IN CANTO 15 of Dante's inferno, Dante in his imagined poetic incarnation meets his old friend and mentor Brunetto Latini. Latini is condemned to walk on burning sands for eternity, the punishment for being a sodomite.

Latini's punishment is emblematic of the wider project of Dante's early fourteenthcentury Commedia—to categorize behaviours and beliefs and to map out their degree of deviance or virtue and their consequences in the afterlife. Punishments are made to fit the crime with a logic known as contrapasso. So Latini must forever walk on burning sands, as apparently befits the sterility and wastefulness of the act of sodomy.

This volume is about the concept of deviance. It is about the categories and judgements which societies construct and enact to distinguish between good and bad; to make sense of the world; to demonize and to persecute. Only rarely do these operate univocally: they tend to be made up of intertwined legal, economic, moral, religious forces and logics. The book will examine the “how” and the “what” of such processes across cultures, whilst hoping that this allows us to gesture towards the “why.” This introduction offers some initial thoughts about the construction of categories of deviance, it sets out the conception of the volume as a whole, and it suggests ways to approach the essays published here. The chapters discuss a wide range of societies, from China to France, North Africa to the Mongol empire. They cover many different kinds of deviance: from theft and violence, to far more disturbing medieval judgements relating to sexuality, religious belief, and identity.

The general introduction is followed by a series of three more detailed sectional introductions, which focus on the individual essays, attempt to offer some comparative thoughts (partly as a response to the patchy geographical coverage here—unfortunately covid-related challenges have meant that not all original contributors were able to take part), and suggest some further reading.

CATEGORIES OF DEVIANCE are so often bound up with articulations of political power. They work practically to control and manage, but also often draw on political ideologies for their logic. As this section shows, however, political ideologies cannot be disentangled from other normative frameworks: the religious, the moral and ethical, the economic and so on.

This part opens with an article by Michael Hope on treason in the Mongol empire. “Treason” of course fails to translate the precise critical concepts. Hope focuses on the idea of bulqa, which encompasses rebellion, chaos, and disorder. This could be caused by the betrayal of oaths, by breaking laws, or by challenging the social hierarchy: in other words, it was at once an offence against individuals, against a political system, and against social order more generally. The importance of avoiding bulqa was underpinned by a sense of the heavenly mandate—not just an earthly order, but a cosmologically-ordained order was at stake.

The importance of the “great principle” both sustained, and was sustained by, the political ideology of the Mongol empire. Hope explains that order and disorder were articulated in terms of respect for Chinggis Khan's legacy, the great Khan whose actions had unified the peoples of Inner Asia from 1206. He claimed that he needed to impose order because otherwise things fall apart as with “women who have no husbands; as horses who have no pastures.” The normative force of this legacy in defining deviance was threefold: Chinggis's edicts were to be respected, his precedents were apparently sacrosanct, and reverence for his family was to underpin political behaviour. Actions which transgressed any of these three could cause bulqa, and were offences of the most heinous kind. The temporal dimension of this is really important: notions of treasonous deviance were rooted in genealogical respect for this founder of the Mongol dynasty. But, as Hope points out, the temporality of legal authority here was more complex, as most of these rules actually pre-dated Chinggis and originated with the seventh-century precedents of the Törü. This was a normative system, then, which combined the authority of ancient lore with a strong sense of dynastic loyalty.

Indeed, concepts of loyalty and obedience underpinned Mongol notions of treason. Crimes which were punished involved disobedience. Readers might ask whether such stringency arose in part from the requirements of a nomadic empire.

THIS SECTION IS structured around the idea of legalism. We ask why law matters as an organizing principle for categories of deviance, and how and why it is brought into play. Like religious and political ideologies, law clearly does not operate autonomously, even if legal authority in modern societies rests upon this claim. Equally problematic is our often ready assumption that law maps neatly onto morality and ethics, political power and religion. It does not: conflicts and tensions between these normative frameworks are rife, and it is often in the interstices between them that historical change happens.

The chapters in this section pick up on a range of themes. Developing and changing legal frameworks are shown to be key to the contingency of definitions of what is right and wrong across societies. Law can provide opportunities for minority or oppressed groups to articulate their goals and sense of community; but, of course, it can also be used to repress and reinforce power. Legalism in this period was most often aligned with religious ideologies, but could nevertheless produce conflicting outcomes. If legalism produces a relatively black and white framing of right and wrong, religious frameworks, coupled with the messy complexity of human life, might produce more nuanced parameters and might also suggest the importance of flexible responses and the exercise of mercy. Yet, as these chapters show, even these assumptions about legalism versus religion prove more complex, as legalism itself is revealed to be surprisingly flexible and capacious in many cases.

The part opens with a section on theft. In many ways, the theme of theft goes to the heart of deviance in a universal sense. Rare is the human society which does not put respect for property at its core. Even rarer, though, is the society which is not alarmed by the idea of secret actions. This seems to be the aspect of theft which caused most concern in the medieval period: theft undermines the trust binding together sociopolitical communities, precisely because it relies on deception and secrecy.

Ephraim Shoham-Steiner presents a view of theft in European Jewish communities in the later Middle Ages. He reminds us that categories of deviance do, of course, arise from actual acts of deviance. This is not just a process of invented wrongs, but real choices by real individuals must lie at the heart of the analysis.

RELIGION SO OFTEN lies at the heart of the ways in which societies and individuals make sense of their worlds and attempt to distinguish between right and wrong. Belief often claims a degree of transcendental timelessness, but of course history teaches us that religious maps of behaviour and misbehaviour are profoundly contingent.

This small sectional introduction will briefly explain what the chapters here are about, draw out some central themes and questions, and attempt to set them in a wider context with some suggestions for further comparative reading.

The first part of this section explores the categorization of ideas and beliefs themselves. Societies often map out the rightness and wrongness not only of behaviours, but of thoughts and cherished beliefs. It is both an extraordinary and horrifying endeavour, and an extremely common one.

We open with Ian Forrest's exploration of heresy in England, Bohemia, and the Languedoc from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. He brings together approaches to the study of heresy and the study of crime to pin down what is particular about the processes by which heretical beliefs and their adherents were demonized and cast out from the Christian community. A powerful argument emerges that the process was contingent—rooted in time and historical circumstance—as indeed are all crimes which depend by their very nature on a process of definition. That contingency involved a degree of uncertainty and suspicion which looked different from the clearer delineation of a crime like theft. Heretics, once classified as such, found themselves, as Forrest argues, “commodified”—ostensibly stripped of features apart from their heretical-ness. After tracing this process comparatively across three contexts, Forrest then turns most importantly to the heretics themselves: how did they experience belief? What motivated their choices? How might we do justice to the ethical imperative to place these individuals at the heart of our analysis, rather than merely reproducing the categories imposed by those hostile to them?

Readers might compare Forrest's themes here with an exploration of heresy and reactions to it in Byzantium, and in medieval Islam. As Christine Caldwell Ames has pointed out,