This chapter examines J. S. Mill’s writings on universal history, beginning with his reviews of Jules Michelet, François Guizot, and Henry Buckle, and ending with Alexis de Tocqueville’s prophetic account of democracy and Mill’s timely socialism. Barrell argues that we must take seriously the two historical perspectives from which Mill theorised politics: the first looked to the special causes which determined the timeliness or untimeliness of a given doctrine, reform, or phenomenon, while the latter looked to general causes and the region of ultimate aims. The first depended logically on the second. Any attempt to historicise the study of politics – by making laws relative to time and place, for example – must reckon with civilisation’s provisional trends. The debate surrounding Mill’s universalism and relativism, Barrell concludes, can be helpfully understood in these terms. While Mill’s argument is difficult to credulously follow, his intentions were clear: general and special circumstances always coexisted, and because they coexisted the past was both irreducibly distinct and uniform in its development. One consequence of this intellectual remapping might be to re-establish continuities between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in keeping with Mill’s self-professed eclecticism.

Chapter 5 evaluates the role of education in China’s rapid growth. In 1980, China was one of the poorest countries in the world, but the average years of schooling of its adult population was already near that of a middle-income country. This relatively high educational level was an advantage for China’s economic development. However, this advantage all but disappeared by 2005. China’s greatest advantage turns out to be in the quality rather than quantity of education. According to the cognitive skills index produced by Eric Hanushek and his coauthors, who use it as a measure of a country’s educational quality, China ranks the best among all developing nations. This factor alone may explain a very significant 4 percentage point difference in GDP per capita growth between China and developing countries such as Peru and South Africa. It is shown that China’s advantage in the quality of schooling is not due to more investment in education by the government. Instead, it is the traditional Confucian culture that has made people in China and other East Asian economies influenced by the culture value of education more than people in most other developing countries.

Books and boxes were found in close proximity; before bookshelves, chests were the most obvious place to store books, and the physical features of a bound book often made it visually analogous to a box. The material and tactile connections between book and box play into common metaphors of the book as a receptacle for textual riches, and the chapter brings together responses to the book as box-like object from Erasmus to early seventeenth-century English Protestants, from humanist treatises to portraits. In considering literary and visual encounters with the codex, discussion focuses on the significance of external surfaces, such as gold, blackness, and embroidery, in the fashioning of these inherently box-like objects. While reformers insisted on the Word of God as the only vehicle of truth, they could not escape the fact that it had to be contained in books, unavoidably material receptacles with insides and outsides that could shape and inscribe each other. Protestants remained sensitive to the metaphorical potential of an object with insides and outsides, and this chapter demonstrates that the identity of the ‘book’ was more complex than 'sola scriptura' suggested.

Focuses on the reliquary: an enclosing, revealing structure, which engages intensely with its contents. The apparently idolatrous worshipping of ‘Gods bodye in the box’ was a persistent complaint among reformers, and the murky box of the reliquary epitomised the falseness of the Roman Catholic faith. The chapter starts with sixteenth-century encounters with relics, beginning with Erasmus, whose attitude is characterised by ambiguities about the spiritual significance of material things. Comparing satirical and polemical responses to relics from both sides of the religious divide, the chapter considers how these boxes operated as contested sites. It then turns to the afterlife of the reliquary once it had been removed from the religious sphere, and locates its survival in the vocabulary of post-Reformation libraries as new kinds of shrine, and in seventeenth-century printed reliquiae, as safer kinds of receptacle. Even after the reliquary appeared to be emptied of its dangerous significance, the very idea of the relic and the possibilities offered by this controversial box endured as ways of thinking about the interweaving of physical and intellectual apprehension demanded by books.

“Nationalist Ethos, Collective Reformation and Citizenry Power” examines the invention and fragmentation of Nigeria as nation, and the inadequacies and complications that arise from the lack of a proper definition of national identity as a Nigerian. Only the territory has been clearly defined; the people and the governments are at indeterminate extremes of national formation with insufficient integrating ideologies. While nationalism as a patriotic allegiance to national identity is central to the reformation and revolution interventions, it is yet the least explored or emphasized. The collective identification of a group of people as one is a needed impetus that drives national development, democracy, and empowerment. Rather than enhance the integration of the nation, as it is practiced in Nigeria, federalism further divides the nation across majority–minority and regional dichotomies. Just as the government is alienated from the people, the people are also alienated from the state with the utmost preoccupation of scrambling for survival. Such inadequacies are themselves dangerous prompts for succession and (ethnic)nationalism. However, there is the need to perceive strength from the multicultural existence of Nigeria, and not concentrate on the divisive tendency of our diversity. The spirit of inclusiveness fosters peace and development.

If the eighteenth century was dominated by a French Enlightenment idea of Europe, following the French Revolution and then the Napoleon Wars, the early nineteenth century saw the rise of a German Romantic idea of Europe, dominated by strains of cultural nationalism. On the one hand, German Romantics such as Novalis looked back nostalgically to medieval Christendom for the model of a united Europe; on the other hand, thinkers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the Schlegel brothers dreamed of a Europe dominated by German culture. The roots of the shift from universalism to nationalism lay in the work of writers such as Johann Gottfried Herder, who challenged French Enlightenment universalism with an insistence upon cultural differences. While Herder also challenged the prevailing Eurocentrism and Euro-universalism, the post-Napoleonic era saw both a growing nationalism across Europe and an intensifying European imperialism that would culminate in the “scramble for Africa” in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 3 explores the complex relation between the idea of Europe and that of nationalism in the Romantic period, focusing in particular on the ways in which the ostensibly antithetical ideas of the universal and the national were integrated into the idea of Europe.

Chatper 3 studies a unique pilgrimage society known as the Order of the Holy Sepulcher as a window into the the Holy Land as a source of spiritual and political legitimacy for Catholics in the wake of the Reformation.

A shared biblical past has long imbued the Holy Land with special authority as well as a mythic character that has made the region not only a revered spiritual home for Muslims, Christians, and Jews but also a source of a living sacred history that continues to inform present-day realities and religious identities. This book explores the Early Modern Holy Land (1517–1700) as a critical place in which many early modern Catholics sought spiritual and political legitimacy during a period of profound and disruptive change. The Ottoman conquest of the region, the division of the Western Church, Catholic reform, the integration of the Mediterranean into global trading networks, and the emergence of new imperial rivalries transformed the Custody of the Holy Land (Custodia Terrae Sanctae), the venerable Catholic institution that had overseen Western pilgrimage since 1342, into a site of intense intra-Christian conflict by 1517. This contestation thrusts into relief the Holy Land’s importance both a frontier and sacred center of an embattled Catholic tradition, and in consequence, as a critical site of Catholic renewal and reinvention.

Rynetta Davis’s “National Housekeeping: (Re)dressing the Politics of Whiteness in Nineteenth-Century African American Literary History” considers how nineteenth-century Black women writers contested and revised representations of traditional Black domesticity. Moving outside of the home and beyond traditional forms of domestic work, Elizabeth Keckley, Julia Collins, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper suggest that Black domestic work exceeds the home space. Davis thus examines a range of domestic print practices and sensibilities in ways that highlight gender, gendered spaces and work, and print possibilities surrounding such. In this, her chapter considers just what “domestic” citizenship might look like.

Clarinda Calma and Jolanta Rzegocka demonstrate how the experience of compassion shaped communities in early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by looking at the realm of theatre and normative poetics taught in the Jesuit schools of Poland-Lithuania. They argue that the Jesuit school theatre, a key institution in the Catholic Reformation movement, was one of the venues where the multi-denominational, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic public sphere of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was debated. Analysing the sermons of Piotr Skarga, rector of the Jesuit Academy in Wilno, alongside dramatic theory and playbills from Jesuit school theatres, they demonstrate that Jesuit theatre, homiletics and poetic theory became spaces where mercy, compassion and tolerance were continually questioned, debated and negotiated in the shifting context of the contemporary political reality.

Toria Johnson interrogates the classification and portrayal of compassion in two major texts: the anonymous morality play Everyman (c. 1508) and Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606). Taking these plays as examples of pre- and post-Reformation approaches to compassionate interaction, she scrutinises a noticeable shift in attitudes towards the idea of pity, both as a fundamental human trait, and as an organising principle for human interaction. Whereas pre-Reformation plays like Everyman stress the volatility and unreliability of an emotion like pity – preferring instead the more established structure offered by charity – King Lear imagines a world without charity, and without the Church as an overseer of interpersonal exchange. Lear, she argues, reflects an emotional response to the Protestant revision of medieval penitential culture, and in so doing, Shakespeare imagines the possible consequences of England’s new emotional landscape. This chapter examines how the language, structure and ceremony of ‘compassion’ changed in the wake of the English Protestant Reformation, and how these shifts altered the way people experienced or understood the compassion of their communities.

Kristine Steenbergh argues that the Reformation impacted traditional practices cultivating compassion. Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century sermons reveal a concern over the disappearance of traditional habits of charitable giving and affective meditation, and explore new forms of nurturing a capacity for sharing in the suffering of others. Clergymen thought that a mollified heart requires constant practice. With the loss of traditional habits of charity, they feared their congregations’ hearts were in danger of hardening against the sight of suffering. These concerns are expressed in a recurrent image: in their sermons, preachers worry that the members of their congregation suffer from hardened, closed and dry bowels. The concept of the ‘bowels of compassion’ is central to early modern practices of charity and fellow-feeling: these organs need to be soft and moist to open and stretch towards those in need, to share in their suffering. The active process of compassion was seen as a long-term process of softening the bowels – a concept that brings together religious terminology with humoral and bodily notions of the workings of compassion.

The Introduction lays out the book’s main argument about the uses to which accounts of the Bible’s origins were put in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It sketches the historical context for this phenomenon, discussing how the period was characterized by heightened attention on the Bible’s ultimate divine origin, transcendent of all historical contexts, and at the same time by a new focus on the human and historical mediations shaping Scripture’s extant forms. The Introduction proceeds to a critical analysis of how modern scholars have understood these modes of biblical reception according to theories of secularization and modernity, with some arguing that the early modern Bible’s transcendence, and some its immanence, played important roles in the development of secularity, disenchantment, and modernity. Through engaging this scholarship, the Introduction develops arguments that challenge contemporary thinking about secularity. Following a discussion of the scholarly field of political theology and the present book’s relationship to it, the Introduction ends with an overview of the book's chapters.

Chapter 2 charts how the Reformation’s spread, coupled with its vulnerability in many territories, created new religious alliances such as the Protestant Schmalkaldic League and the Catholic League of Nuremberg. Both leagues experienced internal conflicts over their operation that burst into the open in 1542 when the Schmalkaldic League’s chiefs attacked one of the League of Nuremberg’s leaders, Duke Heinrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. Through the comparative analysis of multiple contemporaneous leagues, this chapter shows how the Reformation and its interaction with the imperial political system depended on the politics of alliance but also remade how such politics operated.

While many alliances existed in the Empire during the late Middle Ages, the Swabian League became the model par excellence for subsequent leagues. It achieved this standing by offering something unique to all members. It allowed small territories to secure political and military backing from their more powerful neighbors while enabling larger territories to institutionalize spheres of influence. This chapter investigates these dynamics by analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of leagues as tools for military action. The Swabian League fielded one of the most effective fighting forces the Empire had ever seen. Its 1499, 1504, 1519, 1523, and 1525 campaigns established it as a force in imperial politics. They also pushed its members and other Estates to develop in ways that produced later alliances. Ultimately, the League’s operation promoted a vision of the Empire based on collaboration between its territories and the imperial crown that broke down during the early Reformation. Despite its collapse in the early 1530s, the ideal of the Swabian League lived on as the standard to which later alliances aspired. Instead of being rendered redundant, the League’s legacy helped ensure that the politics of alliance remained an essential political strategy long after the League itself disappeared.

During the Reformation and the Age of Exploration, just war thinkers were forced to reexamine the premises on which the Augustinian tradition had stood, including their understanding of natural law, justice, and sovereignty. This chapter examines three thinkers crucial to that transition: Alberico Gentili, Francisco Suarez, and Hugo Grotius. They are part of the Augustinian tradition, but clearly show signs of subtle departure from their predecessors. Grotius, especially, is a hybrid between the Augustinian past and Westphalian future. They understood themselves to be engaged in a project of continuity: they wanted to salvage and reinterpret the intellectual inheritance of Christendom and reapply it to the changing and fracturing landscape of their day. But the new age inaugurated by the treaties of Westphalia transformed it in subtle but important ways, most prominently by secularizing its discourse and changing its understanding of natural law.