The last inquisition tribunal established in the Spanish empire was founded in Cartagena de las Indias, in Colombia, in 1610. It appears that Spanish inquisitors in Cartagena prosecuted and executed far fewer people than their counterparts in Mexico City and Lima, though in contrast to those cities’ archives Cartagena’s records have been curtailed by adverse weather conditions, termites (comejénes), and the destruction of the city in 1697 by the French corsair, Baron of Pointis. As a result, few inquisition trials have survived in their entirety; we primarily know about Cartagena’s prosecutions through the case summaries that inquisitors periodically sent to the inquisition leadership in Madrid. This chapter presents an overview of the crimes, victims, and power dynamics that characterized Cartagena’s Inquisition. It highlights the ways in which the pageantry of public celebrations, the secrecy of the tribunal’s inner workings, and local and metropolitan politics affected rivalries and alliances in the region, and thereby influenced inquisitorial decisions.

Visual and textual evidence from the Mediterranean region indicates the continued significance, complexity, opacity, and versatility of veiling practices among the late ancients. For women of this era (including Christians and Jews), veiling was entwined with performances of social status, honor, shame, deference, and obligations to others and the gods. Veiling was part and parcel of the formation of religious and liturgical subjects in the late ancient imaginary.

The trope that nature is a woman who hides or reveals herself has been around at least since the time of the presocratic philosopher, Heraclitus, who remarked: “Nature loves to hide.” This chapter introduces the allegorical representation of nature and truth as a veiled woman in diverse texts from Platonic philosophy and late ancient biblical interpretation to medieval literature and post-Enlightenment visual arts. This introduction also includes an examination of twenty-first century political contexts of veiling, and it presents an outline of the plan of the book.

Scholarship on ancient Greek prayer has almost always focused on its public instantiations: in sacrifice, oratory, sanctuary contexts, etc. This chapter explores the evidence for ancient Greek prayer in the liminal space where public and private clash, coalesce, and collapse. I argue that the prayers of ancient polytheists, though rarely – if ever – strictly private, routinely operated across and between different spheres such as the public and the private, the polis and the oikos, the intimate and the communal. I approach the study of ancient prayer afresh, not as a site of opposition between the individual and the polis, nor as a space in which the distinctions between these realms of praxis are erased or effaced. Rather, prayer here features as an occasion to reflect on the spectrum of possible intersections between personal piety (individual feelings towards and actions in service of the divine) and the wider superstructures of religion, politics, society, and culture within which its practitioners were imbricated and to which they sought to respond.

Herodotus’ Historiesare filled with instances of personal engagement with the supernatural. If we consider that phenomenon in the specific terms of ‘personal religion’, new patterns and questions emerge. This chapter demonstrates not only that personal religion in Herodotus tends to resolve itself in the political, but that this reinforces the point that there was no strict boundary between personal and polis religion. Most of the people whose experiences Herodotus relates remain ‘public figures’, and Herodotus’ historical narrative, by its nature, devotes significant attention to political affairs. Many episodes from the Histories involve atypical individuals. But their experiences with the divine nevertheless fit into common categories, and the concerns which lead these individuals to approach the divine are mostly nothing out of the ordinary. Herodotus’ stories reveal elements of personal religious practice which might otherwise be difficult to find in surviving sources. By considering both personal and civic aspects of Greek religious thought and practice in Herodotus’ work, we see the continuous presence of the gods in the lived experience of individuals.