Chapter Six offers a careful reading of the first two sedition trials of Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1898 and 1908). While existing scholarship has studied his subversive performances within the courtroom, I extend this analysis to incorporate his efforts at winning executive mercy and commutation from prison. More than any other political leader, Tilak spent his imprisonment exhausting every avenue to petition and appeal against his sentence. This included multiple approaches to the Privy Council and serious plans to petition the House of Lords. In an important and original breakthrough in anticolonial political thought, it was when Tilak failed to win freedom on the basis of justice alone that he connected the availability of mercy to the curtailment of political rights in India.

This chapter focuses on the Noncooperation Movement (1920–1922) and, in particular, the role played by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The NCM was the largest political movement for swaraj that India had ever seen. As the leader of this movement, Gandhi would demand noncooperators refuse mercy, and if necessary, sacrifice their lives in pursuit of political freedom. For Gandhi, it was only by reclaiming the right to die a political death that the satyagrahi could finally escape the label of the criminal and the category of rebellion. The chapter studies the place of mercy in Gandhian thought by paying close attention to his response to the Amritsar Massacre, his public speeches and writings, and his performance in his trial for sedition in 1922. As I argue, by embracing guilt and rejecting mercy, Gandhi threatened to finally explode the political conditions upon which imperial sovereignty had been organized.

Chapter Two explores the declaration of colonial peace through the amnesty offered to rebels in the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858. While this document has already piqued the interest of historians and political theorists of liberalism and “indirect rule,” I turn to this document as an instrument of post-conflict resolution. Comparing and contrasting the variety of strategies used by the state to temper forgiveness, this chapter tracks the creation of an uneven hierarchy of colonial subjecthood organized along lines of relative loyalty and disloyalty. In exploring the wider importance of amnesty at this juncture, this chapter examines this offer as a founding political bargain presented to the defeated. This promise of mercy, in this instance, had been contingent on the full surrender of Indian political agency.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

The Introduction draws attention to the many pictures and metaphors employed in the text. Literary study of the text reveals three sections: Chapters 1–3, 4–11, 12–14. Redaction-critical study indicates that the text developed from an earliest eighth-century text into the final form produced in the post-exilic period. Chapters 1–3 contain narrative material and prophetic sayings concerning Hosea’s marriage. Chapters 4–11 and 12–14 contain prophetic words of judgment and restoration. Key themes include Israel’s unfaithfulness to YHWH, of which the people’s worship of Baal and the nation’s propensity to seek alliances with Assyria and Egypt (rather than seeking YHWH) are indicative. There are Closer Look sections (A Wife of Prostitution; Baalism, Canaanite Religion and Ancient Ugarit; Knowledge of and by YHWH; Hosea and the Ten Commandments; Ephraim in Hosea; The Covenant in Scholarly Research; Jacob in Hosea 12). There are also Bridging the Horizons sections (The Metaphor of the Unfaithful Wife; Priestly Responsibility; Israel’s Alliances with Foreign Nations; The Judgment and Mercy of YHWH).

There is a tension in military culture between the growing acceptance of moral injury and an idealized view of Stoicism that leaves little room for the guilt and shame, mercy and forgiveness characteristic of moral injury and repair. Does that emotion-lean view do justice to ancient Stoic doctrine? I argue that it does not. The emotions of the Stoic moral aspirant, such as shame and moral distress, bear striking similarities to the negative self-reactive attitudes that P.F. Strawson famously discusses. Notions of mercy and forgiveness speak to the positive reactive attitudes. I develop my argument by turning to Seneca’s essay, On Mercy and his play, the Trojan Woman. Mercy, Seneca insists, makes good on the gentler side of Stoicism. Learning from the mercy others show us, and that we would show them, is one way that soldiers can begin to show mercy towards themselves.

Stoic virtue relies on the judgment of internal impressions. This aesthetic and ethical process echoes Shakespeare’s theatrical art, which frequently focuses on its own artifice and capacity to affect reality. While early modern dramatists frequently mocked Stoicism as stuffy and impractical, a closer look at fundamental texts by Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius reveals their interest not in attaining perfect sagacity but instead in the day-to-day reality of attempting to live better. Stoicism, thought of in this way, becomes what Pierre Hadot calls “a way of life,” and allows us to read Shakespeare’s drama more charitably as a mode of philosophical exercise. This chapter surveys Stoic understandings of virtue before turning to A Midsummer Night’s Dream to examine how the play’s testing the imaginative powers of theatricality mirrors the Stoic’s internal processes of judgment. Drawing on key Stoic texts as well as the 1581 translation of Seneca’s Hippolytus, a source for Midsummer, I propose that the play reveals the potential for imaginative impressions to become mere fantasy — but also admits to their power over our consciousness. While this may appear anti-Stoic, Midsummer in fact mounts its apology for the imagination by practicing mercy, a key Stoic virtue.

This chapter explores the fate of obstinate enemy garrisons who chose to withstand British breach assaults in the Napoleonic era. Under customary laws of war, British soldiers had the right to put such garrisons to the sword. In the sieges of the Peninsular War, British soldiers generally gave mercy to their French counterparts, part of a consistent pattern of self-regulating restraint that characterised Anglo-French combat during the war. A shared Anglo-French martial culture of honour and civility prevailed. Amongst other national enemies, however, in other contemporary global theatres of war, a very different picture emerges. British soldiers put defending Spanish and Indian troops to the sword at the sieges of Montevideo, Seringapatam and Gawilghur, raising important questions about the complex ways in which military and cultural factors coalesced, in shaping patterns of restraint and excess. These comparative case studies reveal the paradoxical Janus-face of enlightened ‘civilized war’ in action, with moderation and protections accorded to those enemy soldiers who fell firmly within its self-defining and self-limiting boundaries, and a dramatic lowering of restraints towards those combatants deemed to be on its margins or beyond.

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.

The Vision of Tnugdal (1149) was written in Latin in Regensburg. It provides a case study for the genre of otherworld visions. The author, an Irish monk, shows the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, in his treatment of divine mercy and justice as expounded by a guide who accompanies the visionary and explains the nature of the otherworld. Hell is segmented into eight locations for different punishments. The less grievous sinners, still redeemable, are at the top, with those eternally damned already in the pit of hell. Outside a segmented heaven two intermediate locations are designated for those neither particularly good nor particularly bad. This lengthy and popular work demonstrates considerable learning and a unique creativity with its vivid descriptions of punishments and demons and its spatial, intellectual, and spiritual vision of heaven. The vision expounds a theology of fear while extoling the redemptive power of both internal and external pilgrimage.

The chapter explores how, as an ‘empire of difference’, Russia from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries tolerated local law for lesser crimes among the empire’s diverse peoples but insisted on the tsar’s law for high crimes (murder, recidivist robbery and theft, treason and heresy and the like). The bureaucracy established a remarkable uniformity of documentary form, judicial procedure and legal norms across the empire. In local courts knowledgeable scribes, in the absence of a professional bar, juridical faculties and notaries advised governors who were untrained amateurs. Lacking jurisprudential expertise, criminal codes were laconic, workaday compendia of fines and penalties primarily intended to police official corruption. Punishment was primarily corporal, but in local courts violence was mitigated by judges’ use of mercy to preserve community stability and by their reliance on locals to staff court and executioners’ roles. Violence, in torture and corporal and capital punishment, escalated in the prosecution of highest crime (treason, heresy), but Muscovy did not conduct European-style theatrical spectacles of suffering until Peter I witnessed them in the 1690s. Even so, from the late 1600s Russia relied increasingly on exile and abolished capital punishment for all crimes but treason by the end of the eighteenth century.

Chapter 8 opens with the story of Erkenwald and the righteous pagan judge, inviting the reader to consider not only the complexities of defendants’ mental state, but also the mental state of persons engaged in the act of judging; this, too, would be subject to scrutiny at the Last Judgment. The chapter argues that medieval English felony law was based upon the equitable balancing of harsh justice and mercy; for a justice or jurors to stray too far in either direction could be condemnable. Drawing upon cautionary tales about judging, the chapter highlights themes that appear in medieval English literary and religious sources, including the notion that justices should not waver too greatly in decision-making, being swayed by money or ill advice; that justices should also not be too inflexible, but should rather reconsider a judgment that in hindsight appeared to be mistaken; and that justices and jurors should beware lest their decisions be informed by anger rather than measured consideration of the facts. The chapter illuminates the ways in which mind mattered not just for determining the culpability of criminal defendants, but also for assessing the culpability of individuals tasked with sending felons to the gallows.