This chapter analyzes the gradual and escalating development of human rights and religious freedom protections over the past two millennia. The chapter surveys the discovery and accumulation of rights and liberties in biblical texts and their interpretations over the centuries; in classical Roman law and the medieval civil, canon, and common law sources that built on the Bible and Roman law; in the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant–Catholic conflicts and revolts that followed; in Enlightenment liberalism and modern constitutional reforms born of democratic revolution; and in twentieth-century international human rights documents beginning with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Setting up the more detailed studies that follow, the chapter identifies several essential and enduring questions about the intersections of religion, human rights and religious freedom that still confront states and churches today.

This chapter analyzes the gradual and escalating development of human rights and religious freedom protections over the past two millennia. The chapter surveys the discovery and accumulation of rights and liberties in biblical texts and their interpretations over the centuries; in classical Roman law and the medieval civil, canon, and common law sources that built on the Bible and Roman law; in the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant–Catholic conflicts and revolts that followed; in Enlightenment liberalism and modern constitutional reforms born of democratic revolution; and in twentieth-century international human rights documents beginning with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Setting up the more detailed studies that follow, the chapter identifies several essential and enduring questions about the intersections of religion, human rights and religious freedom that still confront states and churches today.

Most literary histories of Renaissance skepticism neglect medieval skepticism and address a single genre, usually drama, or a single author, usually Montaigne or Shakespeare. This literary history of skepticism in England addresses medieval skepticism as well as multiple genres and authors. The introduction defines key terms, distinguishes between first- and second-wave skepticism (using William Walwyn and Joseph Glanvill as examples), and clarifies the relation of skepticism to secularization. It reviews competing narratives of secularization in early modernity, including those of Hans Blumenberg, C. John Sommerville, and Charles Taylor. It argues that the challenges posed by philosophical skepticism incite aesthetic innovation. Issues of cognition, language, ethics, and politics are identified. These include problems of doubt and suspended judgment, the uncertainty of private experience, illusions of impartiality, dilemmas of neutrality, parodies of sovereignty, questions of religious conflict, dissent and toleration, as well the pleasures of aisthesis and the skeptical sublime.

The high ideals of the faith to which medieval Latin Christians were repeatedly exhorted had rendered ideas and initiatives of reform virtually coextensive with Christendom for centuries before the Protestant Reformation. The imitation of Christ through the practice of the virtues was not so much hard to understand as it was difficult to enact, whether among lay Christians, members of the secular clergy, or those men and women whose solemn vows in religious orders obliged them, at least in theory, self-consciously to pursue this virtuous imitation. “You must be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect”; “Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors”; “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” Such admonitions were all but guaranteed to produce a gap between prescription and practice. No sooner were Jesus’s commands proclaimed than Christians more often than not failed to realize them, whether they were members of the unlettered rural laity, skilled artisans and merchants in Western Europe’s burgeoning cities, parish priests scraping by on meager benefices, or powerful prelates whose positions offered constant opportunities to indulge sinful desires. No medieval Christian with the scantest grasp of the faith could have doubted that sins abounded in Christendom.

In contrast to the transcendent image eliding idolatry through immateriality or dematerialization, the transgressive image courts sin to transcend the self. Through the Abrahamic story of the prophet Joseph and Zuleikha, transformed from Judaic and Islamic exegesis to poetry and painting, Chapter 8 explores the trope of the transgressive image. Development of the story from the Talmud into the Bible and subsequent interplay between Jewish and Islamic commentaries suggests close interreligious communication. The story’s fifteenth-century romantic popularization in Persian poetry, first by Sa’di and then by Jami, used tropes of dreams and idols to transform the story into a parable describing the path to divine union. Combining text with image, Bihzad’s famous rendition of the climactic scene responds to the poem’s intermediality. Comparison with the transgressive dream vision central to the tale of Shaykh Sam’an in Attar’s Language of the Birds underscores a broader recognition of idolatrous transgression as a path to salvation. The chapter concludes by contrasting the mystical, humanizing interpretation embodied in these tales with depictions of the same romance in Europe. Recognizing the independence of European painting from text as an inappropriate paradigm for manuscript paintings embedded in texts, the chapter suggests the need for contextual critical reading of poetry through theology as well as politics to ascribe visual meaning.