Redeeming Faustus: Tracing the pacts of Mariken and Faust from the 1500s to the present

This dissertation uncovers and analyzes the complicated history of the devil’s pact in literature from approximately 1330 to 2015, focusing primarily on texts written in German and Dutch. That the tale of the pact with the devil (the so-called Faustian bargain) is one of the most durable and pliable literary themes is undeniable. Yet for too long, the success of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust I (1808) decisively shaped scholarship on early devil’s pact tales, leading to a misreading of the texts with Goethe’s concerns being projected onto the earliest manifestations. But Goethe’s Faust really only borrows from the original Faust his name; the two characters could not be more different. Furthermore, Faustus was not the only early pact-maker character and his tale was neither limited to the German language nor to the Protestant faith. Among others, tales written in Dutch about a female, Catholic, latemedieval pact-maker, Mariken van Nieumeghen (1515), illustrate this. This dissertation seeks to redeem the early modern Faustus texts from its misreading and to broaden the scholarship on the literature of the devil’s pact by considering the Mariken and Faust traditions together.

The first chapter outlines the beginnings of pact literature as a Catholic phenomenon, considering the tales of Theophilus and Pope Joan alongside Mariken of Nijmegen. The second chapter turns to the original Faust tale, the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587), best read as a Lutheran response to the Catholic pact literature in the wake of the Reformation. In the third chapter, this dissertation offers a new, united reading of the early modern Faust tradition. The fourth and fifth chapters trace the literary preoccupation with the pacts of both Mariken and Faustus from the late early modern to the present.

The dissertation traces the evolution of these two bodies of literature and provides an in-depth analysis and comparison of the two that has not been done before. It argues for a more global literary scholarship that considers texts across multiple languages and one that takes into consideration the rich body of material of the pact tradition.

Evolutionary characters, phenotypes and ontologies: curating data from the systematic biology literature.

BACKGROUND: The wealth of phenotypic descriptions documented in the published articles, monographs, and dissertations of phylogenetic systematics is traditionally reported in a free-text format, and it is therefore largely inaccessible for linkage to biological databases for genetics, development, and phenotypes, and difficult to manage for large-scale integrative work. The Phenoscape project aims to represent these complex and detailed descriptions with rich and formal semantics that are amenable to computation and integration with phenotype data from other fields of biology. This entails reconceptualizing the traditional free-text characters into the computable Entity-Quality (EQ) formalism using ontologies. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We used ontologies and the EQ formalism to curate a collection of 47 phylogenetic studies on ostariophysan fishes (including catfishes, characins, minnows, knifefishes) and their relatives with the goal of integrating these complex phenotype descriptions with information from an existing model organism database (zebrafish, http://zfin.org). We developed a curation workflow for the collection of character, taxonomic and specimen data from these publications. A total of 4,617 phenotypic characters (10,512 states) for 3,449 taxa, primarily species, were curated into EQ formalism (for a total of 12,861 EQ statements) using anatomical and taxonomic terms from teleost-specific ontologies (Teleost Anatomy Ontology and Teleost Taxonomy Ontology) in combination with terms from a quality ontology (Phenotype and Trait Ontology). Standards and guidelines for consistently and accurately representing phenotypes were developed in response to the challenges that were evident from two annotation experiments and from feedback from curators. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The challenges we encountered and many of the curation standards and methods for improving consistency that we developed are generally applicable to any effort to represent phenotypes using ontologies. This is because an ontological representation of the detailed variations in phenotype, whether between mutant or wildtype, among individual humans, or across the diversity of species, requires a process by which a precise combination of terms from domain ontologies are selected and organized according to logical relations. The efficiencies that we have developed in this process will be useful for any attempt to annotate complex phenotypic descriptions using ontologies. We also discuss some ramifications of EQ representation for the domain of systematics.