Abstract: This chapter engages closely with the key state of nature passages in Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. It shows how each text constructs strikingly distinct imaginaries of the state of nature, and begins to explore some of the real-world implications of these imaginaries.

This chapter addresses the profound indebtedness of the Spanish Inquisition to its medieval predecessor. Both were grounded in the procedures and priorities of ancient Roman law. The text explains the concept of “heresy” within Christianity, as well as the ways in which medieval European rulers -- popes and monarchs -- worked together in an attempt to stamp out public, persistent, and intentional religious dissent. The essay charts the structural formation of the Spanish Inquisition after 1478, and examines the processes that were eventually standardized. It addresses questions of proof and legal discretion, as well as potential defense maneuvers by suspects. It raises the frequency of torture and describes more and less typical punishments, which Spanish inquisitors called “penances” in accordance with their overarching pastoral goals. Finally, this essay addresses the pivotal question of support for the Inquisition from below, namely, from ordinary Spaniards.

It was not implausibe for Spanish inquisitors and their wider staff to provoke scandal in their communities through moral, sexual, physical, and financial offenses. The same held true for Spanish Catholic clergy at large. This essay examines the varieties and possible sites of inquisitorial malfeasance, as well as the special legal privileges that constituted one of the main attractions of being employed in an inquisition tribunal. The essay also ponders in particular the crime and heresy of clerical solicitation of female penitents for sexual favors. Those clerical malefactors were sentenced in secret and punished via exile that took them out of their communities. They thus kept their identities and offenses a secret. At the same time, however the Spanish Inquisition offered a legal platform for female complainants to voice their grievances.

The inquisition tribunal in Lima, Peru, has received comparatively less scholarly attention because its sources are scattered and remain relatively incomplete. This chapter examines the inquisitorial jurisdiction in terms both of geography and of the Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans who attracted the inquisitors’ attention. It covers the lives and careers of prominent inquisitors, and addresses the variety of alleged offenders. It identifies different phases of tribunal activity, provides examples of the offenses that Lima’s inquisitors targeted in each phase, and delves into trials of faith for the heresy of crypto-judaism, the so-called “Great Complicity” of 1635–39. Inquisitors in Lima were interested in the same range of offenses as their counterparts in Spain. The tribunal worried about the presence of hidden Jews, Muslims, and Protestants in the Peruvian Viceroyalty and the effects they might have. They also were preoccupied with minor offenders such as visionaries, sorcerers, and bigamists.

Abstract: The Conclusion argues that the state of nature remains central to understanding the fractured condition of modern Western thought, particularly in the fields of colonialism, secularism, and ecology. It highlights the continuing relevance of the notion for interpreting the fragmented imaginaries of Western modernity.

This chapter assesses the Spanish Inquisition’s treatment of so-called “Old Christians,” meaning Spaniards who allegedly had no Jewish or Muslim ancestors in their genealogies. While Old Christians convicted of serious heresy could be relaxed to the secular arm and burned at the stake, their ancestry meant that Spanish inquisitors usually interrogated them less stringently, tortured them less frequently, and penanced them more lightly. Moreover, the Spanish Inquisition did not single out Old Christians as a potentially heretical group. Instead, inquisitors typically arrested Old Christians for morals offenses -- which connoted religious error -- as part of a larger effort to discipline Spain’s Catholic population. Speech acts, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, witchcraft, and magic committed by Old Christians preoccupied Spanish inquisitors. The Inquisition’s attention to a wide range of more prosaic crimes beyond crypto-judaizing rendered the Holy Office a constant presence in the lives of Old Christians.

The Kingdom of Sicily, which belonged to the Kingdom of Aragon, was a challenging environment for Spanish inquisitors. The island was by default a space through which people, goods, and ideas circulated. It also amounted to a frontier zone in the eastern Mediterranean. Inquisitors in Sicily attempted to monitor the ports while attending to the numerous populations of foreigners which resided there; they also focused on the Catholic orthodoxy and morality of the Christian residents. This chapter explores the ways in which the inquisition tribunal on the island continuously came into conflict with other courts, institutions, and powers of the kingdom. It argues that Sicily’s inquisitors were significantly affected by their local environment. While the history of the Sicilian Inquisition demonstrates its ability to adapt to particular social and institutional contexts, as well as political situations, it also reveals resistance to the confessional society that the Inquisition represented and promoted.

Abstract: This chapter explores the semantic and conceptual complexity of the state of nature, presenting thirteen different meanings of the term, showing how it functions as a myth, inflecting perennial human themes, and as a part of a social imaginary, conditioning lived experience. The chapter argues that understanding the importance of the state of nature in Western modernity requires an appreciation of each of these three dimensions.

In ancient Greece and Rome, veiling practices were ordinary (part of daily life) and extraordinary (part of special ritual occasions). Women’s veils were versatile objects that were involved in the performance of status, piety, modesty, and beauty. Some men veiled in the act of sacrifice or to hide strong emotions of sorrow and anger.

Abstract: This chapter understands modernity’s fragmented and contradictory secular modernities through the prism of the state of nature accounts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. It offers a new taxonomy of the varieties of modern secularization in terms of deflationary, collateral, and psychologizing imaginaries.

Abstract: This chapter theorizes three “figures” – the theoretical gestures or patterns – of the state of nature: a flattening of complexity, a partition between natural and civil conditions, and a normalization one of the sides of the partition. It argues that these figures recur across Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau’s work, where they present en abyme characteristic patterns of Western modernity.