This dissertation examines Elizabeth Robinson Montagu's relationships with three men: her husband, Edward Montagu; George Lyttelton, first baron Lyttelton; and William Pulteney, earl of Bath to show how these relationships were structured and how Elizabeth Montagu negotiated them in order to forward her own intellectual interests. Montagu's relationship with her husband Edward and her friendships with Lord Lyttelton and Lord Bath supplied her with important outlets for intellectual and political expression. Scholarly work on Montagu's friendships with other intellectual women has demonstrated how Montagu drew on the support of female friends in her literary ambitions, but at the same time, it has obscured her equally important male relationships. Without discounting the importance of female friendship to Montagu's intellectual life, this study demonstrates that Montagu's relationships with Bath, Lyttleton, and her husband were at least as important to her as those with women, and that her male friendships and relationships offered her entry into the political sphere. Elizabeth Montagu was greatly interested in the political debates of her day and she contributed to the political process in the various ways open to her as an elite woman and female intellectual. Within the context of these male friendships, Montagu had an opportunity …

The eleventh and twelfth centuries represent a critical formative period for institutions and practices that characterized later Islam. Sufism also emerged during the same period as a distinct mode of piety that gained widespread acceptance in the aftermath of Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century. Using early Sufi biographies produced in Khorasan during that period, this study will argue that the early Sufis were not only preoccupied with locating their own tradition within the Islamic orthodoxy but also defining the contours of what constituted acceptable Islam. The sources used are predominantly Persian Sufi biographies composed in Khorasan which form the main body of historiography of Sufism.

This thesis is a comparative analysis of Ibn Taymiyya of Damascus and Gregory of Rimini within their respective religious and philosophical traditions. Ibn Taymiyya and Gregory of Rimini rejected the use of Aristotelian logic in the valorization of divine revelation in Islam and Christianity respectively. The translation movements, in Baghdad and then in Toledo, ensured the transmission of Greek scientific and philosophical works to both the Islamic world during the 'Abbasid Caliphate and the Catholic Christian European milieu beginning in the eleventh century. By the fourteenth century both the Islamic and the Catholic European religious traditions had a long history of assimilating Aristotle's Organon. Ibn Taymiyya and Gregory of Rimini rejected the notion, adopted by the kalam and scholastic traditions respectively, that logical demonstration could be used to validate religious doctrine as taught in the Qur'an and the Bible. Ibn Taymiyya rejected demonstration completely but Gregory accepted its qualified use.