Max Müller, Charles Darwin and the science of religion

The science of religion, as a discipline distinct from theology emerging in the 19th century, from the beginning was closely related to the discourse on Darwinism. This article focusses on Max Müller, known as ‘The father of Comparative Religion’, who was involved in the Darwinian discourse, compared with Jane Ellen Harrison who emphasised the impact of the theory of evolution, approaching, however, the ‘scientific study of religion’ from a different viewpoint.Contribution: From a historical point of view, this article discusses the relationship between different strands in Religious Studies (Religionswissenschaft), and, also, touches upon the relationship between Religious Studies and Theology.

Jane Ellen Harrison and a Ritual Aesthetic: The Early 20th Century Turn Towards Materiality, Embodiment and Performativity in the Arts

This article considers the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison’s ritual theory of art as part of an intellectual, cultural and aesthetic zeitgeist occurring at the beginning of the 20th century. While centred on ancient Greek culture and art, Harrison’s work is directly connected to her concerns with religion and art in her own time. Her theory posits ritual as the forgotten origin of art and theology and sees in the modern period a return to this source in both religion and art. I argue that her theory implies a particular aesthetic which speaks to key shifts happening concurrently across the arts in Europe and America, and that the scope of her theory, incorporating insights from a range of fields of study, makes it a useful and unique lens through which to contextualise and view important developments in the arts during this period. Leading examples of these developments are considered from the fields of visual art, literature, theatre and particularly dance.

Abandoned Lives

This chapter theorizes biographical failure, such as what happens when it feels impossible to finish telling a life story. It reads two incomplete biographical projects in the context of what Jack Halberstam has called the “queer art of failure”: the recognition and reframing of failure as one possible form of the deliberate subversion of heteronormative metrics of success. Djuna Barnes worked for decades to turn the attempted autobiography of her Dadaist friend, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, into a publishable biography. Hope Mirrlees compiled a series of half-done drafts, notes, and outlines toward the biography of her late mentor, friend, and intimate companion, the celebrated Cambridge classicist Jane Ellen Harrison. Though their projects were very different, neither Barnes nor Mirrlees would finish their biographies or consent to let anyone else take over their projects. The chapter reframes the discourse of failure surrounding both projects and suggests that these so-called failures represent acts of resistance to the normalizing pull of typical biographical narratives.

Weston, Jessie (1850–1928)

Jessie Laidlay Weston was a British independent scholar and folklorist best known for her influential study From Ritual to Romance (1920), which sought to trace the Christian grail legend, specifically the story of the Fisher King, back to pre-Christian origins. Her analysis draws from Sir James Frazer’s comparative study of religion, The Golden Bough (1890), and its claim that modern religion evolved from older fertility cults and their rites of the dying god/king. The ‘Cambridge Ritualists’, who also took much inspiration from Frazer, likewise influenced Weston—particularly the work of Jane Ellen Harrison—with their theories of ritual practice and their shared belief that ritual preceded myth, with storytelling always an explanation of older rites.

Harrison, Jane (1850–1928)

Jane Ellen Harrison was a classicist credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a ‘career academic’. Her scholarship combined archeological research with mythology to understand the religious rituals and social practices represented in the art and literature of ancient Greece. Born in Yorkshire, Harrison was among the first students to attend Cambridge University’s newly created school for women, Newnham College. She later studied with Charles Newton (1816–1894) in the Department of Antiquities of the British Museum and began a career as a speaker on archeology and classical art before her appointment to Newnham as a lecturer in 1898.

Orlando, Greece and the Impossible Landscape

Tracing the trope of landscape as it appears in Orlando’s experience on Mount Athos – a monastic site upon which women were historically forbidden to trespass – Vassiliki Kolocotroni explores the poet Orlando’s allegorical and pastoral scene-making impulses. Grounded in the thought of classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, Orlando’s vision of the Greek landscape enacts a feminist transgression, Kolocotroni argues, at the same time as it problematically appropriates this space and the classical past. This chapter thereby highlights Orlando’s ambivalence as ‘emblem of an impossibility, a female creature on a sacred, forbidding all-male space’.

Out-takes from Upstarts: Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the Heritage of Dissent, or, “There She Wasn’t?”

Jean Mills uses Virginia Woolf’s legacy and literature to process the work and impact of two important women in her life, the Virginia Woolf scholar, Jane Marcus, and her own mother, following their deaths. In her attempts to preserve and champion the memory of the two women, Mills acknowledges Woolf’s own participation in the act of writing women into obscurity and refers to Jane Harrison’s title of ‘J.H’ in A Room of One’s Own. Mills argues that not using the scholar’s full name contributes to Harrison’s erasure and reveals Woolf’s act of distancing between herself and her female role models. While Mills attributes Woolf’s sense of isolation from her academic audience as a result of distancing and alienation, she acknowledges that many of Woolf’s narratives privileged women’s history and experience, and observes that any presence of ambivalence can be utilised as a necessary tool to foreground the need for the recognition of women in activism and political thought.