History MA candidate Ace Gammon-Burnett will defend his thesis on Monday, August 24, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The defence will take place on Teams. Interested members of the public are welcome to attend.

Ace’s thesis is entitled, “Opposita juxta: Aristotelian Antithesis as the Epistemic Engine of Alexander Ross’s Pansebeia: or, A View of All Religions in the World (1653/1655).” His thesis supervisor is Dr. Michael Driedger.

Thesis abstract

Alexander Ross (1591–1654), Royalist cleric and controversialist, confronted the collapse of sociopolitical and religious conformity during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum—and the exposure of early modern Europeans to global religious diversity—by doubling down on an aggressively ancient Aristotelian mode of knowing. This thesis foregrounds Ross’s use of antithesis as a core epistemological structure for defining “true religion” through the curated “deformities” of its many contraries in his best-selling Pansebeia (1653/1655). I also trace Ross’s theory of heliolatry (sun-worship) as the origin of “Gentile” religion, linking his anxieties over contemporary heliocentric innovations across key texts of his corpus to his conclusions in Pansebeia. Building primarily on R.J.W. Mills’s work on the conflicting legacy of Pansebeia as both heresiographical polemic and an inadvertent precursor to Enlightenment notions of religious diversity, my close-reading analysis across three chapters reconstructs Ross’s comparative method to show how his rigid Aristotelian framework shaped the aims, limits, and paradoxical consequences of Pansebeia.