This thesis is concerned with literary representations of the passions in a selection of eighteenth-century French epistolary fiction. In close readings of Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu’s 1721 Persian Letters, Francoise de Graffigny’s 1747 Letters of a Peruvian Woman and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1761 Julie, or the New Heloise, I consider how the passions serve, in the context of narrative, to ground claims about human nature and sexual difference, and to speculate on the social and political apologetics at work within each text. The importance of sensibility in the culture and literature of the eighteenth century has to some extent eclipsed the role of the passions in literary representations of human nature and sexual difference. However central sensibility became to eighteenth-century imaginations, it did not eclipse but rather complemented developing moral and natural philosophical conceptions of the passions. As each of novels explored here attest, the passions remained central to literary and philosophical claims about human nature and sexual difference in the eighteenth century, providing a common vocabulary for making claims about the state of the social and political order. Entrenched, polysemous, and changing, discourses of the passions in Early Modern Europe served multiple and divergent ends. The goal of this thesis is to contextualize their representations in the narratives of three eighteenth-century novels as interventions in moral philosophy, shaped not only by epistemological philosophy but also the imperatives of a French literary tradition of gallantry.

Based upon the political components of Norbert Elias’ civilizing process I further examine Louis XIV’s strategies of maintaining and increasing his power through the use of etiquette and manipulation to influence the court. This process is revealed through the drama around the showing of Tartuffe, the king’s image creation, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes along with the destruction of nobles like the Chevalier de Rohan and the empowering of nobles like Madame de Maintenon. The main purpose of this project is to use the concept of the civilizing process as a means to explain what Louis XIV did to his court and nobility. By looking at the controversy caused by Tartuffe between Moliere, Louis XIV, and the Company of the Holy Sacrament, I explore how it would ultimately come to demonstrate the young king’s authority and centralization of power. Furthermore, the thesis explores how Louis XIV created his image by examining the symbolism within three grand festivals he hosted within Versailles and the daily routines he implemented and built upon at court such as the levee. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes is another demonstration of power by rolling back religious rights and maintaining that the king’s subjects subscribe to Catholicism, a faith deeply entrenched in innate hierarchies and not associated with the king’s foreign enemies. Along with these events I survey how Louis XIV’s disfavor and favor impacted the social and economic standing of particular members of the nobility, and how the king was able to utilize the social structures within Versailles to incentivize behavior he liked and to punish those who did not follow the rules of etiquette. Ultimately, I will use Norbert Elias’ concept of the civilizing process to aid in explaining how Louis XIV centralized the power and state to himself by establishing stricter codes of etiquette and bringing the nobility under his hand.

Magic, divination, and obeah appear in some form in almost all of Jamaica’s near-continuous revolts from the time the British took the island in 1655 to the decades following the abolition of slavery in 1834. Although discussions of African diasporic spiritual systems were very much alive in the early modern centuries, the forms that emerged in early colonial Jamaica have received little scholarly treatment. This study is an attempt to inject culture into the story of African resistance to slavery and colonialism in Jamaica by reconceptualizing three major rebellions as cultural rather than military histories and by highlighting the role of magic and divination in the genesis of these freedom struggles. The First Maroon War, Tacky’s Revolt, and the 1823 Boxing Day Conspiracy illuminate a clear system of supernatural understanding that came to include a definite link to political resistance and rebellion. These understandings were recognized by enslaved or formerly enslaved Africans as well as the British in Jamaica and abroad. Some work must be done to delineate what European settlers were responding to as the idea of obeah—and how it was related to European ideas about witchcraft and illicit magic—from the ideas held among African peoples. This is especially significant following Tacky’s Revolt, when the first anti-obeah laws in the Caribbean made obeah an explicitly political action. Europeans were clearly wrapped up in the politics of obeah to a degree that did not concern Africans. However, Africans also used obeah as a crucial form of political resistance. Thus, these three cases allow both British and African ideas about obeah to be traced over a century to reinject a cultural history of African-derived spirituality into an otherwise political narrative.

About one in ten refugees from the American Revolution was African-descended, and unlike many white Loyalists fleeing war in the thirteen mainland North American colonies, black Loyalists were people without a country. Most were fleeing slavery in Virginia or the Carolinas, yet not fully able to claim to be British subjects, despite many heeding the call to join British forces. Among the 40,000 Loyalists who departed, around 3,500 black Loyalists evacuated from the newly founded United States between the years of 1776 and 1785. I hope to evaluate the movement patterns and thought process behind this particular group with what choices they ultimately had after the war using Dunmore’s Proclamation as a means to freedom. These black Loyalists faced the difficult decision in choosing what identity they would side with once they left. These former slaves ultimately had to choose between becoming forced migrants with the losing side of the war or staying with the winning side of the war as people bound by chains. Although there were a multitude of fascinating tales that could be told through the lens of these black Loyalists, one particular family caught my eye within my research. This story is the journey of the Fortune family who chose to run away from American slavery to migrate to Nova Scotia. Their story will grant me access to analyze the extreme discrimination families met as they fled, the contempt the new colonies felt against them, as well as the evolution of their societal roles as some of these immigrants integrated into their new country and became accepted as respected individuals. Furthermore, their tale aided me in understanding what caused some emigrant black Loyalists to stay in Nova Scotia despite the hardships they faced as outsiders who were unwelcome from the perspective of native white Nova Scotians.

Queen Margaret of Anjou has been vilified throughout history and was even defamed by Shakespeare as a "she-wolf" in his history of Henry VI part III. This revisionist biographical study begins by redefining a "she-wolf's" connote from that of rapacious predator to a protector as seen in original myth for Rome's foundation. By studying her childhood and reign it analyzes her identity as a "she-wolf" and regent sovereign on behalf of her mentally ill husband, Henry VI and their young son, Edward of Westminster. Contrary to previous historiography, this analysis emphasizes how Margaret was apprenticed by the she-wolves of her grandmother and mother during their regent sovereignty in the absence of a husband or son. It then continues to analyze events such as her intercessory role in the Jack Cade's Rebellion of 1450, her eighty-two letters and other forms of de facto rule that Margaret implemented. Despite her imminent loss in a hyper-masculinized, political culture during the War of the Roses this accredits the successes of Margaret's tenure as queen overlooked by historians. Furthermore, this study addresses the attacks from Margaret's contemporary sources and how her historiography has evolved with the continuation of such attacks. This influence has even spilled into literature and film as the success of Game of Thrones has popularized Margaret's defamed archetype in the fictional character Cersei Lannister. The purpose of this study is to address not only the faults of Margaret's narrative, but to address the importance for historians to create women as the protagonist of their own story and not their male counterparts. This concludes then with a greater question of how to study the nature of regency in a medieval government with the concern of queens as regents.

My honors thesis, entitled “Conversing with Angels: John Dee and His Quest for Divine Knowledge”, was a study of the Elizabethan scholar John Dee and the angelic conversations he is most known for. I decided to focus my work on the nature of the conversations, as well as looking for an answer to the question of why Dee spent years of his life figuring out how to contact, invoke, and converse with God’s divine beings. After extensive research I found five scholars whose works held six different arguments as to Dee’s motivations for the conversations.
I began my thesis discussing the conversations themselves, starting with Dee’s scryer, Edward Kelly, and the ways in which he was able to contact the angels. I also went into detail about the prayers and psalms Dee used to invoke the angels, as well as the multiple topics discussed throughout the conversations. I found that Dee’s transcriptions of the conversations were written in a form of short hand, and often included his own commentary to go along with what the angels told him. After the general overview of the process that let to the conversations, as well as the conversations themselves, I moved on to discussing the six different arguments from the five scholars: Deborah Harkness, Nicholas Cluelee, Stephen Clucas, György Szönyi, and Stuart Clark.
A quick rundown of each argument is as follows. Deborah Harkness argued that Dee’s conversations found their root in apocalyptic concerns, while Harkness and György Szönyi believed he was trying to bring religious reformation to the world. Stephen Clucas felt Dee was doing everything to bring glory to God, and Nicholas Cluelee claimed Dee was conversing with angels for a purely scholarly reason. Finally, Stuart Clark played devils advocate and argued that Dee was not actually talking to angels, but rather to demons.
After much consideration, taking each of the six interpretations into account, I concluded my thesis by arguing in agreement with György Szönyi and Nicholas Cluelee. I believed, like Szönyi, that Dee was doing all of this work to bring glory to God. But that was most likely only to a lesser extent, for when it comes to Dee’s main reasoning behind the conversations, I argued, like Cluelee, that Dee was a scholar through and through. He had spent his whole life chasing after the idea of omniscience, finally looking to the heavens in hopes that God would share his divine knowledge. Therefore, while Dee might have been conversing with angels for many different reasons, I believe that the main reason was somewhat selfish. He was a scholar with the chance to learn the secrets and knowledge of the divine, there was no other motivation needed.