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.