School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemNo Preview AvailableBarbarian Civility British Expatriates and the Transformation of the Maghreb in English Thought, 1660-1714( 2021)This thesis explores the role of British expatriates living in Ottoman Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripolitania, in a transformation of British-Maghrebi diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations in the later Stuart era. This period, 1660-1714, represented a distinct transitional period in which pragmatic cooperation, detailed knowledge, and material exchanges decreased the envy, enmity and ignorance of earlier periods of conflict, without resulting in the controlling Orientalist domination that characterised later periods. Drawing primarily on a large, little-studied collection of correspondence collected at the British consulate in Tunis, as well as English periodical news, State Papers Foreign, and numerous other government and official records, I highlight how expatriates acted as mediators in trade, diplomacy, and material culture, formed networks of influence and information, and transmitted their pragmatic, nuanced, well-informed views of the Maghreb to British audiences. My introduction presents a survey of relevant literature, sources, and historical context, followed by an outline of key theoretical interventions: the contested term ‘expatriate’ in historiographies of British-Maghrebi relations, the biblical-theological lens of ‘exile’ through which many expatriates viewed their more difficult or isolating experiences, and the concept of ‘equivalence’ in which expatriates and their correspondents viewed Maghrebi institutions, individuals and cultures as essentially equal in legitimacy, and sometimes superior in value, to European equivalents. In Part 1, by exploring the origins, expectations, and interpersonal relationships of British expatriates in the Maghreb, I argue that expatriates were governed fundamentally by self-interest, viewing the Maghreb as a site suitable for personal and professional advancement – not just for wealthy men, but for apprentices, women, and children as well. In Part 2, by examining expatriate material cultures and religious interactions, I show how they ably, often enthusiastically, embraced British, European and Maghrebi traditions without abandoning their essential loyalties to Britain, such that they could act as trusted mediators in negotiation, exchange, and information. In Part 3, I explore expatriates’ professional activities relating to networking, commercial diplomacy, and the Mediterranean corsairing economy, showing how they built robust and varied connections of trust such that they could exploit opportunities to enrich themselves and overcome opposition, in the process deliberately promoting peace and trade between Britain and the Maghreb. In Part 4, I show how expatriate views of the Maghreb and its people reached wider audiences in Britain, by two routes: first, the networks of information that brought expatriate testimony on Maghrebi news to British newspapers, and second, the creation, publication, and influence of The Present State of Algiers, a little-studied but significant longform text produced by a British consul. As a whole, my thesis highlights the significant influence of the actions and networks of British expatriates living in the Maghreb on improving British-Maghrebi relations and increasing public understanding of the Maghreb in British society.
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ItemFrom knowledge to resistance: emerging themes, developments, strategies and agendas for religious Jewish women in Israel today( 2016)This study examines three areas in which religious Jewish women are challenging and changing gender-based inequality in Israel. Israeli women effectively live in two realities. The first is a liberal democracy that has championed legislative policies to advance the status of women and has pushed for gender-based equality from its formation. The second is a nation in which religious law and culturally evolving traditions of Orthodox Jewish practice are not restricted to the private sphere. Instead, such laws and behaviors hold significant power and sway in public space and everyday life. Within this reality, some view the exclusion and subordination of women as a basic tenet of religious Jewish norms. Women are removed, segregated and discriminated again. In the past thirty years, religious Jewish women in Israel have been engaged in an education revolution, gaining access to sacred knowledge and texts previously barred to women and integrating themselves into positions of religious leadership. Their demand for equality, however, has also prompted groups of these women to confront instances of gender-based discrimination on a national level; using legal appeals, public demonstrations, civil disobedience and pluralistic alliances to generate change. Such groups are working to expand ritual, social and civil rights for women in Israel. This study acts to illuminate groups of these women; their engagement with feminism and faith, their confrontation of spaces of inequality and their demand for respect as both Jewish women and Israeli citizens. Little time has been spent examining religious Jewish feminist groups in Israel. There has also been limited academic engagement with the challenges faced by these women as they relate to the Israeli landscape. To this effect, there have been significant gaps in the critical literature regarding women in Israel. Such gaps diminish academic understandings of both the place and position held by women in this country and the strains that evolving religious cultural norms have placed on Israel’s national identity. Situated from a constructionist framework and informed by the academic discipline of Jewish studies, this study utilizes a variety of resources. Previous scholarship, Israeli-based English language newspapers, group-generated publications, United Nations’ reports, NGO reports, legal petitions and rulings, interviews and presentations at a prominent transnational Orthodox feminist conference were all used to illuminate emerging themes, strategies and developments for groups of religious Jewish women in Israel. This is a new methodological approach in a small field and thus offers new perspectives on an underrepresented area of study. Doing so adds to our critical understandings of women’s rights in Israel, Jewish feminism, Orthodoxy in Israel and Israeli national identity.
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ItemThe birth of the vampire in eighteenth-century Europe( 2014)The significance of hermeticism and the esoteric in learned discourse in the eighteenth-century German lands has been the focus of some discussion in recent years, as has the idea that magic continued to play a highly important role at various levels of European society throughout the Age of Reason and into the following centuries. My research contributes to this development through an investigation of the so-called “vampire debate” (1732-35) in the German-speaking world. This debate was a reaction to official Habsburg military reports of a series of unusual deaths on the frontier in Serbia in which vampires had purportedly attacked and killed humans and livestock. It addressed the fundamental question of whether vampires were real, and if so, whether they were the result of godly influence, diabolic machinations or natural magical operations. Modern examinations of the learned discourse pertaining to these cases have tended to focus on the fact that the majority of the writers involved in the debate ultimately doubted the existence of vampires. However, a deeper and more sustained engagement with these sources reveals an underlying discussion concerning the limits and possibilities of sacral, diabolic and natural magical power. Indeed, while denying the reality of the vampires, the writers involved in the debate nonetheless affirmed the existence of magical and occult operations in nature. This key finding indicates that they considered the inclusion of a metaphysical reality of demons, angels, and souls to be integral to the undertaking of natural philosophy, and that magical power (however circumscribed) held considerable importance in their respective cosmologies.
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ItemA woman of spirit: Lorna Osborn (1922-2011) and her circles: citizenship and influence through religion and education( 2011)This thesis explores the life of the prominent and influential Victorian Methodist and Uniting Churchwoman and educator, Lorna Osborn (nee Grierson) who taught for a quarter of a century at Melbourne Church of England Girls' Grammar School. It analyses aspects of her family background, her education at school and university, her marriage and children, and the formation of the networks that underwrote her religious, social and educational activities as a mature woman from the 1940s to the 1980s. Though Australian women received political citizenship at federal level in 1902 following Federation, male-dominated social structures meant that most women, particularly if they were married and mothers of young children, seldom accessed positions that entailed influence, authority and effective leadership in business, politics or many of the professions, prior to the changed consciousness about gender following the second-wave feminist campaigns of the 1970s. The thesis illuminates how Protestant Christianity, especially Methodism, though it set limits to acceptable female behaviour, also provided spaces for women's agency outside the strictly domestic sphere. Osborn herself did not try to enter male preserves. Esteemed as an active and efficient churchwoman, she was able to operate at high levels in church affairs. Stemming from this foundation, Osborn was embedded in supporting networks which later helped her forge an impressive career at Melbourne Church of England Girls' Grammar School, where fresh circles of colleagues and students invigorated and extended her possibilities for innovation. Educationally on the conservative wing, Osborn's strong adherence to Christianity and to advancing the rights of girls to higher education drove her impressive, dynamic career that promoted talented middle-class girls into an advantaged position to compete academically and professionally in the wider society. This study of Lorna Osborn's life throws light onto the experience of many other women in her circles.
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ItemChrist and the Cold War: an exploration of the political activism of the Reverends Frank Hartley, Alfred Dickie and Victor James, 1942-1972( 2007)This thesis argues that previous accounts have oversimplified the lives of the Reverends Alf Dickie, Frank Hartley and Victor James, three prominent, Melbourne-based peace activists during the Cold War. They have been seen as fellow-travellers or apologists for the communist-dominated peace movement, at the expense of any consideration of why they were drawn to such a role. A central aim is to demonstrate that a personally derived understanding of religious duty dominated the political activism of these three men. It begins by exploring how the early political and economic crises experienced by each individual shaped a conviction that radical, progressive politics were a true expression of faith. It goes on to show that such beliefs were at first unremarkable in post-war Australia. With the onset of the Cold War, however, opinion turned away from such optimism and left the three clergymen isolated and embattled. This thesis shows that the religious foundations for their political activism fostered a notion of prophetic duty, so that the political shift produced obduracy on their part. Their interpretation of duty left them no room for political compromise or negotiation. The ensuing conflict served to confirm a sense of righteousness born of suffering and to entrench further their dogmatic approach to political questions. It is suggested that Dickie, Hartley and James increasingly adopted a Manichaean interpretation, rooted in theology, of both international and domestic politics. This dualism significantly influenced their interpretation of Cold War crises, combatants and actors, and its ramifications are examined. By merging politics and theology, all three men came to ignore uncomfortable political facts. As well as exploring the disadvantages of their politico-theological rigidity, this thesis also acknowledges its benefits. Methodist and Presbyterian Church reactions to the Australian and New Zealand Congress for International Cooperation and Disarmament, held in 1959, are examined and it is demonstrated that by this time the Churches had begun to return to a position of support for the activism of Dickie and Hartley. This change continued into the 1960s, and I show that at the time of Gough Whitlam's 1972 election victory, the political mood of the Churches and society in general returned to meet that of Dickie and Hartley (though not James), which had remained essentially consistent since the end of the Second World War.
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ItemThinking about religion: scientific progress and the cognitive science of religion( 2012)My interest lies with a collection of scholarship labelled the ‘Standard Model’, which I propose constitutes an emerging explanatory framework for theoretical and empirical work on religious cognition. I map the features of the Standard Model and assess the strength of its claims to offer a program for understanding religious cognition. My conclusion dilutes the Standard Model in that I suggest it overstates the mind’s susceptibility to religious content and sidesteps other culturally prolific activities that also engage emotion, memory, belonging and belief. While I acknowledge some convergence pressures upon cultural activities, I argue that these pressures lead towards more generic tendencies such as the ability to hold belief sets, rather than the predisposition to hold religious beliefs. While I do agree that the evidence suggests that religious content will be attractive to human minds, it is neither inevitable, nor possible, without the structure of cultural reinforcement. On this view, religion is not a unique domain, but operates within the more general domain of social agency. I also note that the mind is adept at learning; we can change our minds, discard ideas we acquired in the past, and choose to become or remain an atheist. On the basis of this case study, I argue that an explanatory framework in cognitive science demonstrates progress (towards becoming a research program) when it reveals hitherto unforeseen connections between analytical levels. Boundary-breaking, inter-level connections represent markers of progress. The Standard Model is an overconfident but nevertheless progressive explanatory research framework guiding work on religious cognition because it has revealed previously unforeseen connections between theories and observations derived at different analytical levels. A progressive framework exposes previously unconnected propositions or theories and stimulates new empirical work around them. The Standard Model case illustrates how progress can come about through unforseen connections as well as through predictions. Progressive frameworks make both new and more links. I suggest that a progressive framework encourages the tensions that arise when inter-level connections become messy. Tension leads to sharper empirical questions where progress is served by a framework that stimulates empirical work in trying to find resolutions. In reaching this conclusion, I also recommend a suite of seven analytical criteria for assessing an explanatory framework in cognitive science, building on Thagard (2005a). The Standard Model case suggests that progress in an inter-disciplinary area can be achieved without a unifying or reducing model, and may even be best seen through a complex set of relations that facilitate the development of novel predictions and the specification of inter-level connections. I argue that the lessons in the case of the Standard Model of Religious Cognition underscore the importance of a working framework—a principles-driven, neo-Lakosian ‘soft’ core—in facilitating unforeseen connections between theories and observations arising from different analytical strata.
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ItemMinoan stone vessels with Linear A inscriptions( 2011)Minoan stone vessels with Linear A inscriptions are ritual vessels whose stone and inscriptions denoted the permanence of the dedicants’ devotion. The vessels were dedicated to deities, and were used in a variety of Minoan rituals, some of which can be tentatively reconstructed. Most of the vessels come from peak sanctuaries, the most important of which probably doubled as observatories for marking the passage of the equinoxes and solstices; thus the concentration of inscribed vessels at these sites suggests that the vessels played a part in seasonal rituals whose timing was determined by the sun and moon. The seasonality of these rituals suggests that they were focused on aspects of the cycle of life: fertility, birth, death and renewal. However, offerings left with the vessels also suggest that people visited these sanctuaries for other, more personal reasons—for example, to give thanks for good fortune, to request healing, or to seek divine protection before a dangerous journey. Inscribed stone vessels may have played a part in any of these rituals. A smaller number of inscribed stone vessels come from Kato Syme, a very important shrine built high on a flank of Mt Dikte, on the spot where a perpetual spring issues from the mountain. This spring is an important water source for the valleys and arable lands below; thus the location of the sanctuary again suggests that the inscribed vessels found there were used in rituals focussed on the divine source(s) of fertility. Most inscribed stone vessels can be interpreted as receptacles for liquid and/or solid offerings. The so-called Minoan ‘ladles’ are a special case: I interpret them as pouring vessels meant to be held in cupped hands. Iconographic evidence suggests that ‘ladles’ may have been used in male maturation rites. Though Linear A remains undeciphered, linguistic analysis of the inscriptions on the vessels is still possible on several fronts. Clues to the phonology of Minoan can be found in the structure of Linear A itself, and in the way in which it was borrowed by the Mycenaeans to create Linear B. Mycenaean spellings of Minoan words and names also contain clues as to the sounds of Minoan, while alternating Classical spellings of some Minoan words suggest that Minoan had some sounds that were not native to Greek. The morphology of Minoan can be investigated through statistical analyses of the frequency with which the various Linear A signs occur. Inflection in human languages usually involves affixes; thus signs that appear inordinately often at the beginnings or ends of Linear A words are likely to be prefixes and suffixes. Finally: most inscribed Minoan stone vessels contain a version of the so-called ‘Libation formula’, a lengthy sequence of Minoan words; comparing these versions yields valuable clues about the nature of Minoan syntax. The results of these investigations suggest that Minoan is a non-Indo-European, non-Semitic language with a fairly standard set of phonemes, an agglutinative morphology incorporating both prefixes and suffixes, and (possibly) VSO word order.
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ItemWhat are these queer stones? Baetyls: epistemology of a Minoan fetish( 2011)This thesis examines the aniconic cult stones, or baetyls, of the Aegean Bronze Age. Minoan baetyls are commonly understood by reference to the interpretive vocabularies of ancient Near Eastern traditions adopted by comparative ethnographies popular in the early 20th century. This study presents and interrogates the Aegean evidence for baetyl cult, providing the first comprehensive catalogue of archaeological evidence attesting to this cultic practice. A rigorous contextual analysis provides the basis for interpreting and (re)constructing aspects of the cult. It is argued that the ambiguity inherent in these aniconic stones renders them uniquely flexible in serving multiple functions across different contexts.