In this chapter, religion’s role in conflict and violence is examined, covering the decades from c. 1603 until shortly before the outbreak of rebellion in October 1641. The chapter traces how it was increasingly religious flashpoints – sacred objects, churches and churchyards, and rituals such as the Mass among others – that generated tension, unrest and even violence in seventeenth-century Ireland. As Protestant settlers sought to implement the work of ‘converting and civilising’, Irish Catholics pushed back against what they viewed as heretical incursions. They reveal battles over ideas of possession, heritage, power and the nature of the sacred itself, and how religious symbols and language were growing ever more important in how Irish and British, Catholic and Protestant viewed and lived alongside one another. Intra-confessional conflict is also addressed, through examining the eruption of violence by Scottish settlers against the Church of Ireland in the wake of the National Covenant and ensuing unrest in Scotland. It indicates religion’s potent ability to motivate and mobilise resistance, even unto violence, as crisis Unfolded across the Three Kingdoms.

The clergy – both Catholic priests and Protestant ministers – are the subject of this chapter. They were both targets for violence and could be among its perpetrators. A core argument here is that Protestant ministers were subjected to violence in large part because of their profession, as against motives such as moneylending that were emphasised in previous scholarship. As leading Protestant figures, they were both symbols of and key actors within Protestant ‘civilising and converting’ that was so central to the decades before the rebellion, helping to explain Irish Catholic hostility towards them. Similarly, violence against Catholic priests drew from longstanding patterns that viewed priests as seditious, troublesome and violent, thus justifying their persecution and even killing. Examining the clergy as symbols as well as people, alongside the study of violence against sacred objects and spaces, reinforces the strong religious character of violence during the rebellion and its continuation in the decade of conflict that followed.

Su Shi was a major poet and outspoken opponent of a major policy reform program enacted during his lifetime. His writings reflecting that opposition eventually succeeded in attracting the ire of the reformers, who tried to make an example of him by imprisoning him and then sending into a series of exiles, each one more distant and harsh than the one before. These actions taken against Su Shi succeeded only in enhancing his fame. His affective buoyancy during periods of exile set him apart from the tradition of self-pitying writings composed by earlier exiled officials and helped to make him into an icon of uncrushable self-sufficiency in the face of political oppression. This chapter discusses the his life in the context of his struggles in an out of imperial officialdom, as well as the circle of friends who rallied around and admired him. Reference is also made to Su Shi’s literary talent for producing poetry that is at once striking for its imaginative flights and unusually accessible in its language, which helps to account for its enduring appeal even to readers today.

Three: I address the cormorant’s alleged greed, reflecting on the etymological associations of the bird’s name and discussing a range of contexts, from medieval to contemporary, in which the cormorant’s greed becomes a cultural trope. I then outline scientific debates over the bird’s recovery from persecution, numerical resurgence and impact on fish stocks, noting the ways in which zoologists address the bird’s consumption of fish and assessing whether or not it is reasonable to describe the cormorant as ‘greedy’. I conclude by turning away from the consuming cormorant to the cormorant consumed, reflecting on the curious cultural associations, not least in respect of the cultural meanings of blackness, apparent in the history and politics (not to mention the weirdness) of the culinary cormorant.

Chapter Three provides a thorough exploration of the multifaceted experience of being Qizilbash within the Ottoman realm and the consequential implications of such an identity within the intricate Ottoman–Safavid geopolitical landscape. By scrutinizing a diverse array of Qizilbash texts, artifacts, and ceremonial practices, the chapter elucidates the complex processes entailed in shaping and perpetuating a collective sense of belonging. Additionally, this chapter seeks to integrate a discussion of the Ottoman state’s surveillance strategies into the analysis of Qizilbash subjecthood formation within the empire.

Chapter Four explores the politics of sectarianism and statecraft within the context of the triangular relationship among the Ottoman state, the Safavid state, and the Qizilbash communities situated between them. The chapter examines how the Ottoman state and its Qizilbash subjects devised diverse strategies to navigate their religious sensitivities, sociopolitical realities, and fiscal imperatives. A new set of questions is introduced to challenge the prevailing notion that the relationship between the “Sunni Ottoman” state and its “non-Sunni Qizilbash” subjects was inherently irreconcilable and characterized by continuous persecution of these supposedly powerless, defenseless religious nonconformists. It reveals the existence of a range of policies and approaches adopted by the Ottoman state, from providing financial support to establishing quid pro quo arrangements, from accommodating Qizilbash subjects to resorting to surveillance and heavy-handed suppression and persecution of the very same populations. The chapter emphasizes that the Ottoman Qizilbash, as significant powerholders during this period, exerted their influence not only through practices of conversion and reconversion but also through negotiation, migration, intervention, and at times rebellion.

Chapter 5 explores a wide range of passages where the Sectarians identify themselves as the present-time victims or potential victims of violence perpetrated by empowered others: Rome and the local Jewish priestly and political authorities. The imagery of the powerful priests in Jerusalem and their leader the Wicked Priest waging a campaign of violence and intimidation against the Sectarians is part of a broader attempt by the disempowered and disenfranchised Sectarians to craft a narrative of victimhood.

This chapter surveys different ways in which ‘heresy’ has been conceptualised by a variety of writers, both within the periods in which it arose and in later centuries. Tracing a number of different inflections to the charge of heresy, the chapter suggests that we might see it not only as constructed by orthodox authority but as a means by which ‘authority’ itself is reaffirmed; and in conclusion suggests some ways through which modern historians might then reconceptualise their search for ‘dissent’ in past times.

The Waldensians began inside the church in the 1170s, were excommunicated, went underground and survived into the sixteenth century. In our efforts to get at their past reality, how far can we penetrate the texts about them produced in the Middle Ages by a persecuting church, during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation by polemicists and in modern times by academics modelling them according to the latest intellectual fashions?

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 prohibited marriage between people “of German blood” and Jews (including, in practice, “half-Jews”). So-called mixed marriages already in existence were subjected to persecutory measures. This chapter examines the fates of couples in mixed marriages and their “mixed-blood” children, both inside Germany and in Nazi-occupied Europe.

This chapter discusses the emergence of crimes against humanity, the main definitional features, and the most important jurisprudence on crimes against humanity. The chapter reviews historic references, the Nuremberg Charter, and evolution through international jurisprudence. The chapter examines the meaning of ‘widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population’, including the controversy over the meaning of ‘civilian’ and the many controversies about the ICC Statute Article 7 requirement of a ‘state or organizational policy’. The chapter reviews the jurisprudence on the prohibited acts (also referred to as ‘inhumane acts’), including murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, forcible transfer, imprisonment, torture, rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, other sexual violence, persecution, forced disappearance, apartheid, and other inhumane acts.

Chapter 2 considers the so-called cradle of Christian martyrdom: Second-century Asia Minor. Beginning with an analysis of the economic, political, and social relationships between Christian, Jewish, and Greek social structures in the face of the Roman Empire’s centralization of power, I outline the circumstances of Christian martyrs during the first centuries following Jesus’ death. Using legal statutes alongside letters between Pliny the Younger and the emperor Trajan, I analyze the contours and relative scope and depth of Roman persecution. Through an analysis of the language used by Christian theologians and the period’s popular Acta Martyrum, I consider the way martyrdom was performed in recognition of a separate pax Deorum—agreement with God—that challenged that of the Roman state. I proceed to show how martyrs were interpreted as imitators of Christ’s sacrifice, and the meaning that designation brought to martyrs and their audience. Finally, I highlight the parrhēsia—bold, free speech—demonstrated in martyrdom to articulate the centrality of truth-telling to Christian martyrs, a theme to which I return throughout the book.

Shakespeare and George Peele’s Titus Andronicus (1591–94) stages both the proliferating texts and the religious violence of the early 1590s. These years saw a spate of sectarian libels from persecuted Puritans and Catholics alike. In Titus, the marginalized Andronici likewise launch ephemeral scraps of writing into the sky, texts that join appeals for redress with violent threats. These libels bear an especially close resemblance to those scattered in the streets by the Puritan extremist William Hacket and his accomplices in 1591. But the echoes are also cross-confessional, indicating a broader interest in the “manner” of religiopolitical speech. The play folds its topical allegory into a Tacitean-humanist history of political communication: the rise of the emperor, Saturninus, brings about the end of public oratory. Their speech silenced, the Andronici unleash a flurry of texts that takes the Tacitean story of rhetorical decline into its early modern future. By yoking libels not just to the pursuit of justice but also to factionalism and violence, Titus takes a hard look at the viral and virulent media of the late Elizabethan public sphere.

This chapter offers a survey of religious dissimulation in early modern England, where questions concerning its legitimacy were, owing to the unpredictable course of the English Reformation(s), arguably more pressing than anywhere else in Europe. While most Catholic and Protestant theological authorities condemned dissimulation in principle, the practice must have been widespread and was perceived, at least by those in power, as a political reality that could not simply be ignored. This chapter outlines both ecclesiological and political justifications for tolerating those who dissembled their faith and argues that their ambivalent status and the often unstable practices of policing such religious dissimulation should be considered a central aspect of early modern approaches to the problem of religious toleration. Religious dissimulation was a highly controversial practice, and toleration for inward dissent was never a given. Especially in times of political crisis, church and state authorities frequently resorted to aggressive measures to access the secret beliefs of religious dissenters, which belied the Queen’s alleged refusal to make windows into men’s hearts.