Abstract: This chapter contends that modern ecological debates can be traced back to the differences between the Hobbesian constructivist idea of an exit from nature, a Lockean productivist enhancement of nature, and a Rousseauian idea of conservation built on his notion of supplementarity. It shows how these conflicting views shape current ecological discourses and crises, and help us to understand the complex, fractured ecological sensibility of the modern West.

Abstract: The state of nature is a foundational concept for modern Western thought, influencing ideas about colonialism, secularization, and ecology. It is a fractured idea that shines a light on the contemporary culture wars, and continues to shape debates on human nature, political structures, and the legacy of the West.

This essay explores the Spanish Inquisition’s attention to individuals who identified with Protestant Christianity. In the 1520s, inquisitors first attempted to prohibit the smuggling of books. By the 1530s, they were also willing track Spanish Protestant sympathizers abroad, via family members of the suspects as well as networks of spies, and have them repatriated for punishment. The discovery of Spanish Protestant cells in Seville and Valladolid in the late 1550s -- whose members often intellectual and socioeconomic elites -- stunned the inquisitorial establishment, which did not succeed in catching all the suspects. Exceptional punishments even for the penitent were allowed by Pope Paul IV; dozens of individuals were burned at the stake in autos de fe between 1559 and 1562. The discovery of Protestants in the heart of Spain also facilitated the arrest of the archbishop of Toledo, Bartolomé de Carranza, whose seventeen-year trial became notorious. Eventually, Spanish monarchs had to make concessions to foreign Protestants for political and economic reasons, and Spanish inquisitors only encountered scattered, small groups of native believers.

The essay reviews the ebb and flow of Jewish conversions to Catholicism, as well as the ambiguous process of categorizing religious identity. It examines the types of accusations launched against conversos, as well as the motivations for such accusals and their gendered nature. The essays discusses the truthfulness of surviving Inquisition records. It compares trials from the Spanish Inquisition’s first decades to those of later years, with particular attention to the presence of Jewish converts from Portugal. These trials demonstrate the complicated, ongoing interactions among Jews, New Christians, and so-called “Old Christians” throughout the Spanish Empire and around the world. The end of the chapter notes the decline of trials for Judaizing in the eighteenth century.

The Spanish Inquisition developed the heresy known as alumbradismo out of disparate evidence: the heresy existed only in documents by, for, or about the Inquisition. Defendants charged as alumbrados were often acted in ways incommensurate with orthodox Spanish Catholicism; their defining characteristic across time was an emphasis on interior religious experience, especially mental prayer, which would lead toward the abandonment of one’s soul in God. However, the idea that they were members of an organized group—despite lacking any self-formulated doctrine or teachings, much less a means for global communication or dissemination of their ideas—was a stretch of logic that validated inquisitorial persecution but fails to adhere to modern historians’ concepts of proof. It was the Inquisition’s persecutorial discourse and bureaucracy that provided the connective threads for this “sect” when the alumbrados themselves failed to do so.

Jacques Derrida’s contribution to the book Veils, jointly authored with his friend Hélène Cixous, is, in part, a meditation on his tallit – the Jewish prayer shawl – that was given to him as a boy. Derrida turns to the tallit as a contrast to the veil. The tallit opens an avenue for him to critique the traditional and widespread trope of truth as that which is veiled and that which calls out for unveiling. This epilogue focuses on Derrida‘s affectionate description of his tallit–the yellowing, familiar, soft, singular tallit that resists knowing.

This chapter examines the representation of textiles, curtains, drapery, and other architectural veils in early Christian art from the earliest Christian frescoes to the catacombs and sarcophagi of the fourth and fifth centuries, to the mosaic programs of sixth-century Ravenna and Rome. I argue that one of the ways that veiling increasingly signified in late antiquity and early Byzantium was to intimate mystery, sacrality, and hiddenness while hinting at the promise of revelation and discovery.

This chapter provides an examination of the complex beginning and ending of the Spanish Inquisition, with attention to the forced conversion of Jews to Christianity in 1391, the ambiguous religious status of those converts in the fifteenth century, and the creation of yet another new generation of converts after the Jewish Expulsion of 1492. The aims of Ferdinand and Isabella are explored, as is the resistance to the Inquisition’s creation. The essay explores the attempted abolition of the Spanish Inquisition in 1808, with Napoleon’s invasion, as well as the contested legal relevance of the Inquisition in the 1812 Cortes of Cádiz, and the institution’s gradual extinction from 1814 to 1834.

For fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa, veils became part of the way to describe the soul’s pursuit of divine love and union. This chapter examines how the numerous veils of the biblical book known as the Song of Songs become the threads with which Gregory weaves not only his mystical reflections on the soul’s unrelenting desire for God but also his description of the allegorist’s pursuit.

This chapter examines the historical development of the Spanish Inquisition in New Spain (Mexico), investigating its processes, targets, and ambitions. It surveys the first inquisition prosecutions there, which were carried out not by inquisitors per se, but by mendicant friars as well as the episcopal court. After King Philip II authorized an inquisition tribunal for New Spain in 1569, inquisitors quickly began to operate in Mexico City. At the same time, Spanish inquisitors in New Spain had no investigative or coercive powers over New Spain’s Indigenous populations, whose religious beliefs and practices were monitored by the episcopal legal jurisdiction. New Spain’s inquisitors prosecuted far fewer serious heretics than their counterparts in Spain itself, though the tribunal was interested in Portuguese conversos, especially when it was encountering financial difficulties.