This chapter explores how the ancient literary and philosophical dialogue form maintained its relevance as a tool of cultural and religious identity formation and competition. It addresses the ongoing scholarly discussion regarding the scope for dialogue in the face of rising authoritarianism and dogmatism in late antiquity.

Numerous Christian authors from the seventh century to the twenty-first have classified Islam as a Christian heresy. Writers from John of Damascus in the seventh century to Hilaire Belloc in the twentieth have seen Muhammad as a heresiarch who forged a heresy based on elements of Judaism, Christianity and Paganism. Comparison between Muhammad and earlier heresiarchs (such as Arius or Nestorius) allowed Christian authors to denigrate and dismiss Islamic doctrine. Such comparison also facilitated the denunciation of new heretics closer to home: Luther and Calvin, for Catholic polemicists of the sixteenth century, or on the contrary the ‘papists’, for Protestant writers.

The Reformation and Counter-Reformation had a profound effect on the treatment of unchristianised peoples in Europe, intensifying efforts to convert them to Christianity, while Protestants and Catholics vied to establish their own version of the faith as the true one. The theme of paganism, intensely polemicised, occupied a central place in the religious rhetoric of the Reformation, with Protestants accusing Catholics of being little more than pagans while Catholics in turn denounced Protestants as infidels with no respect for the holy. The result was the effective reinvention of the concept of paganism, which came to be identified with folk religion (and, more specifically, folk Catholicism). ‘Paganism’ became both a greedy and a fuzzy concept, blurring the lines between those who were poorly catechised and those who were wholly unchristianised. Furthermore, ideas of infidels and idolaters formed in the New World were reimported to Europe in this period. This chapter seeks to dispel the fog of Reformation polemic in order to determine what we can know of unchristianised peoples in Europe during this period, when Orthodox Muscovy was also expanding eastward into unchristianised areas of Europe’s far east.

In an aside to his audience after narrating the revolt of the Theruingi and the slaughter of the Roman army under Lupicinus in AD 376, the ’lonely’ historian Ammianus Marcellinus asks the indulgence of his readers on a particularly difficult matter ... The rather poignant parenthesis is consistent with the view that Ammianus presents elsewhere in his history of a public at Rome concerned only with the trivial biographies of emperors and caring more for the details of the private lives of the imperial household than with the grand sweep of res gestae. The last antique historian is indeed a great one, and he may even have been as isolated as is sometimes suggested.

This chapter discusses the 2015 Islamic State (IS) publication Bal ʾaṭʿanā allāh idh aḥraqanāhu yā ʿabīda al-rafāhiyya (‘Nay, We Obeyed God When We Burned Him, You Slaves of the Luxurious Life’), which justifies the execution by immolation of Jordanian fighter pilot Muʿādh al-Kasāsba. The act prompted widespread criticism, sparking outrage across the Muslim world. This condemnation was even echoed within the Salafī jihādī, including the notorious Abū Muḥammad al-Maqdisī (b. 1959). The author of the piece, Shaymāʾ Haddād (b. 1992), more commonly known by her pseudonym Aḥlām al-Naṣr, exploits juristic disagreements in the medieval scholarly tradition to persuade the reader that immolation was never prohibited by the Prophet Muḥammad. Far from presenting the punishment of immolation as a timeless repetition of Prophetic custom, she claims that immolation is a necessary evil in a modern world where ‘incendiary weaponry’ (al-asliḥa fī hi ḥaraqa) - such as missiles, napalm, and cluster bombs - has become a norm in the conduct of war.

In “Divine and Human Plans of God in the Book of Isaiah,” J. Todd Hibbard follows the occurrences of a Hebrew root that means “to plan, advise, counsel” through the whole book, bringing to light one of its central themes. He shows how Isaiah’s theological rhetoric begins with a plan against Judah that involves foreign nations, but eventually undermines the plans of those nations as well. As with feminine imagery in the book, it is possible to identify a kind of episodic narrative running through the book in relation to certain themes in a way that animates the development of the book and holds it together despite its lengthy formation. The divine plans for Judah and nations eventually come together and culminate with the summoning of Cyrus as messiah and the appearance of the Persian empire.

Chapter 6 centres on Galen’s longest moral work, the Affections and Errors of the Soul, and explores the features of Galenic practical philosophy from a number of angles. The first section provides an analysis of the work’s programmatic preface and shows that Galen exploits the dynamics of polemic, self-promotion and self-effacement to cast himself as a prominent contributor in this intellectual area. The next section discusses Galen’s emphasis on self-knowledge, which is often blocked by self-love. It claims that in order to generate feelings of revulsion with regard to the latter, Galen works on ‘class fraction’ as a tactic with moralising intent. Another strand of special importance in the essay is the figure of the moral adviser, which Galen elaborates on so as to highlight the need for welcoming and indeed enduring moral criticism. Even though the moral adviser features in other authors of the Second Sophistic, in Galen it points to the applicability of ethics to a broad range of social contexts, thus credentialing his situational ethics. A separate section of Chapter 6 focuses on the concept of free speech (parrhēsia). While Galen debates the challenges of social and political interaction, he advises frankness at all costs. A genuine friend should never be reluctant to express the truth of someone’s moral situation and this makes him strikingly different from the flatterer, a disgusting stock figure in Imperial works on moralia, particularly in Plutarch, whom Galen seems to follow here. Another shrewd device that Galen uses to good effect to achieve the moral rectification of readers is the description of the pathology of anger (its origins and results), particularly in the episode featuring Galen’s Cretan friend, which is framed, I suggest, as an ‘ethical case history’, sharing characteristics with Galen’s medical case histories.

This seeks to summarise the conclusions of the book, asserting and defending Laudianism’s status as a coherent, distinctive and aggressive ideological position, and as a coalition made up of persons of varying views and degrees of commitment, and as such a set of responses to a dynamic and changing set of political circumstances. The methodological approach of the book is defended and the compatibility of the lumping, which underpinned the first four part with the splitting that characterised the fifth, is asserted. In its second half the Conclusion looks forward to the larger significance of Laudianism for the history of ‘Anglicanism’ and ends with an account of the Tractarian use of Laudianism and the ways in which the legacy of the Tractarians has, in turn, shaped the subsequent historiography of Laudianism. The attempt here, as in the book as a whole, is to free the topic from the ongoing quarrels about the historical identity and theological and pietistic essence of the church of England, so that it can be understood in terms of the period during which it first came into existence, and which it tried (so ardently and unsuccessfully) to transform.

Chapter 4 treats the Cappadocians’ hagiographic biographies in conjunction with their polemic against non-Trinitarian theologians.The chapter begins by outlining the background and teachings of Eunomius of Cyzicus (c. 335–c. 395), a longtime heterousian rival to the Cappadocians. The chapter analyzes the narratives about fourth-century Nicene bishop Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 298–372), Basil, and Macrina as hagiographies designed in part to contrast true (pro-Nicene) doctrine against the false philosophy of non-Trinitarians.These saints’ ascetic feats are recounted as spiritual ordeals fashioned as classical contests: in Athanasius, suffering multiple exiles because of standing up to false (heterousian) teachers; in Basil, countering threats to the Nicene faith by imperial officials; and in Macrina, enduring disease and death with unwavering resolve.In each case,Nyssen or Nazianzen emphasize that character is formed out of struggle; and that voice and speech (as a metaphor for doctrine) have been purified and validated in pro-Nicene theologians, but are corrupted and disingenuous in the untested charlatans they oppose.

Books and boxes were found in close proximity; before bookshelves, chests were the most obvious place to store books, and the physical features of a bound book often made it visually analogous to a box. The material and tactile connections between book and box play into common metaphors of the book as a receptacle for textual riches, and the chapter brings together responses to the book as box-like object from Erasmus to early seventeenth-century English Protestants, from humanist treatises to portraits. In considering literary and visual encounters with the codex, discussion focuses on the significance of external surfaces, such as gold, blackness, and embroidery, in the fashioning of these inherently box-like objects. While reformers insisted on the Word of God as the only vehicle of truth, they could not escape the fact that it had to be contained in books, unavoidably material receptacles with insides and outsides that could shape and inscribe each other. Protestants remained sensitive to the metaphorical potential of an object with insides and outsides, and this chapter demonstrates that the identity of the ‘book’ was more complex than 'sola scriptura' suggested.

Chapter 5 is a key turning point in the narrative of the book. It analyses radical Catholic pamphlets printed in Paris and Lyon c. 1588–89, during a period in which the king was assassinated and the Catholic League controlled Paris and many other French towns. These pamphlets attack a now monstrous figure, the politique, for duplicity and for linguistic and moral flexibility. They confirm that the politique is shadowy and hard to define; this is part of the new politique problem of the late stages of the wars, which did much to create the historiographical legend of the Politique party. In these works, politique shifts from object of knowledge and knowing subject to object of opprobrium – but some qualities of the knowing, linguistically capable politique subject are retained. I argue that longer-term trends and influences are also present in source material as well as the immediate concerns of the crisis of c. 1589. This chapter also brings visual sources to bear on the politique problem, including two of the only known representations of the politique figure, found in Pierre de L’Estoile’s Drolleries collection.

Chatper 3 studies a unique pilgrimage society known as the Order of the Holy Sepulcher as a window into the the Holy Land as a source of spiritual and political legitimacy for Catholics in the wake of the Reformation.

Chapter four focuses on Avicenna's endeavour in his famous Canon of Medicine to reassert the epistemic authority of philosophy by restoring the proper boundaries of medicine, which Galen had especially obscured through his engagements with Plato's Timaeus. I maintain that Avicenna, a student of Aristotle, formulates this polemic in response to the threat that Galen's defence of the dialogue's brain centred psycho-physiology posed to the credibility of Aristotelian cardiocentrism, which identified the heart as the source of sensation. This study examines how Avicenna appeals to the restrictive epistemic hierarchies of his intellectual milieu, which limit doctors to subjects only relevant to the production or preservation of bodily health, to delegitimize Galen's contributions to natural philosophy. The rhetorical, as opposed to normalizing, force of the disciplinary prescriptions that he levels at Galen in the Canon of Medicine will become clear from my analysis of Avicenna's discussions of the hegemonic organ and pleasure in his philosophical works, where he transgresses his own 'laws' when disputing or even adopting TImaean positions on these issues.

The Foreword by Professor Jason BeDuhn (Professor of Religious Studies, Northern Arizona University) offers an overview of this book’s critical historiography of the life of Mani, based in part on scepticism regarding the previously known sources, and in part on newly available sources. In introducing this book’s approach, BeDuhn follows various depictions of Mani the 'Apostle of Jesus Christ', the 'Doctor from Babylon', the 'Illuminator' and the 'Great Interpreter' within both the Manichaean tradition and in polemical accounts.