Canon law rules of marriage became the legal means for policing forbidden sex in Iceland during the Middle Ages. These rules were adapted to various needs: enforcing morality, encouraging adherence to Christian sexual norms, and managing inheritance practices and property rights. This chapter explores sex in Iceland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by focusing on legal regulation, the archbishops’ and bishops’ statutes, and selected court cases. In all the Nordic countries the regulation of sexuality was highly influenced by canon law, but a study of sex in Iceland needs to be understood in relation to the special character of the society. It was highly literate, because of Christianity, but decentralized, with no towns and a distant royal administration. There had never been a strong executive authority in Iceland, and its absence seems to have encouraged widespread interest in documenting personal disputes and property rights. This makes Iceland special. Written documents and historical writing were mostly kept at the farms of leading families, for use in disputes over property rights in the local courts. This differs from more urbanized societies elsewhere in Europe.

This chapter turns to Augustine’s account of his own Christian conversion in Confessions. It offers a new account of what Augustine thought it meant to be a Christian – in particular, this chapter finds that the idea of God as the saviour of sinners (and therefore the giver of virtue) stood at the heart of Augustine’s conception of Christianity. This finding allows this chapter to show that Augustine’s intellectual and moral conversion coincided in the garden in Milan and also that Augustine made his criticisms of Manicheanism and Platonism from within the eudaimonist tradition.

Shaken baby syndrome/abusive head trauma struggles to find a solid scientific foundation, largely because of a circularity confound, the same diagnostic features under study serve as the basis for categorising cases for research purposes. In an attempt to overcome this circularity, researchers have turned to confessions as a sorting criterion in the research, under the belief that confessions are independent of the diagnostic features and hence not subject to circularity. However, none of the research examines the nature and reliability of the confessions, or the interrogations that produce them; they simply accept the confessions as true, reliable, and independent. Research on interrogations and false confessions, however, along with extensive and wholly consistent anecdotal evidence, strongly suggest that SBS/AHT confessions are largely if not entirely produced by interrogator reliance on the diagnostic findings. That reliance undermines both the independence of the confessions, and hence their ability to break free from circularity, and the reliability of these confessions as a group. On the current state of knowledge, confessions cannot be relied upon to substitute for science to support the SBS/AHT hypothesis.

Chapter 11 explores Plutarch reception in political reflection through the work of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743), the Abbé Mably (1709–1785) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau is the culminating figure in my study, and Plutarch’s place in Rousseau’s political reflection is a highly complicated one. It could be suggested that Rousseau’s broader intellectual project was developed on the pillars derived from fundamental Plutarchan tenets of moral education in virtue, exemplarity as a central aspect of moral thinking, and political right as the pursuit of justice and the common good. In a concluding section to the chapter I demonstrate, partly in dialogue with contemporary scholarship on Rousseau in political theory, how Rousseau’s political vision as developed in the Social Contract can be regarded as a turning away from the ideas of public humanism with which Plutarch’s work was associated in the period covered by my overall analysis in this book.

Chapter 6 examines the particular role of justice institutions in the incarceration wave that has yielded such a dysfunctional and overpopulated system. Our analysis focuses on arrests done by police, criminal prosecution, and trials in order to assess the types of cases that end up in criminal convictions, the type of evidence used to convict, and the role played by defense lawyers. We examine the overreliance on flagrancy detention, police and prosecutor collusion with crime, and corruption. This chapter shows that by targeting the most visible crimes, prosecutors process the easy cases, and judges rarely require high standards of proof as evidence to convict.

This chapter asks what light the well-known but little understood story of Augustine’s relationship to the mother of his first child can shed on our understanding of marriage as an asymmetrical institution in the Roman period. Reviewing the evidence that both pagans and Christians in late antiquity expected a ‘double standard’ for men and women where marital fidelity was concerned, we suggest that Augustine’s On the Good of Marriage argued for a new marriage ethics based on sexual symmetry, capturing a new spirit of criticism for the double standard in fourth-century preaching, and that Augustine invoked his own experiences (as recounted in the Confessions) in order to drive home his argument.

Chapter Three studies ‘the word’ by merging two fields of association: first, the agglomeration of human labours, social practices, cultural values, and codified grammatical systems that made possible and supported the acquisition of Latin; second, the inhuman order of the ‘verbum Dei’. Each of these fields of association has, as its ultimate aim, the transformation of individual lives. It is under the rubric of this shared objective that I bring them together here. The first half of the chapter explores aspects of the medieval Latin grammatical tradition and its early modern afterlives. My goal is to make some seventh-century wranglings on the subject of the Latin case system serve as a point of entry into later fashions of prose style, and into the pedagogical disciplines of systematic imitation that were developed to teach Ciceronian Latin to schoolboys. The second half of the chapter explores a range of texts associated with St Paul, St Augustine, and Martin Luther in order to characterize the linguistic and spiritual stakes of medieval and early modern Britain’s absorption into Rome.

Chapter 3 explores the language of confessions to explain how language affected religious practices. Ministers expected all confessions to use a feminized language of submission and humility. However, laymen diverged from the language prescribed by the clergy to accept a more masculine language for male confessants. In the public space of the meetinghouse, where laymen confessed their sins, they could not risk their masculine reputations by adopting a feminized verbal order espoused by the clergy. Women were the normative Puritans who fully adopted the language and demeanor of a feminized faith. Men created a more masculine verbal order that focused on their behavior instead of their souls. Through this practice, the disciplinary process reinforced male duty and female piety, which ultimately gendered Puritanism.