This chapter focuses on the drill music genre, a subgenre of gangsta rap that was born in Chicago’s underground hip hop scene in the early 2010s. Using observation and interviews with drill artists, their managers and other support workers, it discusses the relational practices of hip-hop youth on social media. The chapter examines their work on social media toward acquiring “clout”– a digital form of influence described by emerging musicians as allowing them to leverage digital tools in building social and professional status, amplify authenticity, cultivate relations with fans, and connect to friends and other cultural producers. It analyses the practice of “capping” (strategic deception, exaggeration of toughness, desirability to women and financial wealth) as a relational strategy that respondents utilized to acquire clout. The chapter argues that capping is an example of how race, class, gender and geography influence the digital interactions of young people and how the social media practices of drill rappers add significantly to the understanding of the counterpublics arising from globalising social media.

This chapter explores how the ancient literary and philosophical dialogue form maintained its relevance as a tool of cultural and religious identity formation and competition. It addresses the ongoing scholarly discussion regarding the scope for dialogue in the face of rising authoritarianism and dogmatism in late antiquity.

Heresiological catalogues are one of the most distinctive forms of literature concerning heresy and have also traditionally been one of the most difficult to interpret. This chapter traces the development of this form of writing, focusing on the most productive period in late antiquity, and explores how much such works were intended to be employed in active ‘heresy-hunting’ and what other purposes they might have had, including increasing the authority and status of their authors.

Numerous Christian authors from the seventh century to the twenty-first have classified Islam as a Christian heresy. Writers from John of Damascus in the seventh century to Hilaire Belloc in the twentieth have seen Muhammad as a heresiarch who forged a heresy based on elements of Judaism, Christianity and Paganism. Comparison between Muhammad and earlier heresiarchs (such as Arius or Nestorius) allowed Christian authors to denigrate and dismiss Islamic doctrine. Such comparison also facilitated the denunciation of new heretics closer to home: Luther and Calvin, for Catholic polemicists of the sixteenth century, or on the contrary the ‘papists’, for Protestant writers.

This chapter examines the concept of heresy through the growth of papal decretals, canon law and conciliar legislation during the High and Late Middle Ages (eleventh to fifteenth centuries). It explores the growth of medieval heresy during a period of burgeoning papal power and examines how popes both reacted to and constructed ideas of heresy and heretics.

This chapter examines the reciprocal accusations of heresy between the Byzantine East and Latin West: such accusations were only sporadically made during the first millennium but increased exponentially from the twelfth century onwards on the Byzantine side and, to a lesser extent, from the thirteenth century on the Latin side (where they were generally subsumed under the accusation of schism or ‘disobedience’). The notions of ‘heretic’ and ‘schismatic’, which ought to be distinct and precisely defined according to canon law, increasingly overlapped within the polemical discourse and were collectively applied to the opposite population, in a process of construction of religious otherness.

The documentation related to inquisitorial practice included trial transcripts, consultations, sentences, manuals and accounts. But while this documentation was a key ingredient in inquisition’s power, the relationship between these sources and our knowledge of medieval heresy is complex.

Unlike many other forms of ‘heresy’, Manichaeism is not a polemical construct but an independent and organised church within the Christian tradition originating in Mesopotamia and Iran in the third century CE. It had its own heresiology against other communities such as the western Catholic-Orthodox church, identifying key points of difference and deviance from the ‘faithful and true Christianity’ of Manichaean doctrine and practice.

This chapter offers a critical narrative of the development of Arianism as a heresy from the fourth to the sixth century. It explores the changing meanings of the heresiological label, and the political and ecclesiastical contexts in which it was deployed, from the origins of controversy between Arius and Alexander in Alexandria through to the barbarian successor kingdoms of the post-imperial West.

Even by the standards of medieval heresy, the history of the Bogomils is notable for a lack of sources. This chapter bases its analysis on the long account of Kosmas Presbyter of Pop Bogomil and his followers in tenth-century Bulgaria. Understanding this helps illuminate less informative references and points to a persistent dualist tradition in the Balkans and Byzantium, well capable of exporting organisation and doctrine.

The anthropology and soteriology of western Christianity were radically reinterpreted in the fifth century CE by Augustine of Hippo, who constructed a fictional ‘Pelagianism’ to delegitimise opposition to his new theology of original sin, an absolutist account of prevenient grace, and predestination interpreted as preordainment. This chapter gives an outline of the issues involved in this attempt to relocate orthodoxy, the course of events relating to Pelagius and his defence of eastern ascetic Christianity, and the afterlife of controversy over this new account of the anthropology and soteriology of Christianity.

The iconoclast refusal to accept the use of images, particularly of Christ, in public and private worship in Byzantium, is often condemned as a heretical movement. But its emphasis on symbolic representations (the Cross and the Eucharist) and on spiritual veneration was essentially a reform of potentially idolatrous church practice.

Whenever the story of lollardy has been told, that story has been shaped by the prevailing historical, theological and intellectual climate. This chapter surveys how lollardy has been narrated, looking at the terminology, people and communities, practices and texts, and beliefs associated with the lollard or Wycliffite movement of late medieval England.