Chapter 3 considers how evolving demands for uniformity fit into the cultural norms of political institutions in late antiquity. It uses reports on (supposed) pagans, heretics, Jews, and Samaritans in service to sketch out the contours of those demands in practice. While these exemplary stories cannot be used to substantiate the presence of these groups in administration, they can help us understand when and why the perceived divergence of a ruler’s subordinates from his version of correct religion mattered. Their continued service is, in part, a reflection of the continued capacity of rulers and their subordinates to put requirements for religious uniformity to one side. This chapter argues that it was also a result of the precise framing of those requirements. Late ancient laws tended to portray orthodox Christian officials as necessary to ensure laws on correct religion were enforced. It is easy to see how those heterodox officials willing to uphold a Christian political dispensation could continue to serve in political institutions. In that sense, the appointments of non-Christians and heretics should be seen, not as a breach of requirements for uniformity, but a product of their specific contours.

Chapter 1 considers the evolving significance of a putative ideal of religious uniformity for the makeup of political institutions in late antiquity. It suggests that we have the chronology of the Christianisation of late ancient bureaucracies back to front. It was only when those elites became predominantly Christian that religious uniformity within the state became a feasible goal for individual regimes. In that sense, for the Christianisation of the Roman state, the conversion of the Roman aristocracy only represents the beginning of the story. This chapter thus pursues the question of religious uniformity further into late antiquity, by considering the developing understanding of what was required to ensure an appropriately (orthodox) Christian state in the fifth and sixth centuries. It argues that requirements for (orthodox) Christian administrators were not simply an axiomatic assumption of late (and post-)Roman regimes, but a product of shifts in institutional norms and wider cultural assumptions across the fourth to sixth centuries.

Chapter 2 reviews Plath’s metaphorical employment of the witch-martyr figure within the political and religious framework of the Cold War. The chapter outlines Plath’s subversion of the religious vocabulary and themes in her poems, like ‘Lady Lazarus’, particularly its draft, and her parallelling doctors and priests in short stories, such as ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ to critique the rhetoric of the Cold War. The chapter gives evidence that Plath employs the female body as a site of modern political and medical institutional violence, seeking inspiration from the power imbalance of the early modern witch trials and Joan of Arc’s martyrdom. The close examination of Plath’s drafts of ‘Fever 103°’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ concludes the chapter on Plath’s Cold War poetics. It argues that the anticlerical and anti-authoritarian language of her poetry reimagines witch prosecutions, martyrdom, and inquisition in periods of political torture and nuclear warfare.

This chapter examines socialist-secularist intellectuals. Secularist intellectuals were noted both for their quick rise within the socialist party, which offered them newspaper editorships and Reichstag candidacies, and for their tendency to heresy. They provided many of the key figures in anarchism, revisionism and radicalism. The first section focuses on how an important oppositional movement of 1890 to 1893, the so-called “revolt of the Jungen” was led by some of the Berlin secularists introduced in Chapter 1. The Jungen have been the subject of a number of reflections on the role of intellectuals in the party; however, none of these has dealt with the secularist dimension of this conflict. By taking up this lacuna, the chapter reinterprets key aspects of the history and the theory of the intellectual. The second section of this chapter shows how Berlin secularists strategically employed heresy as a means of developing their charisma as autonomous intellectuals within the socialist milieu.

Irenaeus as the mastermind of the canonicl collection, later known as the New Testament, creates the foundation for the later picture of a chronological development from Jesus and his disciples through the first bishops and the institutionalization of the Church. However, he himself hardly relates to these writings as historical evidence, but rather engages in an anti-heretical use of some of them to endorse church orthodoxy. It is this apostolic foundation that provides the rule of truth against which he sees the heretics struggeling, driven by evil forces in an apocalyptic scenario.

Irenaeus’ view is condensed in the collection that he brought together, combining the Book of Acts with the so-called Catholic Letters (= the Praxapostolos). Placed after the four Gospels, it endorses a neatless development from Jesus and his early followers through the early days of growth of the church in its emancipation from its Jewish beginnings. With Paul’s letters in a revised version that was made to fit the Gospels and the Praxapostolos this fiction of a continuous, rapid and Spirit-guided growth was linked to the success-story of the Church in contra-distinction to the miseries and decline of the Jewish community and the vain attempts at undermining the Church by the develish heretics.

The three subchapters demonstrate the early attempts at Christianizing historiography. The start of history is made by the historically perceived Resurrection of Christ, as outlined by Iulius Africanus. Christians are not simply part of a long history of human development, but they mark a new beginning of human history. What existed before, Paganism and Judaism, were only ephemeral preparations for Christianity. Like Eusebius later, he draws on pseudonymous writings, particularly documents that he refers back to the archive of Edessa. Origen, before him, had already approached history from a spiritual angle, largely disregarding the historical and chronological side of it, and making use of the canonical writings of the New Testament in an allegorical way by which he dissociates Christian history from that of Jews and Pagans, and sees it guided and foreseen by God. Very similar to Origen, Tertullian in the Latin speaking world portraits Christians in fighting of Pagans and Jews, but also deviant Christians, heretics and less commited brothers and sisters which he contrasts with those prophetic Christians who are fully engaged, are prepared for asceticism, rejection of pagan pasts and are willing martyrs. Instead of canonical scriptures it is the prophetic reading of the church traditions that inform about the origins of Christianity.

The complex interaction of different Christian systems created a series of uncertainties: about how to coordinate different ritual systems (e.g. baptism and the ritual year), about hierarchy (e.g. relation of the chain of command to status hierarchy), about the relation between the clerical elite and the monastic elite, and about the ritual status of heretics.

The practice of criminal justice in western and central Europe was more violent between 1400 and 1600 than before or afterwards, but sensational propaganda produced during this period exaggerates the prevalence of torture and execution. Many criminals evaded justice altogether and most defendants who were caught and brought to trial were subject to quick and relatively merciful justice. Fines, short prison sentences and banishment were far more commonplace than brutally painful execution rituals. As early as the seventeenth century, the practice of both torture and execution declined, the result of changes in Christianity, the growing confidence of secular states, and concerns that inflicting pain was inherently abusive. Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Beccaria, who insisted on judicial reform in the late eighteenth century, grossly distorted the actual practice of criminal justice in their own era in ways that have allowed historians to assume that criminal justice in the pre-modern period was more violent than it actually was.

This chapter surveys violence imposed by medieval western-European Christians upon their chief religious “others”: heretics, Jews, and Muslims. Modern scholars have often found it useful to understand such violence collectively, echoing medieval Christians’ own frequent grouping together of those “others.” Yet it is important to disassemble the differences in why and how Christians wielded violence against each, and to recognize how violence took variegated forms, was committed by diverse actors, and resulted from multiple, coexisting motivations. Violence against Jews interpenetrated with their increasing demonization in Christian polemic and with their subject status in Europe. Both church and state, increasingly ambitious institutions, assisted in the general transformation of European Jews from protected minorities to not “real” Jews rightly deserving toleration. Violence against heretics (a more subjective identity than that of Jews and Muslims) was only rarely and early the object of mob violence. That was soon succeeded by “crusade” and the institutional violence of inquisitions, which owed a debt to monastic and penitential violence. While Christian violence against Muslims in Europe was geographically limited, key there was the evolution of Muslims from rulers to ruled, and even an acceptance of Muslims as agents of violence. Despite the varying circumstances, motivations, agents, and forms of Christian violence against all three, it was nevertheless embedded within a universalizing Latin-Christian theology and ecclesiology.

After 600 years without executions of heretics, several were burned in France in 1022. Persecutions, erratic across western Europe, remained rare in Orthodox lands. Debate continues over whether large medieval heretical movements existed or were inflated by authorities seeking an excuse to assert their authority. Hunts for heretics turned into witchcraft trials by the late 1300s. Soon a stereotype of the witch insisted that she rejected Christianity and committed evil acts at the devil’s command. Witch hunts then occurred in various lands, especially along the Rhine in 1580–90 and 1620–30. Such persecutions, also erratic, never took place in many areas. The relatively few Russian cases rarely mentioned alliance with Satan. Both strains of persecution arose in western Europe by the eleventh century as fear worsened of enemies within Christendom. The church strengthened its influence, making heresy identifiable. In Catholic and Protestant regions witch hunts arose when villagers accused their neighbours of foul deeds and the local elite seized on the witch stereotype. But authorities often rejected that image, while central officials in Sweden, for instance, halted trials. Thus, it is doubtful that the hunts had the intention or effect of terrorising women, instilling social discipline among peasants or strengthening the state. They ended as objections grew that evidence for witchcraft was weak or conjectural.