s Lacanian approach. The primary research method is a comparison of the death sequences of major Arthurian figures in late-medieval English literature with the major tenets of several ars moriendi tracts. Further, these source materials are examined and compared to the earlier Arthurian texts. Lastly, some ars moriendi expedients already present in the Arthurian source materials are compared with contemporaneous rituals to elucidate which of them belong to an earlier tradition and therefore are not updates. This dissertation demonstrates the following: Malory and the authors of the AMA and SGGK captured a uniquely late-medieval English understanding of death by updating their source materials, battlefield expedients for the dying included in late-medieval English Arthurian literature can be traced back well before the Black Death, and finally, that the English knight developed into a figure who spiritually battles accidental sudden death, or mors improvisa, in the memento mori tradition, which in turn influenced English Arthurian legend.
ContributorsPike, Daniel (Author) / Newhauser, Richard (Thesis advisor) / Sturges, Robert (Committee member) / Wheeler, Bonnie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
The Doukhobors originated in Russia in the 18th century and faced many instances of persecution over the years, including exile, imprisonment, and forced assimilation. Despite these challenges, the Doukhobors managed to maintain their community and culture through their unique rituals and practices. This thesis explores the role of Doukhobor rituals in fostering a sense of community that helped them withstand decades of persecution and asks how rituals functioned among the Doukhobors between 1895 and 1915. How did Doukhobors adapt their rituals to the challenges around them to maintain their group cohesion? Through these rituals, the Doukhobors created a tight-knit community that provided emotional support and solidarity in the face of external threats. Doukhobor rituals were linked to the most intimate part of their lives—the celebration of love, recognition of the soul’s departure, their history, and their identity. These rituals highlight perseverance, joy, and community building.
ContributorsNeubuhr Torres, Rachel Louise (Author) / Clay, J. Eugene (Thesis advisor) / Henn, Alexander (Committee member) / Androsoff, Ashleigh B (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023