This essay aims to show how one remarkable practitioner of vernacular scholastic literary theory, Reginald Pecock (d. c. 1361), Bishop of Chichester, deployed it to service diverse orders of worth in his works by at once upending and apparently re-accepting authorised ecclesiastical discourses, including the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed and orthodox definitions of God as creator or as infinite. Focusing especially on the theoretical category of ordinatio, it investigates how Pecock both upsets and re-accommodates such discourses in places where the articulation and control of spiritual authority in this world and the tapping of divine authority from the next were at stake. In both his rejection of standard doctrinal discourses and his (re)accommodation of them in his own new system, Reginald deploys a full repertoire of scholastic terms, practices and attitudes. Pecock’s novel and astoundingly ambitious reconfiguration of Christian knowledge and doctrine was a gargantuan programme, endeavouring to efface and outdo traditional discourses of the Church whilst at the same time taking pains palpably, even anxiously, to be equivalent or answerable to that which it would displace. Pecock, in attempting re-cognition of the familiar, ended up recognising it dissonantly within his own unfamiliar discourse.

One of the best known distinctions among the precepts of Judaism is that between the precepts that apply “between man and God” and those that apply “between man and his fellow.” It is generally assumed that this distinction has been a matter of consensus since the time of the talmudic sages.

The present article examines this assumption by means of a close reading of the earliest sources that draw the distinction between the two categories. The discussion of the tannaitic sources will reveal disagreements about this categorization. We will review this disagreement in the context of a hidden debate between the talmudic sages and early Christian literature.

In this context, we will also address the question of the enumeration of the Ten Commandments and their division on the tablets into two sets of five precepts. We will propose that the talmudic sages’ position on this question is also a polemic response to the approach that emerged in early Christianity.

Angeliki Lymberopoulou identifies the basic characteristics of the imagery of Hell (the Place of Hell Formed by the River of Fire, Individual Sinners and Communal Punishments), but highlights the absence of iconographical standardisation. Since Hell signified divergence from the preaching of the Orthodox Church and highlighted to the faithful the consequences of sin, it was often formed according to the degree to which communities were affected by each transgression. As such, the professions depicted offer us valuable insight into the economic structure of the society and the role of women within a male-dominant society. To highlight the significance of repentance, individual sinners are often placed at eye level, creating a telling proximity between sinners and churchgoers, who are brutally reminded of the significance their own deeds could have in determining their final destination – Paradise or Hell. It can be argued that Cretan imagery of Hell acts as the Church’s call for repentance from the faithful, encouraging social disapproval of those who transgress against penal and ethical law.

Angeliki Lymberopoulou identifies the basic characteristics of the imagery of Hell (the Place of Hell Formed by the River of Fire, Individual Sinners and Communal Punishments), but highlights the absence of iconographical standardisation. Since Hell signified divergence from the preaching of the Orthodox Church and highlighted to the faithful the consequences of sin, it was often formed according to the degree to which communities were affected by each transgression. As such, the professions depicted offer us valuable insight into the economic structure of the society and the role of women within a male-dominant society. To highlight the significance of repentance, individual sinners are often placed at eye level, creating a telling proximity between sinners and churchgoers, who are brutally reminded of the significance their own deeds could have in determining their final destination – Paradise or Hell. It can be argued that Cretan imagery of Hell acts as the Church’s call for repentance from the faithful, encouraging social disapproval of those who transgress against penal and ethical law.

The impact of idealized myths of femininity, including the trope of woman-as-nation, is addressed through embodied mythmaking as a consideration of the reiteration, reperformance and reinscription of myths on and through the body. Stasis and containment define violent mythmaking, yet the chapter also looks to the possibility of myth’s liberating and utopian function. Counter to the unhomely experience which marks woman’s displacement outside of culture, the introduction proposes the potential for women’s mythmaking to reconceive spaces, myths, and theatrical forms which accommodate female expression. The assertion of a creative female corporeality redresses scholarly neglect of female bodies; both their creativity and their histories. The introduction addresses the overarching question of this book, namely how to ‘house’ the body of women’s work in Irish theatre, and proposes a new paradigm, the genealogy, as a means of remodelling our understanding of the development of Irish theatre. Deploying a feminist genealogy enables the assertion of a coalition of women in Irish theatre united by their unhomely experience and mobilized through the collective action of embodied mythmaking.

In the laws in the first five books of the Bible, each law is a response to a specific ethical or legal problem arising in a narrative incident recounted in Genesis through 2 Kings. The closest of links exist between law and literature. This argument differs significantly from the commonly held view that legal texts were inserted into narrative texts at different historical periods to reflect changing societal circumstances. Topics covered include the origin of the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments); legal ideas of perennial interest such as individual and corporate responsibility, conflict of law with principle, and authoritative sanctioning of evil; sacred (ritual) law; the absence of certain rules; the role of the curse in controlling behavior; the contributions of Jesus and Paul to ethics and law.

This chapter explores when the government’s religious speech violates the EstablishmentClause, which commands that the government “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” It examines how courts and commentators have identified at least three different approaches to this question. Under the noncoercion principle, we focus on the effects of the government’s religious, specifically asking whether it coerces listeners’ religious belief or practice. Under the nonendorsement principle, we ask whether the government’s speech endorses religion in ways that communicate a message of exclusion to nonadherents. Finally, under the neutrality principle, we turn to the government’s purposes, asking whether the government seeks to advance religion through its speech. The chapter then applies these approaches to a range of problems involving the government’s prayers, religious displays, and its statements that reflect religious animus. It closes by briefly considering when constitutional challenges to the government’s speech are justiciable—that is, when the federal courts have the constitutional power to decide them—a question to which later chapters will return.

Since the first settlements in British North America, Christianity and the Bible have had a significant influence on American jurisprudence. This reflects Christianity’s expansive influence on Western legal traditions in general and the English common law in particular. Christianity’s influence on American law was most pronounced in the colonial era, especially in New England’s Puritan commonwealths. Early colonial laws drew extensively from biblical sources, especially Mosaic law as interpreted within the colonists’ theological traditions. Christianity also contributed to an evolving constitutional tradition in the colonies and, later, the newly independent states, culminating in the U.S. Constitution framed in 1787. This is evident in broad principles, such as the separation of powers needed to check the abuse of government powers vested in fallen human actors, as well as in specific provisions such as the Article III, § 3 requirement that convictions for treason be supported by “the testimony of two witnesses” and the Fifth Amendment prohibition on double jeopardy. Although Christianity remained a dominant cultural force well into the nineteenth century and beyond, church-state separationists, secularists, and rationalists increasingly challenged its influence on law. This is seen, for example, in bitter political and legal controversies involving the Sunday mails, blasphemy laws, and the Bible’s invocation as authority in judicial proceedings. These disputes signaled Christianity’s declining influence in an increasingly secular age.