Focusing on four 'religious' periodicals in the late Victorian period, this thesis explores a number of encounters between science and religion in the British periodical press. Concentrating on debates about the relations between human and other animals, it examines how a range of religious, moral, political and cultural factors influenced editors, authors and readers in their evaluation of scientific knowledge. In so doing, the thesis examines how boundaries between humans and animals were negotiated by religious authors and their readers and seeks to rethink Christian (re-)conceptualisations of animals in light of nineteenth-century scientific developments. In pursuing this goal, the thesis contributes to recent research on science in periodicals and, more generally, work on the historical geographies of science and religion. Under investigation are the English Roman Catholic weekly The Tablet, the weekly Spectator whose science debates were driven by its religious editor, the carefully-managed Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, and the Evangelical/Nonconformist Good Words. Each chapter reveals a different religious engagement with science, including responses to the growth of British physiology and animal experimentation, debates about animal instinct and intelligence, reactions to human evolution and the study of human origins, and the more popular considerations of human- animal relations in science through the lens of late Victorian natural theology. Late Victorian encounters between science and religion in religious periodicals remain under-examined. Yet, as this thesis argues religious audiences were one of the largest consumers of periodicals during the late Victorian period and were actively involved in debates and controversies that influenced wider public opinion on human-animal relations.
| Date of Award | Dec 2019 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Awarding Institution | - Queen's University Belfast
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| Sponsors | Northern Ireland Department for the Economy |
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| Supervisor | Diarmid Finnegan (Supervisor) |
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Human-animal relations and the religious periodical press in late Victorian Britain
Swain, E. (Author). Dec 2019
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy