Livy not Polybius is the main source for Roman religion; Carthaginian is less easily grasped. Literary traditions represented Hannibal as an impious perjuror, whereas Scipio enjoyed divine help (Neptune) and privileged access (Jupiter). Neither picture is true. Both made youthful vows, Hannibal never to befriend Rome, Scipio (after Cannae) to continue the fight. Neither was regularly accompanied by seers on campaign; Hannibal was his own diviner and personally executed one violent animal sacrifice. He buried defeated enemy commanders respectfully, unlike Nero after Metaurus. Scipio, unlike Hannibal, took impious advantage of a truce. Hannibal was a priest only in the sense that ancient generals conducted campaign rituals. Scipio had been a Salian priest of Mars for many years (special dress, ceremonies, obligations). There was a Hannibalic legend (advice or warnings in dreams from Jupiter and Juno) as well as the famous Scipionic legend (supernatural snake-birth and Neptune’s help at New Carthage).

Neither Hannibal nor Scipio participated at the Metaurus (207), but it was the war’s turning point: Ennius thought Juno was now at last reconciled with Rome, and Livy presented Rome’s victory over Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal as revenge for Cannae. Things looked bad for Rome after both consuls of 208, Marcellus and Crispinus, died in battle. Roman success was made possible by another reconciliation, between two old enemies the consuls Salinator and Nero. Nero’s forced march up Italy was enthusiastically greeted and fed en route. He returned south and threw Hasdrubal’s head before Hannibal’s camp. Appendix 8.1 concludes that Salinator was not a senior decemuir (priest) in 236. Appendix 8.2 discusses Roman battle vows and asks why Livy omitted Salinator’s Metaurus vow in his battle narrative. Appendix 8.3 examines the unusual joint triumph of Salinator and Nero. Appendix 8.4 shows another name (Sena) for Metaurus was current before Horace immortalized it.

This chapter considers the debate over biblical law and the so-called wisdom literature (mainly Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes), as well as questions about whether biblical law derives from early wisdom sayings or vice versa. It also shows how we lack information necessary to answer other related questions.

This chapter explores the religious practice of characters in the five ‘ideal’ Greek novels, arguing that despite these works’ overall presentation of a world that is in many ways ‘realistic’, their representation of religion diverges from ‘reality’. At one end of the spectrum the behaviour of the rustic couple Daphnis and Chloe is almost hyper-religious, and it is only in Longus’ novel that we find a full range of traditional religious practices, including vows and libations. In the other four many features correspond to behaviour in the ‘real’ world – prayers, offerings, sacrifices, feasts and festivals: but libations are sometimes not poured when they might be expected; rituals associated with marriage or burial are omitted or played down; and, most strikingly, the practice of making a vow to a god at critical moments to secure help or rescue, a practice documented in the ‘real’ world by epigraphy and literature from the archaic period down to at least the third century AD, is wholly absent. Possible reasons for this absence are briefly discussed: is it simply a generally soft-focus and elliptical account of religious behaviour, or is it the avoidance of a device which, if deployed, would risk short-circuiting characters’ tension-creating peril in cliff-hanging situations?

The chapters in this book are all readings, or interpretations, of key characters and episodes in the Divine Comedy where it can be shown that what is at stake is a kind of faith. What has been argued is that reading itself is an act of faith, a willingness to trust not only in the individual human author or narrator, but in the larger story in which all truthful, good faith narratives somehow fit. A different faith, like a superseded hypothesis in science, is another way of approaching a single truth and it can be read, charitably, as such.

A first shock of the Paradiso is to discover that it has difference, diversity and degrees. Dante questions Piccarda, the lovely sister of his childhood pal, as to whether she doesn’t yearn to have a more exalted station and to be friends with people in higher places. Her response is that the virtue of charity quiets their will so that they do not want anything other than what they have. Since Piccarda was taken against her will by her powerful brother’s henchmen from the convent where she had wanted to sleep and wake with Christ her whole life, and forced into a marriage she did not want, her acquiescence to the will of others seems to endure even in heaven. Yet appeasement in the face of violent threats turns out to be the opposite of resting in the truth of one’s own particular capacity for goodness, in a spectrum of possible goodness that soars way over our heads.

The council’s teaching on professed religious life wished to preserve the distinctive role of professed religious men and women in the church while moving beyond a pre-conciliar emphasis on the “states of evangelical perfection.” This chapter will consider in particular the council’s treatment of this topic in Lumen Gentium and Perfectae Caritatis.

The second chapter considers the exile English convents’ commitment to a core tenet of the Council of Trent’s teaching on female religious life: the implementation and maintenance of full enclosure. It opens by detailing the convents’ initiation rites, through the ceremonies of clothing and profession of vows. This chapter considers the relationship between English women religious and enclosure as a touchstone indicator of commitment to the initiatives of the Catholic Reformation. In their dedication to such a major Catholic identifier, it is argued that the English convents did not just match their continental equivalents but even outstripped them, gaining a reputation for their full commitment to this aspect of religious identity. In short, English nuns were committed to the tenets of the Council of Trent, especially those surrounding enclosure. This dedication allowed the nuns to place themselves in the vanguard of new Catholic Reformation initiatives, though this in itself reveals a paradox: for all that they embraced enclosure, the communities were not cut off from the wider world or its perceptions but remained involved with it.