The first part of this chapter explores the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony’s conception of law on matters of religion. For the Pilgrims, law was both the memorialization of their commitment to the Word of God and an instrument for sustaining a sanctified society. The second part of the chapter details how the legislature and the courts of Massachusetts Bay Colony enacted many statutes and issued scores of judicial decisions to help ensure the success of their Puritan “Citty vpon a Hill.” In 1691 Massachusetts Bay was issued a new charter as a royal colony. The 1691 provincial charter required that “liberty of Conscience” be allowed “in the Worshipp of God to all Christians (Except Papists).” The third part of the chapter focuses on the laws enacted and adjudicated during the provincial period to determine whether Massachusetts Bay complied with the new charter’s requirement about religious toleration. Massachusetts Bay’s Puritan Standing Order—the unofficial alliance between Congregational ministers and godly magistrates—would not abandon the animating principle of Puritan Congregationalism without a fight, and that fight was waged in large part through statutes and court cases. It was not until 1833 that Massachusetts disestablished church and state.

Tolstoi was well acquainted with the phenomenon of “holy wanderer” or “strannik”: His estate Iasnaia Poliana was located close to the main road to Kyiv where each summer scores of pilgrims passed by. However, in the Russian strannik concept, the focus is not – as for the pilgrim – primarily on reaching a sacred site, but on the journey, on being underway. Wandering becomes a goal in its own right. This kind of spirituality appealed to Tolstoi and during one of his visits to Optina Pustyn he consciously emulated it: He set off on foot, wearing a peasant jacket, bast shoes tied with rags, knapsacks on his back, and with a wanderer’s staff in the hand. It would be misleading to say that Tolstoi simply took over a “form” and filled it with his own content. He was also concerned with and fascinated by the “content side” of holy wandering – the restless, seeking attitude that spurns the security of house and hearth and trusts that God will provide guidance where to go. But to Tolstoi, the inner journey was just as important as the physical. Between “Tolstoi the holy wanderer” and the age-old Orthodox wanderer tradition there is both rupture and continuity.

What are the legacies of American Puritanism? The answers might surprise you. Somewhat paradoxically, these legacies are somehow both nearly invisible in the contemporary United States and also ubiquitous. On one hand, there is very little evidence of the theology or polity of seventeenth-century New England Puritans visible in today’s religious or political culture. It would be difficult to find an extant church offering a semblance of the services the Puritans attended, and even churches that claim a link to this time are quick to emphasize their evolution. At the same time, “puritan” persists in our culture as a byword for everything that is more repressive and less sexually evolved than we are. For instance, activists who want more freedom for nudity and sexual expression on social media often blame puritans for these restrictions. This differentiation between a contemporary Us and a puritan Them creates space for caricature that opens up space for what I call “settler kitsch,” an array of cartoonish, caricatured images of the settlers of New England, impossible to take seriously with their big hats and funny shoes. At the same time, these cartoons obscure an actual cognizance of Puritans by concealing the violence inherent in the settler colonial projects of Pilgrims and Puritans. As such, the principal legacies of Puritanism today are #freethenipple and settler kitsch.

Chapter 4 discusses the political theology of the American Puritans and their influential legacy of the bi-dimensional covenant. Arriving on the shores of the New World in the 1620s and 1630s, the Puritans set about the ambitious project of creating perfect theologico-political communities. In particular, the Puritan settlements combined republican and liberal perspectives: On the one hand, the church covenant resembled in its horizontality the social contract theory, by creating a religious community with an accepted government from the free accord of its individual members. On the other hand, the vertical covenant of each church with God was modeled after the classical political contract between the people and its rulers. Thus, both the liberal apprehension of the people as a collection of equal individuals and the republican understanding of the people as of corporate whole were implemented in the colonies of New England. The chapter includes samples of the Puritan compacts, excerpts from the Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England, and selections from the writings of John Winthrop, John Cotton, Roger Williams, Nathaniel Ward, John Wise, and others.

Examines three groups of ‘consumers’ of visual culture in the opening decades of the eighth century: clerics (non-papal actors), monks, and pilgrims. Three case studies are employed: the recently discovered mural in the narthex of the church of Santa Sabina, the murals from the excavations of the monastery of San Saba, and the mural placed at the tomb of Pope Cornelius in the Catacomb of San Callisto on the Via Appia. These all offer additional evidence for the pervasive presence of ‘Mediterranean’/Byzantine culture.

Chapter 3 examines the changing population of Jeddah by drawing on exemplary migration histories, reconstructed on the basis of (often oral) family histories. The chapter shows the variety of origins and different ways in which individuals managed to establish themselves in the city, both economically and politically. While precise historical dates are often unavailable, the chapter attempts to trace when specific groups, such as West Africans fleeing French expansion in sub-Saharan Africa, had particular incentives to migrate to the Hijaz. Special attention is given to the slave trade and the ways in which male and female slaves, and notably their descendants, were integrated into households.