Vanessa Vroon-Najem reviews the growing scholarship on women’s conversion to Islam in the West. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork with Dutch female converts to Islam, she demonstrates how initial conversions often stem from the appeal of classical Islamic reasoning on gender norms. Over time, these women learn to respect core values while making adjustments on secondary matters, enabling them to engage with a wider society that remains skeptical of their newly acquired Muslim identity.

Faraz A. Khan offers a classical perspective on the Prophet Muhammad’s engagement with women in his life, including his wives, daughters, and Muslim women from the wider community who sought his advice. The chapter illustrates why the Prophet is idealized as an exemplary figure in his treatment of women.

Katerina Nordin utilizes both specialized legal scholarship and vernacular Islamic literature to explore the nuanced debates surrounding veiling and restrictions on sexual freedom in Islam. The chapter discusses how many Muslim women adhere to these rulings by conscious choice, while also highlighting Islam’s encouragement of sexual pleasure for both genders within marriage and emphasizing that the extent of gender segregation remains negotiable.

Sohail Hanif provides a detailed examination of the complex legal debates surrounding women’s inheritance in Islam, particularly within the Hanafi school of law (madhhab). The chapter emphasizes how these debates are highly nuanced, requiring an understanding of how Islamic law balances financial responsibilities between genders, ensuring that what women might seemingly lose in inheritance is offset by their entitlement to maintenance.

Arndt Emmerich and Alyaa Ebbiary explore the evolution of scholarship on Salafi Islamic movements, highlighting how the field has matured over time. The chapter emphasizes recent research that recognizes the agency exhibited by Salafi women in engaging with their faith. These women adhere to the core rulings while negotiating secondary ones to ensure they can live fulfilling lives while respecting tradition.

Protestant attacks against papal corruption of the cult of saints and falsification of miracles led the Post-Tridentine Church to reform the processes of saint-making through an intensified collaboration with medical science. The alignment of faith and science at the nexus of the human body culminated in the eighteenth century under Benedict XIV Lambertini (r. 1740–58). Benedict published a monumental treatise, still influential today, that codified canonization proceedings on the basis of modern medical expertise, and he was a preeminent patron of scientific and medical institutions and practitioners for the advancement of medical knowledge and public health. The imperatives of the Counter-Reformation, canon law, experimental science and medicine, and the burgeoning Enlightenment coalesced, albeit uneasily, in his vision of a reformed Church, for which natural and saintly bodies became primary emblems in defense of the authority of the Catholic Church in a world increasingly resistant to it.

In recent years, the history of emotions has acquired an epistemological maturity that has established its legitimacy in the historiographic field. But what is an emotion? Although "emotion" is not a medieval word, the great historian of emotions, Barbara H. Rosenwein, refuses the semantic fixity of the vocables, by slipping voluntarily on the terms and by the playing of the synonymies. Emotional expressionism is the mark of the late Middle Ages in religious life but also in the political, ecclesial, and social worlds. The social sharing of emotions fulfills the function of strengthening the collective identity. In a sense, to rewrite the history of the Great Schism from the perspective of the history of emotions is to consider the great fresco of ecclesiastical passions in their experiences, their discursivity, and their subsequent reception. Passions were often silenced a posteriori by the great official narrative of the Church. That is the gap between archives and narratives.

Archdeacon Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85), is associated with a radical and swift change in the Roman Church. The vision of a Christendom jointly administered by emperor and clergy, the famous model advanced by Pope Gelasius II (r. 492–96), was transformed into a new order where regnum and sacerdotium occupied separate stacked spheres, with the spiritual claiming superiority. Unlike tenth-century reform movements, the later eleventh-century Roman reforms centered on the papacy. Popes assembled a curia featuring more professional officials, legates, councils, and other technologies of power. The reformed Church cultivated trained lawyers and sympathetic lay leaders. It has been credited with launching a legal “big bang,” the invention of propaganda, the creation of a semi-institutionalized public sphere, and the formation of a persecuting society. Closer examination of institutional changes helps reveal the achievements and limits of this “new world order.”

The relationship of Catholic hierarchies with the medium of printing has always been multifarious, and even in early modern times it was far more complex than most current studies maintain. This chapter attempts to draw a concise and unbiased picture of the papacy’s publishing and censoring practices from the 1460s to the 1630s. It starts with the arrival of the first printers in Italy on the outskirts of Rome and ends with the Galileo Galilei affair, analyzing all intervening attempts to use moveable type in support of papal policy and the development of the Index of Forbidden Books. Highlighting the interconnections between prohibition and promotion, it proposes a unified interpretation of these two lines of action rather than present them in opposition, as is often the case.

The Christian community of Rome, since its origins, was adamant in preserving written texts. Documents and books of multiple kinds were treated as important, precious objects. The history of the popes’ libraries exemplifies this approach. In addition to spreading Christianity and keeping records of discussions and decisions taken by the Church, the library was intended as a repository not only of religious books but also of literary and scientific texts of non-Christian traditions, including pagan classics and others. The mission of ensuring the conservation and spreading of the knowledge was clearly stated during humanism, when the current Vatican Apostolic Library was founded. Books were there made accessible “for the common benefit of the learned.” Such a mission continues today. The papacy considers the Library and its books to be the “heritage of mankind,” one that needs to be made available for generations through continuous technological innovations and cutting-edge preservation strategies.

This chapter examines the role of the papacy in the history of marriage regulation in a long-term perspective. The core theme of corporeality is investigated between doctrine and practice. On the one hand, the body is a central good whose rights of use are mutually exchanged by the spouses within the framework of the marriage contract; on the other hand, it is a deadly burden, the place where the flesh manifests itself with its law that contradicts reason. In the light of this tension, the position of papal authority – in particular the power to bind and dissolve – is addressed by examining its pronouncements, especially the Decretales, conciliar legislation, and the publication of encyclicals and apostolic exhortations up to the most recent on the subject: Amoris laetitia, by Pope Francis I. Finally, some cases that have been dealt with by courts such as the Penitentiary, the Holy Office, and the Rota are examined.

This chapter examines the transition from the “Ottoman Empire” into the “post-Ottoman” worlds that succeeded it. Rejecting the conventional narrative, in which “Westernization” caused the empire’s fragmentation and final collapse, it highlights instead the perpetuation of Ottoman institutions within the polities that emerged out of the sultanate. It argues that achieving this more nuanced periodization requires questioning the three normative oppositions that have structured the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire: between Ottoman and European, Empire and Nation, and Tradition and Modernity. It proposes three research objects (among other alternatives) to apprehend the layered temporalities at work in the post-Ottoman imperial transition: the emergence of citizenship in lieu of imperial subjecthood; biographies (including sociographies and intellectual histories) of actors having lived through that transition; and the transformation of property regimes. The chapter’s broader goal is to incite awareness of how context sensitive categories we use in history – such as Ottoman/Ottomanness – remain.

For nearly two centuries after the French Revolution, papal attitudes towards Judaism remained rooted in theological notions of the Jews as deicidal “others” whose salvation would only be achieved through repentance and conversion to Catholicism. Enlightenment notions of religious freedom and tolerance offered Jews an emancipation based on secular citizenship and assimilation, a development which repudiated the Church’s theological and eschatological views of Judaism. As a result, papal attitudes towards the Jews hardened through the nineteenth century, as popes associated emancipated Jews with liberalism, freemasonry, socialism, and democracy, the very ideologies which had undermined papal authority. It was not until the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) that the Church definitely repudiated its negation of the Abrahamic Covenant and the Jewish people. The council document Nostra aetate disavowed anti-Semitism in all forms and recognized Judaism as the wellspring from which the Church emerged, creating a template of interfaith kinship and cooperation which the modern papacy has embraced and expanded upon.