The new political spaces opened by the Ponce decision sparked off many thoughts and concerns. Legal scholars protested, and even playwrights attempted to unravel the mysteries of the (in)famous Article 330 of the Penal Code. The way the courts made use of Article 330 in the last quarter of the nineteenth century implied the abolition of the wall of shame as it had been constructed by the legislation of the Second Empire. The wall of shame could be held as a kind of puritan-liberal covenant that the State had made with the People. Court statistics show that since the 1840s there was an exponential increase in the number of persons convicted of sexual crime. When the visible world as a whole was considered potentially public, any consensual (or nonconsensual) sexual conduct could become the subject of a conviction for contempt of public decency.

The 1270s inquisition manual translated in this part provides an ideal version of the inquisitorial actions. A fundamental concern with the records has long been the truth or otherwise of what the deponents confessed when interrogated by inquisitors. Suspicion about inquisition records has its own history, especially in southern France. There is an abundance of modern scholarship on inquisition records. John H. Arnold has analysed the different voices of the records, the balance between inquisitorial categorisation and the excess of detail generated within each deposition.

This chapter was published in 2008, shortly after the decision of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to reorganize some 90 zakat committees and bring them under central control. The chapter (originally published by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva) set out to review competing interpretations of the nature of the West Bank committees during the "Oslo period", after limited autonomy was ceded by Israel to the Palestinian Authority but before the split between the West Bank and Gaza which took place in 2007. Allegations in the counter-terrorist literature that the zakat committees had been simply fronts for Hamas are considered here and found to be unpersuasive, short of hard evidence and especially in the light of the confidence that – according to reputable opinion surveys – they earned from the Palestinian public. A more benign interpretation is offered in this chapter – that these zakat committees were a result of the "Islamic resurgence" and were typically grass-roots, community based organizations that were beginning to tap into the international aid system, in response to urgent humanitarian needs and the pressures inflicted by the Israeli Occupation.

The bulk of material in this part comes from papal bulls that include letters and decretals. There are several very famous papal letters which sit at the heart of the Church's prosecution of heresy, from Ad abolendam and Vergentis in senium to Pope Gregory IX's 'founding' bulls commissioning inquisition against heresy. The authors have chosen material that tells us of activity against heresy in northern France with a particular focus on the Inquisitor Robert Lepetit.

The final full chapter explores how a strikingly large number of poets turned the epigram – despite its questionable reputation -- to a religious purpose, sometimes of devotion or meditation, and at other times for the purpose of religious satire or polemic. It shows how such a conversion of the genre was made difficult by its scurrilous reputation and conventionally cynical tone. The composition of such epigrams was often based in educational or devotional disciplines, as illustrated in the case of Richard Crashaw. Religious epigrams were sometimes defended as an ambitious act of devout reclamation, at other times with the humble justification that the poet could be doing something worse with his time. The typical qualities of the genre would seem to make it more promising for epigrams of religious satire, but many such polemical epigrams lost the genre's characteristic sharpness and brevity.

This chapter, together with the next, examine the implementation of the British withdrawal, which in the end accompanied the emergence of the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar in international society. In January 1968, nine ‘Protected States’ stood in parallel to each other. Within four years, they had to decide in what shape they were going to become fully-fledged sovereign states. Were the nine going to amalgamate into one, two, three or even four separate entities? Even though the British retreat was decided for short-term domestic reasons, it was to have a more profound – even ‘epochal’ – effect than most could foresee at the time. The Gulf rulers’ initial response to decide their own fate was quick, but ultimately unsuccessful.

Emphasising the diversity of the Gothic genre in the eighteenth century, this chapter argues that, in The Recess, Lee hijacks certain themes from Walpole and Reeve to write a prototypical Female Gothic novel. Continuing to read the Gothic as a reaction to eighteenth-century historical writing, this chapter contends that Lee focuses on female protagonists and employs Gothic plotlines to critique the male codes of historical representation that govern David Hume’s Enlightenment historiography. Developing arguments from the previous chapter, this section shows how, in the hands of female writers, Gothic pasts often express contemporary fears and anxieties, and comment on gender politics in the eighteenth century. Drawing on Gary Kelly’s notion that the Gothic enabled women to access the male-dominated realms of history and politics, it is argued that Lee’s historically based novel utilises Gothic tropes such as concealed writings and a focus on the law to present a nightmare vision of women’s historical and social plight in the eighteenth century. Examining the complex structure of The Recess, this chapter concludes by assessing the extent to which Lee ‘Gothicises’ the eighteenth-century epistolary form, and what the novel says about the nature of the past.