The conclusion traces a history of religious gesture from the mid-seventeenth century to the present day. This period saw major changes in gesture and bodily habitus which we could characterise in three ways. First, there is the decline of uniformity, that is, the gradual abandonment of attempts to enforce bodily uniformity as a means of social discipline, whether in religious worship or in other forms of collective social activity. Secondly, there is the process that sociologists have labelled the decline of deference, whereby individuals in the modern West are, for the most part, no longer required to kneel or bow to social superiors, or to use gestures of reverence in sacred spaces. Lastly, there is the decline of formality, a growing discomfort with formal ritual which could also be described in terms of interiority or individualism, as a belief that the mind rather than the body is the true locus of selfhood. In all these respects it would be rather easy to see the world of early modern religion described in this book as a world we have lost. But I want to argue that this model is unsatisfactory, or at least incomplete.

How did religious and political debates that had only recently generated violent conflicts become relatively peaceably conducted in growing numbers of publications and clubs?

This chapter bridges environmental humanities and Black humanities by examining a figure largely, if curiously, excluded from the “ecocritical” canon: Charles Chesnutt, the first African American writer of commercially successful fiction. Reading literary environmentalism beyond the lenses of Romanticism or transcendentalism, Forbes finds in Chesnutt’s late nineteenth-century conjure tales a richly imagined Black environmental heritage that connected race and nature. Chesnutt’s short fiction featuring metamorphoses of humans into plants and animals represents a key node in an alternate, and nonlinear, Black environmentalist timeline. In contrast to environmentalisms that pit nature’s interests against humans’, the insights we see at flashpoints across this tradition, and crucially in Chesnutt’s conjure tales, belie narratives of human/nature separation that underpin most “white” environmentalisms. Moreover, his marshaling of racialized nonhuman agencies also helps us address persistent difficulties associated with new materialist theorizing. Fusing human/plant/animal agencies to frameworks of care and nurturance, characters in Chesnutt’s conjure tales weaponize “waste” against enslavement’s inhuman valuation systems.

Ostensibly, Hume’s Essays do not have much to say about religion. ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ (1741) may contain an incisive treatment of the psychological origins of religious error and its ecclesiastical and political consequences, but it was the one Essay dedicated to religion published in Hume’s lifetime. But when the topic of religion does come up in the Essays, as it frequently does in examples, asides and footnotes, we find Hume doing two things: outlining the character and dangers of institutional religion on individual happiness and social stability and doing so in a neutral manner characteristic of his wider ‘science of man’. He brought religious belief and priestly power down to the level of another aspect of human life, comparable to the other themes discussed in this guide, and which could subject to ‘scientific’ observation that led to identification of general principles. Piecing together the various discussions of religion, we find Hume articulating a strong anticlericalism in which religion is understood to be a natural propensity of human nature, exploited by priesthoods claiming power over others, but which could be managed through increased scepticism about clerical claims amongst the citizenry and the subordination of church to state.

Gambling affected the mental apparatus that people employed to understand the world around them as well as their own desires and compulsions. Casino gambling established a psychological dynamic perfectly calibrated to drive people to the edge of madness. The “storm” of despair generated by a loss, never compensated by a corresponding elation coming with a win, can overwhelm the player and leave them incapable of self-direction. Descriptions of the psychological effects of addiction – not only how those behaviors were formed through repetition but also how they resulted in a person whose entire world had shrunk – indicate how the machinery of Blanc-style casino gambling affected people in new and profound ways.

Chapter 7 analyses the violent conflict between industrial whalers and fishermen leading up to the Hachinohe uprising of 1911. Whalers, bureaucrats, and fishing scientists used fishery science to discredit the ecological knowledge of the local fishermen. In their accounts, allegedly objective scientific knowledge proved that whaling would not harm fishing while the locals' counterarguments were ridiculed as religious superstitions. Unlike in Ayukawa, fishermen in Hachinohe showed stronger resistance, eventually leading to the destruction of the whaling station in Same-ura in late 1911. However, the whaling company was able to reconcile with the local fishermen by offering them job opportunities in the whaling business. By 1912, all protests in Northeast Japan ceased, and whaling towns, such as Ayukawa and Hachinohe, brought economic wealth to the region. It is argued that the dwindling resistance of the population was closely connected to the decline of near-coastal fishing around 1900. With the advent of offshore fishing, whales no longer held the same environmental importance for fishermen, as they were no longer dependent on them to bring sardines close to the shore.

Chapter 2 considers the problem of ‘atheism’ in the period before the Civil War, emphasising the extent to which the concept represented an amalgam of the imaginary and the real, to which justice needs to be done. In many ways the discourse of ‘atheism’ was exaggerated, even fantastic. Yet it overlapped with actual instances of irreligion in ways that are teased out in the course of the chapter. The concept of ‘atheism’ made was possible to express disquiet about tendencies in contemporary thought and mores, such as secularism, naturalism and an undue reliance on ‘wit’ and sarcasm. The supposed overlap between atheism and immorality also provided an opportunity for preachers to draw attention to the spiritual shortcomings of the godly to whom they preached.

Chapter 6 examines the role of mobility in Veracruz’s distinctive social and cultural landscape, focusing on how individuals moving between Veracruz and other ports established intercolonial networks and developed informal religious communities. In a series of case studies based on investigations of the Mexican Inquisition, the chapter considers border-crossing associations of free-black women, using their cases to demonstrate both Veracruz’s remarkable religious diversity and the occasionally surprising mobility of its residents. While heterodoxy was undoubtedly common in the early modern Atlantic, I demonstrate how the Mexican-Caribbean world conditioned particular religious practices in Veracruz. Describing Veracruz as a spiritual borderland, I argue people from a variety of backgrounds understood the city as a place where the ability to come and go with relative ease created overlapping systems of power and, consequently, space to articulate distinctive ideologies.

Most of the medieval canon law dealing with heresy, magic, and superstition is found in CC. 23–26 of Gratian’s Decretum, the so-called causae hereticorum, also in C. 33 q. 1, in book 5 of the Liber extra of Gregory IX, in later decretals and conciliar canons, and in the broad literature of canonist commentaries discussed elsewhere in this volume. In one sense, of course, these offenses belong to criminal law and fall into the categories of criminal legal procedure and of mixed temporal and spiritual jurisdiction. In another sense they constitute unique problems of theology, including demonology, and therefore influenced canon law in perhaps more complex ways than some other topics

In his treatises De divinatione and De fato, Cicero discusses the possibility of the prediction of future events. His understanding of divination in these philosophical works differs significantly from accepted Roman practice. Thus, De divinatione should not be read as a handbook on Roman divination. Rather, it should be read alongside De fato as an exhortation to act in the service of the res publica after the death of Caesar. Rather than denying outright that divination is real, Cicero seeks to refute the more superstitious divinatory practices current in Rome, all of which he attaches to the individual rather than to the political community to which he has dedicated his life. Among these superstitious views are the belief that humanity is subject to impersonal fate and therefore that human responsibility is curtailed. In writing for a Roman audience, Cicero denies both the notion that men cannot be responsible for their own actions, thus rejecting the idea of fate, as well as the existence of divination in the context of a deterministic worldview.

Rudolph Fisher was unique among Harlem Renaissance authors in making Harlem itself the exclusive focus of his writing. Across a rich body of work (of short stories and novels), he demonstrated keen powers of social observation in revealing how class, regional, phenotypical, and generational distinctions defined Harlem and shaped an appropriate literary aesthetic. Fisher’s satirical yet loving eye is matched by a musical ear in stories about African Americans becoming modern in the black metropolis. Southern greenhorns are vulnerable to being fleeced by urbane northern hustlers. Grandmothers bearing the memory of the South fear and admire in equal measure the way Harlem shapes their grandchildren. Blues and jazz underscore vernacular speech, as street talk engages rural accents and bourgeois tongues. And such sensitivity to the city’s quotidian features informs Fisher’s ultimate understanding of Harlem as the space of encounter between logic and faith, science and superstition for African Americans.

Few, if any, political thinkers of the eighteenth century dealt as thoroughly and extensively with party as David Hume (1711–76). This chapter considers Hume’s first batch of essays on British politics, published in 1741–2. Hume analysed how the Whig–Tory and Court–Country alignments were integral to British party politics, with the former dividing the political nation along dynastic and religious lines and the latter being a natural expression of the workings of the mixed constitution and interparliamentary conflict. His analysis can be read as a compromise between Bolingbroke and Walpole. Yet it was something more than that – and arguably the most ambitious attempt to make sense of party in British politics to date.

In this chapter I argue that despite Hume’s explicit criticisms of enthusiasm and superstition in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (EPM), his more important targets are the orthodox and moderate Protestants of his time who would also scorn enthusiasm and superstition, and those philosophers who mixed Protestant accounts of virtue and duty with their philosophy. I show that Hume rejects central aspects of two prominent Protestant texts, The Whole Duty of Man and the Westminster Confession of Faith, but also borrows some of their language and mimics their style. Hume rejects The Whole Duty of Man’s catalog of duties limited to voluntary traits, and the Confession’s account of the sole purpose of man as well as its view of human nature. Still, in EPM Hume seems to use the style and language of these texts in order to be equally influential, to push religion back into the temple (and out of the public space), and to bring his moral philosophy out of the closet into common life in order to give it more extensive recognition as the accurate description of virtue and vice. EPM, therefore, is Hume’s own secular but religiously styled credo on duty and virtue.

Chapter 6 examines the particular question of John Locke’s position on the toleration of Catholics. This, the chapter argues, was the major area in which his views did not significantly evolve. Recent scholars have tried to establish that Locke softened his position on the intolerability of Catholics by appealing to a ‘loyalist’, oath-taking minority tradition within the Catholic chapter. This chapter refutes this claim and demonstrates Locke’s lifelong refusal to countenance such Gallican (or, in the English context, ‘Blackloist’) solutions to the Catholic question. When these views of Locke are set in their full context, they emerge as another variation on his rejection of the ‘Hobbesian politique’. Loyalist Catholics after the civil war were strongly influenced by the sovereignty theory of Hobbes and on that basis appealed for toleration as an act of monarchical prerogative. Locke’s hardening opposition to such forms of indulgence alienated him from such strategies. Catholics, he came to believe, were irretrievably dominated by either the papacy or the state and thus could not appeal for religious freedom as an inalienable right.