This chapter surveys forms of status by which legal systems assign rights, obligations and capacities to various categories of person. Though such discussions have tended to restrict themselves to statuses recognized in Roman law (the hierarchical birth-based statuses that Maine contrasted with the contractualism of later Western systems), cross-cultural comparison requires a wider lens. Hence, the chapter covers status within the polity, official or military status, unfree or servile status, putatively ‘natural’ statuses, status in the family and status as member of a voluntary or professional association. Special attention is given to the mechanisms involved in change of status, and to status as a factor in legal penalties. It is proposed that, in systems of religious law (which often operate parallel to civil law in a legal-pluralist context and across borders), status within the ‘ecclesial’ polity is comparable to civil status (citizen, resident alien, etc.) within a territorially defined polity.

Chapter 2 evokes the eighteenth-century hierarchical world of the Rajput zanana, highlighting the avenues to power available for the various women living behind purdah, especially via their access to poetry and religious education. Documenting how Bani Thani arrived as a young slave girl, it describes how she trained as a singer and entered in the service of Raj Singh of Kishangarh’s queen known by her pen name Brajdasi. There Bani Thani enjoyed exposure to poetry, including that of the queen’s stepson and crown prince Nagaridas and his friend the innovative love poet Anandghan. She also heard sermons by religious powerbrokers who were involved in the reforms of the powerful neighbor king Jai Singh II of Jaipur, in particular the Nimbarkan abbot of nearby Salemabad, Vrindavandev Acarya. Through pilgrimage trips to the holy land of Braj and sojourns in the fancy parts of Delhi she had access to the latest developments in music. This chapter documents this by featuring her own poetry under the penname Rasikbihari, as well as that of those to whom she responded.

The chapter explores efforts to answer how a community premised on a dislocation from the past, but comprised of people who bring with them their own pasts, locates itself in time. How does a community constituted by other pasts not simply blur into those pasts? I argue that in both Rome and the United States a particular type of Stranger, the corrosive Stranger, is constructed in response to this question. The corrosive Stranger is not defined against some preexistent purity, but is used to construct an imagined purity that gives a community a genealogy that distinguishes it from other communities and also posits a notion of true belonging that is different from juridical membership. I look at the different efforts by Cato the Elder, Cicero, and Varro for the Romans and then by Noah Webster for the United States to craft a genealogy of national identity that is defined against the threats of the corrosive Stranger. I then look at attempts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington to confront the burden of memory reflected in the Stranger marked by race who carries America’s own memory.

The chapter includes readings of Germania 1, 2, 3, 28, 33, 37, 46.

The era of the American Revolution was as critical for African American women as it was for Black men and for White Americans who gained their independence from Great Britain. Black women’s various efforts to escape bondage have been viewed as ancillary in the letters and diaries, biographical accounts, and legal proceedings historians often used to support arguments based on analysis of enslaved men or on factors that prevented women from fleeing slavery. Black women’s freedom was intertwined with the movement for American independence, and African American women influenced the military conflict and were powerfully influenced by its outcome.

Chapter 3 examines the ideas of the American Revolution and places fugitive slave women at the center of analysis. The impact of Dunmore’s Proclamation and the Philipsburg Proclamation are examined. From plantations, women escaped to cities and towns, North and South, fleeing poverty and malevolence. After the Philipsburg Proclamation, 40 percent of runaways were women. There were regional variations and similarities. In the South, enslaved women pursued refuge in Spanish Florida and with British troops during the Southern Campaign; in the Chesapeake, enslaved women fled to Pennsylvania and other Northern destinations often seeking refuge with British troops in the process of escaping; in the North and New England, fugitive women sought refuge with the British. In each of these regions, fugitive women also endeavored to pass as free women in urban spaces. Indeed, throughout the Revolutionary Era, enslaved women advanced their liberation through flight. The Revolutionary War bolstered the independence of Black women, gave them increased access to their families with whom they fled, and greater autonomy in their daily lives once they reached safe haven.

Chapter 4 examines the obstacles enslaved women faced in escaping bondage in post-Revolutionary America. The case of Elizabeth Freeman, an enslaved Black woman in Massachusetts who sued for her freedom, captures the tenacity of Black women, who not only resisted with their feet, but also used the courts to gain their freedom. By highlighting the case of Ona Judge, the fugitive slave of George and Martha Washington, this chapter brings to the fore successful escapes in which enslaved women overcame formidable obstacles to freedom. During the post-Revolutionary period, Bett and other enslaved women developed several strategies for overcoming obstacles to freedom. As daughters, mothers, and wives, they contested oppression and invented solutions that defied their status as enslaved women.

This chapter evaluates the links between the power balance in household relationships and Chrysostom’s preaching on pistis (normally translated as ‘faith’). It argues that, for Chrysostom, pistis is closer to faithful obedience than cognitive belief and analyses how Chrysostom used the expected norms of faithful obedience in household relationships to reinforce congregational faithful obedience to God. The chapter uses this preaching to expose the unequal, reciprocal, and sometimes violent nature of the relationships in the late antique household. It also demonstrates how Chrysostom attempted to regulate the household through reinforcing existing power imbalances in relationships, benefiting the paterfamilias as husband, father, or master. Faithfulness to God and the paterfamilias are intertwined. Wives are exhorted to be faithful to and obey their husbands. Sons are expected to obey their fathers. Slaves are encouraged to be loyal and obedient. Masters are encouraged to treat slaves as if they were their own children – fictive kinship – but in practice this amounted to little change. Chrysostom preached a potentially revolutionary message about faithful obedience to God, but recast it into safe exhortations and a defence of existing societal structures.