Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item "Pillaged and Robbed so Well": Captains in the Hundred Years War 1350-1380(2024) Ament, Nathaniel; Baron, Sabrina; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Captains were among the most influential military figures of the Hundred Years War. Despite this, there is scant scholarship on captaincy as a position within medieval society. This thesis seeks to rectify this gap in the scholarship by exploring the careers of influential captains serving England and France during the period from 1350-80. Drawing primarily from chronicle sources, this thesis examines the careers of this group of captains chronologically. It examines how their careers progressed and how they interacted with key cultural systems such as territorial lordship, chivalric culture, and the economic mechanisms of war. The overall findings of this paper reveal that these three systems mutually reinforced each other through captaincy by justifying chivalric violence.Item “GOD RATHER THAN MEN”: AUSTRIAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY AND THE ORIGINS OF THE CHRISTIAN SOCIAL PARTY, 1848-1893(2024) Messersmith, Thomas Martin; Rozenblit, Marsha L; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the changes in Austrian Catholic theology from 1848 to 1893 and the role these changes played in the foundation of the Christian Social Party. Due to a series of crises after 1848, the theology of the Austrian Catholic Church underwent several shifts, ultimately settling on the belief that, in a modern world, direct political action from the Church was not only permissible, but imperative to defend the Church against those who would destroy it. This shift in political theology, which allowed for informal and unofficial theological participation in the realm of politics, was necessary to allow for the development of the Christian Social Party. This dissertation focuses primarily on the German-speaking areas of the Habsburg Monarchy, drawing on a variety of sources, including letters, diaries, meeting notes, legal records, newspapers, theological treatises, and contemporary academic journals to track the theological and political discussions that took place in this portion of the monarchy. The first chapter defines “political theology” as it is used in this dissertation (i.e., as a broader concept, positioned in opposition to the more limited and problematic definition of Carl Schmitt) as “the study of the divine as it relates to politics,” and provides an overview of the state of political theology in both Austria and the Catholic Church as a whole before 1848. Chapter two focuses on the shifts in political theology that occurred as a result of the Revolutions of 1848, with the paradigm of political theology ultimately coalescing around the leadership of Joseph Othmar Rauscher and the notion of a negotiated legalistic political compromise. Chapter three examines the Habsburg Concordat with Rome of 1855 and its subsequent undoing through the May Laws of 1868, which tested the new paradigm of political theology. Chapter four follows the arrest, trial, and conviction of Bishop Rudigier of Linz for “disturbing the peace,” following his attempted publication of a pastoral letter that called for Catholics to disobey laws that went against the Concordat and Church teachings. This proved to be a pivot point in the development of political theology of the Habsburg Monarchy, leading now-Cardinal Rauscher to reassess the political theological paradigm. Chapter five follows the proceedings of the First Ecumenical Council of the Vatican and the Kulturkampf in Germany, both of which resulted in the development of a more aggressive political theological paradigm in Austria. Finally, chapter six examines the completion of the shift from the Vormärz political theological paradigm to the paradigm of popular public political theology employed by Karl von Vogelsang in the ideological creation of the Christian Social Party. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that while other factors, such as antisemitism and the dissatisfaction of the lower clergy, as argued by John Boyer, helped to create the Christian Social Party in Austria, a shift in political theology in the Austrian Church and in the Catholic Church as a whole was necessary before the various ideologies of the Christian Social Party could coalesce.Item “WHAT PERSONS, MASCULINE OR FEMININE”: EXAMINATIONS OF IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION AND QUEER POTENTIALITIES IN WESTERN MEDIEVAL EUROPE(2023) Taylor, Erin; Bianchini, Janna; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this thesis, I argue that medieval people in Latin Europe had complex, overlapping identities and experiences of gender and sexuality that developed in their specific temporal and geographical contexts. The internal understandings of identities and the external expressions and interpretations of such identities are sites of historical possibility—and sources of potential inter-and intra-personal conflicts Medieval writings like Le Roman de Silence demonstrate how these identities could be constructed and expressed for literary and rhetorical purposes. Extant court cases, including those of John/Eleanor Rykener, Vitoria of Lisbon, and Katherina Hetzeldorfer, demonstrate the complexity of lived experiences of identity, and how deviation from accepted community and cultural norms could prove dangerous. It is impossible to assert such identities of gender and sexuality for historical figures of the medieval era with complete certainty, but the exploration of these identities is necessary for a fuller understanding and representation of the period and the people who lived throughout it.Item Nature and Power: The Game Sill Lifes of Jan Weenix (1641-1719)(2023) Altizer, Kathleen Joanna; Wheelock, Arthur K; Colontuono, Anthony; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Dutch artist Jan Weenix (1641-1719) was the most successful game painter of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Specializing in large-scale still lifes that foregrounded naturalistically depicted game arranged before ornate garden views, these innovative images were highly sought after by wealthy merchants, Dutch nobles, and German princes alike. Despite the renown of Weenix’s art in his own time and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these paintings have never been the focus of in-depth critical analysis. Scholarship on Weenix has mostly concentrated on his early Italianate landscapes and his wall panels, while interpretations of his game paintings have almost exclusively focused on their place within the long tradition of dead animal painting in Northern art, beginning with sixteenth-century Flemish market scenes. This dissertation departs from this approach by arguing that Weenix’s game paintings are best understood within the dramatic cultural shifts and political upheavals of William III’s stadholderate (1672-1702). It was during this period that Weenix first specialized in game paintings. At this time, estate ownership, hunting, and garden design were becoming newly significant performances of authority, wealth, and power, both among members of the wealthy merchant patriciate and at William III’s court. Tracing Weenix’s evolution as a game painter alongside the cultural-political history of Dutch hunting practices and gardens, I explore the nuanced ways in which Weenix’s art drew from a myriad of contemporary visual sources to stylistically and conceptually promote his patrons’ belonging to a community of pan-European elites. I show how merchant collectors sought out Weenix’s game paintings as representations of estate ownership, which had become an increasingly significant marker of inherited wealth and dynastic privilege among the merchant class. In the same period, hunting and garden art became invested with new political meanings as Stadtholder William III made hunting a centerpiece of Dutch court life for the first time, while his courtiers developed magnificent gardens to celebrate his military achievements. I prove that Weenix’s art directly refers to these activities and spaces, enabling those inside and outside the court to adopt the imagery of political power to promote their own status. Combining a sustained visual analysis of Weenix’s game paintings with an in-depth study of his patronage, I demonstrate how Weenix’s art reflected and furthered the aspirations of his patrons, and consequently participated in the construction of elite social identities. I conclude that, through Weenix’s art, collectors claimed the right to to exercise control over nature, identifying themselves with pan-European nobility and ultimately illustrating their participation in the establishment of cultural and political hegemony over their domains.Item Larrons En Foire: Perceptions and Changing Strategies in Russia and Britain durring the Balkan Crises(2023) Trombley, Josiah D; Dolbilov, Mikhail; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)With a contemporary diplomatic crisis between Russia and the West heating up due to the Russo-Ukrainian War, this thesis looks at an often undervalued Nineteenth Century crisis that offers lessons for the ongoing political situation. This thesis argues that, instead of merely being a starting point for many polities in Southern Europe, the Balkan Crisis of 1876-1878 and the subsequent Treaty of Berlin are not only important for Balkan and Ottoman history, but also provides a crucial window into how a crisis could lead to changes in governing and national ideologies. Crucially, this thesis argues that despite the Russian government’s lack of representative bodies, and the British government’s own incredibly limited electorate, the perception of popular support at home for the Balkan peoples abroad altered the way in which leaders of both empires made diplomatic decisions throughout the Balkan Crises. Furthermore, this public sentiment, in this case support for Balkan nationalism and pan-nationalism, became part of an enduring legacy in the political spheres of both St. Petersburg and London.Item "The Mobs All Cryd Peace With America": The Gordon Riots and Revolution in England and America(2023) Michalak, Lauren K; Brewer, Holly; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In June 1780, London was brought to its knees by a week-long insurrection. Rioters broke open and set ablaze nearly all of London’s prisons, ransacked and burned the properties of government officials, and attacked the Bank of England. The riots were in response to the British government’s rejection of a mass petition demanding the repeal of a 1778 law granting rights to Catholic subjects to encourage enlistment in the military to fight in the American Revolutionary War. The rioters’ reaction to the rejected petition reflected broader, transatlantic concerns about government operating without the consent of the governed, echoing grievances raised by American colonists prior to their declaring independence. To regain control over London, George III ordered 15,000 troops into the city, commanding them to bypass the necessary approval of civil magistrates and fire-at-will, hence abandoning legal restrictions on his power. After the insurrection was over, American Patriots and Loyalists deliberated at length over their meaning; many Britons, in turn, blamed the riots on dangerous ideologies and American conspirators. This dissertation explores how the June 1780 riots demonstrate the connections between the American Revolution and wider struggles across the British empire. While building on scholarship of the riots, British politics, and the American Revolution, I argue that these riots brought the American rebellion home to British soil, posing a significant challenge to the stability of the British nation and empire. I examine how the riots gave rise to rumors about the true culprit behind the uprising, with different groups laying blame at the feet of Catholics or Methodists, or as a plot of the British Ministry or the Americans and French. I interrogate how Patriots and Loyalists utilized the riots to reaffirm commitment to their political ideologies. I explore how news of the insurrection influenced delicate diplomatic negotiations amidst an imperial war. By investigating the myriad connections between the London riots and the American Revolution, I show how power was contested on both sides of the Atlantic and how ideas and information spread and shaped political ideology. In doing so, I argue that the London riots were a crucial event during the American Revolution.Item TERROR IN THE PYRENEES: RELIGION, REVOLUTION AND THE NATION IN SOUTHWESTERN FRANCE, 1789-1794(2022) Brower, Jonathan Christopher; Villani, Stefano; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the ways in which revolutionaries in France used religion to define concepts of citizenship, belonging, and identity between the years 1789 and 1794. It contends that the religious policies of the Terror (1793-1794), which it terms the “Sacerdotal Revolution,” were an attempt to construct a new imagined national religious community centered on the worship of the Supreme Being and the nation. It demonstrates that at the beginning of the eighteenth-century, French society was divided between two mutually complementary spheres of authority: the temporal realm of kings and the spiritual realm of Church. Over the course of the century, political and religious writers put forward arguments that essentially integrated spiritual institutions into the terrestrial world, thus paving the way for the formation of a national religious community embodied in the Constitutional Catholic Church of 1791. However, the failure the Constitutional Catholic Church to provide national religious consensus and the looming threat of war, polarized and politicized identities inside and outside the French Republic, and led some revolutionaries during the Terror to embrace a type of universal patriotic religion predicated upon an exclusionary national identity. As this dissertation maintains, at the heart of the debate over religion during the French Revolution was a tension between universalism and particularism, and the ways in which diverse religious and ethnic identities were able to relate to the universal category of French citizenship. This tension was most acute in the southwestern borderlands of France, which were characterized by ethnic and religious diversity. As a result, all those who fell outside the boundaries of the universal patriotic religion of the Sacerdotal Revolution were considered counterrevolutionary religious fanatics in need of regeneration. At the same time, the universalist discourse of the Sacerdotal Revolution also offered some ethno-religious minorities a chance to exercise their citizenship. Thus, by studying the religious debates of the French Revolution, this dissertation seeks to show how revolutionaries in southwestern France attempted to construct a new imagined religious community during a moment of religious conflict, political factionalism, and war.Item The Exiles' Return: Emigres, Anti-Nazis, and the Basic Law(2021) Miner, Samuel James; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation traces the historical origins of several novel features of the postwar West German Constitution (Basic Law). Next to a legally enforceable catalogue of basic rights, the novelty of the 1949 Basic Law lay in articles outlining the forfeiture of those basic rights for any individual, organization, or political party who fights against the “fundamental liberal-democratic order.” This is a pillar of “militant democracy,” a term invented by the emigre jurist Karl Loewenstein, but a feature of German constitutionalism since it uses by the Federal Constitutional Court. That court occupies the position of “guardian of the constitution” in postwar Germany. Postwar “new German constitutionalism” (Kommers) was largely a project of the parliamentary left. Despite their historical aversion to judicial power, postwar German anti-Nazis transferred tremendous powers to the judiciary, especially state and federal constitutional courts. The following dissertation is a collective intellectual biography of the key anti-Nazi and emigre constitutional framers behind the state and federal constitutions. It examines their lives between the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and the late 1950s, when the Federal Constitutional Court established itself as the final arbiter of German law. The Federal Constitutional Court with its powers of judicial review was not an American export. Rather, it was a German response to the circumstances of postwar occupied Germany. Judicial review came to Germany as an anti-Nazi measure designed to prevent the continued use of Nazi statutes in defense of war criminals. Judges in Allied-occupied Germany were asked to review statutes for their adherence to principles of justice to avoid light sentences for Nazi criminals. To counter the tendencies of a reactionary judiciary, anti-Nazi jurists campaigned for a lay judiciary with mixed results. The state constitutions of the American occupation zone provided the prototype for how a “militant democracy” would function in postwar West Germany. The state constitutions were anti-Nazi documents written in response to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The framers of the state constitutions came from the ranks of recent re-emigrants and concentration camp survivors. The following dissertation examines their contributions to postwar law and politics.Item Anywhere but the Reich: The Jews of Nazi Vienna's Applications for Emigration Aid, 1938-1940(2021) Wachtel, Jennifer LeeAnne; Rozenblit, Marsha; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss in 1938, an immediate outpouring of antisemitic violence and legislation horrified the Jews of Vienna. Between 1938 and 1940, Viennese Jews applied to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (Jewish Community of Vienna or IKG) for financial aid to emigrate. Through a close examination of emigration questionnaires Viennese Jews submitted to the IKG, I demonstrate the harrowing effect of the Anschluss and Kristallnacht (November 1938 pogrom) on Jews from all social classes. By centering how individual families engaged with the emigration process, I argue that Viennese Jews immediately recognized the need to flee and exercised enormous creativity to escape. Desperate Viennese Jews were willing to emigrate anywhere and obtain any job outside the Reich. Viennese Jews also demonstrated resilience in the face of Nazi terror by applying for financial aid to flee the Reich even as potential havens shut their doors to Jewish refugees.Item The Price of Reconciliation: West Germany, France and the Arc of Postwar Justice for the Crimes of Nazi Germany, 1944-1963(2020) Staedtler, Rene; Herf, Jeffrey C; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation links the arc of war crimes justice with the arc of reconciliation in Franco-German relations from 1944 to 1963. I argue that France initially created a retributive justice which aggressively targeted crimes committed by the German occupant from 1940 to 1944. By examining the internal debates within the French government and parliament regarding the legal foundation of Nazi war crimes trials in France, I show that the French polity dispensed with and even violated the French republican tradition in its effort to reckon with the Nazi past. In the second part, I demonstrate that the process of European integration and Franco-German reconciliation offered those in West Germany who resented the retributive justice in France the opportunity to influence, even manipulate the French government by initiating and sustaining a trajectory which bound reconciliation ever more tightly to the retreat from the goals of postwar justice. I contend that once French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman initiated the path towards reconciliation with Adenauer’s West Germany, a broad coalition centrally coordinated from Bonn utilized the desire for rapprochement to undermine French war crimes justice. By attacking French justice as a sign of its unforgiveness and its resolve to continue with the so-called “arch-enmity,” the West German diplomats and government officials argued that the war crimes trials were regarded as a symbol of a period of humiliation and injustice which needed to be eradicated in order to achieve a “veritable reconciliation.” I show how the reconciliation narrative shaped the transition from a French system of justice which was one of the most extensive and consequential ones in Western Europe in the late 1940s to the complete and premature release of all remaining war criminals in French custody. The West German view prevailed and imprinted on the landmark achievement of Franco-German reconciliation the stain of privileging the perpetrators over the victims of Nazi Germany in France.