School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemScripting love and gender in fairy tales by French women writers, 1690–1709( 2016)Between 1690 and 1709, more than one hundred fairy tales were written by French authors. Women writers created two-thirds of this corpus, and their tales developed emotion scripts that challenged the patriarchal politics of courtship and marriage in seventeenth-century France. This thesis focuses on the scripts for love in tales by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier, Catherine Bernard, Henriette-Julie de Murat, Charlotte-Rose de La Force, Catherine Durand, and Louise d’Auneuil. Love is the central theme in the conteuses’ tales, but they do not develop a single perspective on love, nor do they offer a definitive answer to the question of whether love has a positive effect on the lives of women. Their complex, literary tales question the idealisation of love as the ultimate fairy tale happy ending by presenting it as a destructive, irrational force as well as a source of fulfilment and joy. Each author develops different scripts for the performance of love in courtship and marriage, and these scripts articulate a series of different perspectives on the gender politics of love in seventeenth-century France. This variation in the representation of love reflects the social realities faced by the conteuses and their contemporary female audiences, as well as seventeenth-century debate about the nature of love. The methodology in this thesis draws on history of emotion scholarship in order to analyse how the emotion scripts in the conteuses’ tales were used to negotiate and challenge gender relationships in France at the turn of the eighteenth century. I argue that these scripts provide evidence of the formation of a literary emotional community engaged in a conversation about the effects of love on the lives of seventeenth-century women. This conversation developed a shared vocabulary of emotion to articulate a poetics of love that reinterpreted conventional scripts for love in seventeenth-century literary and philosophical texts. Each author used this vocabulary to present her own interpretation of the consequences of love, and proposed different strategies for negotiating power imbalances in early modern gender relationships between men and women. While some of their heroines use love to justify their choice of spouse, others are disappointed in their choice, or fail to achieve the union they desire. These different perspectives illustrate the nature of love as a complex emotion with a history that reflects the political and social context in which it is felt and expressed.
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ItemThe devil is in the pamphlets: witchcraft and emotion in seventeenth-century England( 2014)The links between English witchcraft and the Devil have not been the subject of sustained historical analysis. This thesis represents the only study that systematically analyses the content of seventeenth-century English witchcraft pamphlets. It explores all forty-eight of these sources and suggests that English witchcraft was widely conceived of as a diabolical crime. The thesis focuses on the emotional interactions between witches and devils and a witch’s supposed motivations for succumbing to Satan. It has two objectives: to suggest that the content of English witchcraft pamphlets challenges our understanding of English witchcraft as a predominantly malefic, non-diabolical crime, and to highlight how witchcraft narratives emphasised emotions as the driving force behind witchcraft acts and accusations. At its core, this thesis is about relationships between witches and devils. The thesis is divided into six chapters, each of which analyses the different ways in which witches and devils were believed to interact. These chapters explore: the changing nature of beliefs about the Devil in post-Reformation England and the way in which these differing beliefs were incorporated into witchcraft narratives; the role of familiars and how these animalistic spirits forged personal connections between themselves and the witch; the inherently malicious nature of witches and their decisions to make a pact with the Devil out of a desire for revenge; the sexualised nature of English witchcraft narratives and the manner in which sexual desire was understood as maintaining ongoing relationships between female witches and their devils; the intimacy in the relationships between male witches and the Devil, and the personal bonds they shared with their familiar spirits and; beliefs about witchcraft as a form of group activity or conspiracy which sometimes involved meeting the Devil at a night-time meeting. Cumulatively, this thesis argues that English witchcraft was frequently imagined to be a diabolical crime and that witches’ relationships with the Devil were defined by strong emotions such as anger, fear, malice, a desire for revenge, hatred, lust and love.