RELIGION SO OFTEN lies at the heart of the ways in which societies and individuals make sense of their worlds and attempt to distinguish between right and wrong. Belief often claims a degree of transcendental timelessness, but of course history teaches us that religious maps of behaviour and misbehaviour are profoundly contingent.

This small sectional introduction will briefly explain what the chapters here are about, draw out some central themes and questions, and attempt to set them in a wider context with some suggestions for further comparative reading.

The first part of this section explores the categorization of ideas and beliefs themselves. Societies often map out the rightness and wrongness not only of behaviours, but of thoughts and cherished beliefs. It is both an extraordinary and horrifying endeavour, and an extremely common one.

We open with Ian Forrest's exploration of heresy in England, Bohemia, and the Languedoc from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. He brings together approaches to the study of heresy and the study of crime to pin down what is particular about the processes by which heretical beliefs and their adherents were demonized and cast out from the Christian community. A powerful argument emerges that the process was contingent—rooted in time and historical circumstance—as indeed are all crimes which depend by their very nature on a process of definition. That contingency involved a degree of uncertainty and suspicion which looked different from the clearer delineation of a crime like theft. Heretics, once classified as such, found themselves, as Forrest argues, “commodified”—ostensibly stripped of features apart from their heretical-ness. After tracing this process comparatively across three contexts, Forrest then turns most importantly to the heretics themselves: how did they experience belief? What motivated their choices? How might we do justice to the ethical imperative to place these individuals at the heart of our analysis, rather than merely reproducing the categories imposed by those hostile to them?

Readers might compare Forrest's themes here with an exploration of heresy and reactions to it in Byzantium, and in medieval Islam. As Christine Caldwell Ames has pointed out,