The 1270s inquisition manual translated in this part provides an ideal version of the inquisitorial actions. A fundamental concern with the records has long been the truth or otherwise of what the deponents confessed when interrogated by inquisitors. Suspicion about inquisition records has its own history, especially in southern France. There is an abundance of modern scholarship on inquisition records. John H. Arnold has analysed the different voices of the records, the balance between inquisitorial categorisation and the excess of detail generated within each deposition.

This chapter was published in 2008, shortly after the decision of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to reorganize some 90 zakat committees and bring them under central control. The chapter (originally published by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva) set out to review competing interpretations of the nature of the West Bank committees during the "Oslo period", after limited autonomy was ceded by Israel to the Palestinian Authority but before the split between the West Bank and Gaza which took place in 2007. Allegations in the counter-terrorist literature that the zakat committees had been simply fronts for Hamas are considered here and found to be unpersuasive, short of hard evidence and especially in the light of the confidence that – according to reputable opinion surveys – they earned from the Palestinian public. A more benign interpretation is offered in this chapter – that these zakat committees were a result of the "Islamic resurgence" and were typically grass-roots, community based organizations that were beginning to tap into the international aid system, in response to urgent humanitarian needs and the pressures inflicted by the Israeli Occupation.

The bulk of material in this part comes from papal bulls that include letters and decretals. There are several very famous papal letters which sit at the heart of the Church's prosecution of heresy, from Ad abolendam and Vergentis in senium to Pope Gregory IX's 'founding' bulls commissioning inquisition against heresy. The authors have chosen material that tells us of activity against heresy in northern France with a particular focus on the Inquisitor Robert Lepetit.

The final full chapter explores how a strikingly large number of poets turned the epigram – despite its questionable reputation -- to a religious purpose, sometimes of devotion or meditation, and at other times for the purpose of religious satire or polemic. It shows how such a conversion of the genre was made difficult by its scurrilous reputation and conventionally cynical tone. The composition of such epigrams was often based in educational or devotional disciplines, as illustrated in the case of Richard Crashaw. Religious epigrams were sometimes defended as an ambitious act of devout reclamation, at other times with the humble justification that the poet could be doing something worse with his time. The typical qualities of the genre would seem to make it more promising for epigrams of religious satire, but many such polemical epigrams lost the genre's characteristic sharpness and brevity.

This chapter, together with the next, examine the implementation of the British withdrawal, which in the end accompanied the emergence of the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar in international society. In January 1968, nine ‘Protected States’ stood in parallel to each other. Within four years, they had to decide in what shape they were going to become fully-fledged sovereign states. Were the nine going to amalgamate into one, two, three or even four separate entities? Even though the British retreat was decided for short-term domestic reasons, it was to have a more profound – even ‘epochal’ – effect than most could foresee at the time. The Gulf rulers’ initial response to decide their own fate was quick, but ultimately unsuccessful.

Emphasising the diversity of the Gothic genre in the eighteenth century, this chapter argues that, in The Recess, Lee hijacks certain themes from Walpole and Reeve to write a prototypical Female Gothic novel. Continuing to read the Gothic as a reaction to eighteenth-century historical writing, this chapter contends that Lee focuses on female protagonists and employs Gothic plotlines to critique the male codes of historical representation that govern David Hume’s Enlightenment historiography. Developing arguments from the previous chapter, this section shows how, in the hands of female writers, Gothic pasts often express contemporary fears and anxieties, and comment on gender politics in the eighteenth century. Drawing on Gary Kelly’s notion that the Gothic enabled women to access the male-dominated realms of history and politics, it is argued that Lee’s historically based novel utilises Gothic tropes such as concealed writings and a focus on the law to present a nightmare vision of women’s historical and social plight in the eighteenth century. Examining the complex structure of The Recess, this chapter concludes by assessing the extent to which Lee ‘Gothicises’ the eighteenth-century epistolary form, and what the novel says about the nature of the past.

The thirteenth century saw a great upsurge in the writing of theology, both general treatises that contained some material on heresy and polemical treatises specifically directed against heresy. The writing of anti-heretical treatises flourished during the 1230s and 1240s, principally in Italy, where they seem to have been connected with intellectually high-level, real-life polemical exchanges between Catholics and heretics. Italy is a region where direct inquisitorial repression was not as effective as it was in Languedoc. Southern France has much less to show, after the four-part treatise written by Alan of Lille, extracts of which are provided in translation by Wakefield and Evans. The Summa of Authorities provides a textual correlative of the authority-bashing polemics in debates between Catholics, heretics and Waldensians of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.

The chapter provides an annotated translation of the anonymous Latin work known to historians of Spain as the Historia Roderici or 'History of Rodrigo' (HR). It has a claim to be regarded as one of the earliest biographies of a layman who was not a king to have been composed in medieval Christendom. The Rodrigo Díaz whom it commemorates was an eleventh-century Castilian nobleman who enjoyed a strikingly successful career as a military adventurer. He is better known to posterity as El Cid. Rodrigo's truly remarkable career was made possible by the distinctive circumstances of his age: the instability of the Taifa principalities; the acceptability of tribute-taking as the primary mode of Christian-Islamic relationship in Spain; and the availability of mercenary knights. Skilful exploitation by diplomacy and force of the fractious Taifa principalities enabled him to become a tribute-taker on a princely scale.

This chapter examines the complex, often antagonistic relationship between Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Hume’s The History of England (1754–62). As Walpole’s correspondence reveals, he had read numerous volumes of Hume’s history before writing Otranto (the first Gothic novel) and did not think very highly of its content or the methods used to write it. Reassessing the significance of the Gothic in the eighteenth century, this chapter discusses the extent to which Walpole’s novel can be viewed as a bold response to, and critique of, Hume’s historiography. Discussing the proliferation of violent and supernatural occurrences in Otranto, it is argued that the Gothic functions as Enlightenment history’s other; it exploits its insecurities, plagues its vulnerabilities, and imaginatively provides fictional presences for its many absences and omissions. Taking into account a wealth of historical evidence, this chapter proposes that Walpole’s novel can be read as an imaginative revolt against Hume’s multi-volume work of historiography and that it marks the beginning of the genre’s contentious relationship with Enlightenment historiography and the philosophy that underpins it.

This chapter describes the case of Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born academic and commentator on Islamic matters, who was refused a non-immigrant visa in 2005 to enter the USA in order to accept a professorship in peace studies. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took up his case. Though it is probable that the real reason for his exclusion was opposition to Ramadan’s political opinions, the reason given was that between 1998 and July 2002 he had made donations totalling the equivalent of US$940 to a charity registered in Switzerland (the Association de Secours aux Palestiniens). In August 2003 this charity was designated by the USA as a terrorist fundraising entity, on account of its alleged links to Hamas-linked Palestinian charities (including zakat committees). Eventually, after two court hearings, the State Department decided in January 2010, in a document signed by Secretary Clinton, to lift the ban against Ramadan’s entering the USA. This Chapter recounts the progress of the case, and reproduces a letter sent by Benthall to Secretary Clinton in October 2009 in support of the ACLU’s representation of Ramadan.

This chapter introduces the concept of the absurd, which is frequently used in literature and is defined as something applied to the modern sense of human purposelessness in a universe with no meaning or value. It studies the connections the absurd has to nihilism, existentialism and ontology, and then takes a look at ‘negative theology’, which is relevant to practitioners of the absurd. From there, the discussion considers the problems related to the perception of inherent absurdity and the deconstruction of a philosophical system into nonsense, contradiction and absurdity. The chapter also considers the concept of the socio-linguistic absurd, as well as the nature of jokes and humour.

This chapter presents an annotated translation of The Life of Pope Gregory VII written by Paul of Bernried.