Violent conflict was a feature of the early papacy as theological factions or Roman families contested the Throne of Saint Peter and as popes responded to the collapse of Roman authority by assuming responsibility for the defense of Rome. By 1000 CE, popes were temporal rulers, and like their secular counterparts they considered military force a legitimate instrument. The papacy participated in the Crusades, principally as propagandist and financier, and engaged militarily in the “Italian Wars” (1494–1559). Subsequently, papal military capabilities declined and during the Napoleonic Wars the papacy offered little resistance against French armies that twice seized Rome. Under Pius IX, serious efforts to improve the papal military were insufficient to prevent the absorption of Rome and the Papal States into the kingdom of Italy. Reduced to a handful of palace guards, subsequent pontiffs abandoned any martial posture, although these household guards protected the Vatican during World Wars I and II.

The papal penitentiary was the highest office in the later medieval Church concerned with matters of conscience. It granted absolution in cases where this was reserved to the papacy, notably for grave sins such as assaults on clergy, and it issued other graces that were also a papal monopoly, such as dispensations, notably for marriages within the prohibited degrees of kinship, and special licences, especially to appoint a personal confessor. Laity and clergy across later medieval Europe petitioned the office for these favours. The papal penitentiary hence represented a significant point of contact between the papacy and individual Catholics. Its origins were obscure but partly lay in the long tradition of penitential pilgrimage to Rome. Minor penitentiaries heard confessions of penitent pilgrims at Rome’s major basilicas, including Saint Peter’s. By the early thirteenth century, the ‘major penitentiary’ in charge of the office was appointed by the pope from among the cardinals and received growing faculties to concede graces on the pope’s behalf. By the fifteenth century, the office that he headed was a major department of papal government and substantial source of revenue for the papacy.

The era of the Reformation profoundly changed the papal institution. In Italy, it allowed for the assertion of primatial authority and a greater oversight of the Italian Church as well as a capacity to influence popular and elite culture through the medium of the Inquisition and the Index. Rather than attempting to achieve Italian liberty, it now strove to protect the peace and religious orthodoxy of the peninsula. In the wider European sphere, during this period the papacy effectively lost contact with most of Protestant Europe, but through an articulated system of nunciatures and, from 1622, through Propaganda Fide, it remained an important influence throughout the Catholic world, projecting itself as a peacemaker among secular powers, the foe of heresy and Islam, the upholder of the decrees of Trent – conceived, however, as a prescriptive set of disciplinary and doctrinal norms – and the defender of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and privileges.

Commensurate with its vast geography and long history, the Ottoman Empire had varied artistic and architectural cultures. Ottoman visual sources reflect the cultural identities, intellectual priorities, and personal as well as political aspirations of artists and patrons. They are instructive about methods of production, the circulation of goods (artworks, artifacts, and raw materials), and creative practices in palaces and urban centers. This chapter focuses on painting and architecture and surveys the available visual materials, demonstrating some of the innovative ways in which recent research has treated Ottoman painting and architecture.

This chapter documents the complex relationship between the papacy and liberation theology. Prior to the explicit emergence of liberation theology, the papacies of Pius XII and John XXIII provided important institutional and theological conditions in which liberation developed and became influential. A relative harmony existed during the ministry of Paul VI, as liberation theologians often took positions influenced theologically by Vatican II and politically by Paul VI’s attention to global poverty and hopes for the underdeveloped world. This tenor changed dramatically under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Their experiences of communism and reaction to perceived excesses in the implementation of Vatican II translated into great tensions between the Vatican and liberation theologians. The papacy of Francis signals that these tensions have passed, as his priorities align more closely to the work of liberation theologians with important implications for Church governance and in relation to pressing global issues.

The chapter takes stock of the major trends in recent scholarship of medieval heresy and ecclesiastical repression, identifies promising research avenues, and provides an overview of the way in which the papacy confronted the perceived menace of heresy in the central Middle Ages, considering the representations of and responses to religious dissent displayed by the official Church alongside its own motifs and transformations. The implementation of anti-heresy measures are thus observed in light of the main historical developments of the papacy in the central centuries of the Middle Ages: the eleventh-century reform and its institutional legacy; the zenith of papal monarchy; and the Avignon papacy and its political and intellectual developments. In all these different contexts, variously permeated by the ideal of papal theocracy, the Holy See fashioned apt legal and theological responses intended to contain what was featured as an enduring peril threatening the Church and Christendom.

This Introduction distinguishes three approaches to studying politics: political science, political philosophy, and the history of political thought. It identifies the last of these as the focus of the chapters in the collection. It then uses an example from Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 Illinois US Senate debates with Stephen A. Douglas to characterize literature’s relationship to politics. Finally, it distinguishes three approaches to literary history, which it labels poststructuralist discourse analysis, standpoint epistemology, and pragmatism. It treats pragmatism as the most suitable description of the mode of literary history practiced in the chapters in the collection.

The 1820s and 1830s have received less attention than the 1840s and 1850s in histories of US abolition. Attending to African American antislavery activism of the 1820s and 1830s reveals that these were transformative decades, particularly regarding the issues of colonization, immediate abolition, and kidnapping. These specific political concerns of an often-overshadowed constituency, African Americans themselves, shaped the literary conventions of slave narratives published in these earlier two decades. Fugitive slave narratives of the 1820s and 1830s feature an active practice of vigilant watchfulness that anticipates and counters the threat of surveillance through sousveillance (watching from below). Sousveillance is thus a specific narrative manifestation of the vigilance urged by black political activists. Later slave narratives, shaped by the priorities of white-dominated institutional abolition, downplay the agency of African American sousveillants in favor of a more passive story of victimization.

Nineteenth-century women gained limited property and voting rights by embracing naturalized gender roles, including motherhood, as famously described in Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home (1869). Such normative appeals to a feminized domestic sphere appear to contradict a first-wave nineteenth-century feminism that, through efforts like Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Rights and Sentiments (1848), sought political gains for women in the form of property and voting rights equivalent to those of men, but second-wave feminist historians from the 1960s through the 1980s have shown how similar ends were advanced by less radical means: embracing the middle-class mother’s normative gendered role as natural nurturer enabled women to leverage their credibility within the domestic sphere in order to advance political projects both within and beyond it. In addition to resisting traditional restrictions on their rights, women embraced their gendered role as natural mothers to pursue political activism on behalf of impoverished women in urban areas. Third-wave feminism has challenged the normative roles at the core of this gendered separation of spheres, roles that at once restricted nineteenth-century women’s political activity but also authorized them to mobilize, as natural women and mothers, in political resistance to economic oppression.

How did literature and politics blend in nineteenth-century oratory? This chapter argues that the admixture was always particular. Thus it begins by explicating three moments of ordinary oratorical practice in Philadelphia in 1855: a gubernatorial inaugural by James Pollock, an oration by the student Jacob C. White Jr. at the Institute for Colored Youth, and a speech by delegate Mary Ann Shadd at the Colored National Convention. Themes germane to nineteenth-century oratory emerge from these examples: its ubiquity and variety, the interactions of oratorical and print cultures, the critical role of audiences in producing meanings of oratorical events, and the ephemeral characteristics of embodied performance. Further, the emphasis in these examples on freedom, citizenship, learning, leadership, and democratic life highlights political debates on racial justice, slavery, colonization, and emigration, demonstrating the myriad ways in which oratory in the nineteenth-century United States can supply an avenue into culture, voice, and lived experience that helps explain trajectories to our own time.

This chapter is a brief history of the nineteenth-century efforts to expand voting and other political rights, interspersed with analysis of key literary texts in which the question of voting rights is a palpable concern, even though it is sometimes not overtly addressed. It takes as its starting point an early nineteenth-century shift in ideas about qualifications for suffrage, during which the prerequisite of land ownership was replaced by the qualities of “virtue and intelligence.” While this shift ensured almost universal white male suffrage by the 1840s, it also provided an opening – albeit a problematic one – for white women and some African American men and women to agitate for enfranchisement. This chapter demonstrates that literature from the 1830s until the early twentieth century reflected and often intervened in the conversation about the “nature” of women and black men, and whether or not they were suited for integration into the public sphere and specifically into the political realm through voting. Authors such as Margaret Fuller, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Charles Chesnutt (among many others) represented the women’s suffrage and black suffrage movements in ways designed to change readers’ ideas about the “virtue and intelligence” of the disenfranchised.

Nationalism represents, advances, and protects the interests of a national “people,” but the metaphor of bodily nativity at the core of claims to national unity proved increasingly implausible for a United States that, in the buildup to and the aftermath of the Civil War, proved to be more of a politically divided house than a corporeally singular nation. Efforts of mid-century writers like John W. Deforest and Walt Whitman to imagine a US nation-state as a heterosexual conjugal union between a single, feminized, national body and its governing state-as-husband would face challenges from later writers like William Dean Howells, who imagined increasingly intensive ways for racial difference within this single national body to undermine national unity figured as corporeal nativity. Responding at century’s end to such racial fractures in corporeal unity, W. E. B. Du Bois would displace the now-untenable conjugal union of the US nation-state with a double-consciousness located within the US citizen’s individual self. This hyphenated identity, grounded in a color line, installs the failed legacy of nineteenth-century US nationalism at the core of how twentieth- and twenty-first-century US citizens understand and describe their own and others’ imperial Americanness.

Although racial segregation was a social and literary reality throughout the nineteenth century, it would not come to define political, social, and literary practice until the fin de siècle. The defeat of Populism and the wave of disfranchisement across the South in the 1890s enabled the rise of the segregationist order of Jim Crow. Within this order, black writers incubated the idea that the political fate of black Americans required establishing an African American literature. From the 1890s forward, a variety of black writers, including Charles Chesnutt, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sutton E. Griggs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and J. McHenry Jones, sought in their fictional representations of segregation to determine whether these strictures reflected the political will of white southern elites or the animus of lower-class whites. With no social or political basis for political participation by the southern working classes, the form of black politics that came to predominate in the South was what the historian Judith Stein has called “appeals to the ruling elements of society” for justice and redress, with correlate appeals to black elites to speak for the race. It was also this politics of appeal that structured the rise of African American literature.

In American culture, there is a mix and mismatch of core discourses: religious, Enlightenment, and market economy. Each claims, contributes, and competes for kinds of belonging and national definition, by abstract principles of equality, particular community of religion and nation, and possessive individualism of each one’s own self-interest. Poetry, far from being private reflection or self-referring aesthetic object, is an arena in which each of these discourses encounter each other. Widely circulated in newspapers, magazines, publicly recited, poetry took part in and also refracted, in especially intense and focal ways, the drama, questions, and terms of belonging crucial to, and conflictual in, the unfolding of America. In this chapter, I explore the intercrossing and contention between American discourses of religion, Enlightenment, and individualism in the Abolitionist poetry of Whittier, the poetry of war in Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, and the poetry of participation in Walt Whitman. In the texts of each, vocabularies, terms, allusion, and critique of American cultural, religious, and political life form complex interchanges, at times through alignment, at times in tense and critical relationship. The poem becomes a field of confrontation, appeal, and address within the context of their writing as voices of culture take on poetic force.