Soon after IvyGate published the extraordinary email exchange between Margherita Viggiano, a Yale graduate student and teaching fellow in Alexander Nemerov’s art history lecture, and Edward Barnaby, the Graduate School dean who dismissed her, Viggiano posted (on the same blog we found her correspondence with Barnaby) what appears to be her entire, 53,000-word doctoral thesis, entitled “Shakespeare and Dante: Demonic Agency as Literary Theory”.
Much like the conspiracy-laden handout she distributed to undergraduates on Tuesday, Viggiano’s thesis faults the Freemasons—the fraternal organization and subject of several airport thrillers—for various corruptions of power. This time is a little different, though. Viggiano, a dramatically devout Catholic, forcefully argues that something called “Satanic Freemasonry” has infiltrated the Roman Catholic Church and contrives to ruin its reputation by arranging for priests to sexually abuse children.
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