Thesiss

Rife with knowledge projects, encyclopedia-writing, botanical books, travel accounts, and other writing that we today would call ‘scientific,’ the eighteenth century is marked by an explosion of empiricism and rational materialism, re-shaping epistemological frameworks for under…

This dissertation examines beliefs and practices related to second sight in Scotland, with a particular focus on the period from c. 1600 to c. 1800. An influential strain of historiography has asserted that this period was characterized by “disenchantment,” a process of increasi…

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many scholars asserted an ongoing disenchantment of the world. In an arc from the age of enlightenment to their present, these scholars argued that, in consequence of this disenchantment, humanity was becoming increasingly secular. While…

What do religions do and how do they do it? In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Émile Durkheim claims that religions are “grounded in and express the real” and center upon a set of ritualized practices that enact and embody in a distinctively intense and potentially trans…