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Between 1948-1998 there were quite a few Jewish underground groups that preached that Israel should become a Jewish theocracy – that is, run according to the Halakha, and practiced their beliefs, many times using harsh violence. The chapter details these groups, their history, activities, rise and demise. Among such groups one finds Hamahane and Brit Hakanaim, The 1980 Jewish Underground, Keshet, The Modesty Guards, and a few other such groups. Acts by such groups included burning secular establishments like kiosks, restaurants, bus stations, harassing seculars, threats, intimidations, beatings, considering to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount.

This chapter examines for the first time the phenomena of religious novel writing by Iraqi women. It argues that the conservative, and often reactionary religious discourses expounded by devout female authors represented a proxy attack on the Ba‘th’s supposed godlessness. As such, the female body becomes a site of resistance, with modest clothing and limited gender mixing forming part of a wider discourse on purity and contamination. The chapter ultimately concludes that the extremely popular religious novels produced by writers inside and outside Iraq can be considered as a form of counter-propaganda, and their views on women should not be taken at face value.

This chapter investigates the ways in which late nineteenth century concerns about the unauthorised publication of women’s portraits (in advertising, greeting cards and magazines) led to the legal formulation of a right to privacy in the US. It examines the history of this right within debates concerning the 1888 Bill to Protect Ladies, prior to Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis’ seminal article, and connects claims to a right to privacy to the advent of the New Woman and women’s broader struggle for equal citizenship. It argues that despite its emphasis on ladylike “modesty” and “reserve”, the case of Roberson v Rochester Folding Box (which led to the enactment of the first privacy laws in the United States) can be read as the protest of a courageous young woman against the use of her photograph within advertising that transformed her into an anonymous “pretty” object of mass consumption. This chapter compares her objections to the masculine language of liberty and freedom espoused in Pavesich v New England Life Insurance Co. In most of the early cases, a right to privacy was employed by young women who objected to their images being handled and circulated by others.

This chapter offers a revisionist history of modesty and humility in modernity, challenging the standard story, pioneered by David Hume, of humility’s modern demise. After surveying a variety of approaches to modesty and humility in early modern theology and philosophy, the chapter demonstrates that received narratives of secularization are founded upon a tendentious portrait of humility inherited from Hume. Charles Taylor provides the textbook example of this tendentious equation of secular subjectivity with sovereign subjectivity. The chapter concludes with an excursus on Francis Bacon’s ethic of scientific humility.

This chapter examines Thomas Hobbes’ critique of vainglory, arguing that, to confront challenges posed by pride, Hobbes must cultivate the contrary virtues of modesty and humility. Yet, in a stable commonwealth, these virtues are hard to cultivate, as an analysis of Hobbes’ “law of honor” demonstrates. To mitigate these difficulties, Hobbes deploys a theology of divine omnipotence drawn from the book of Job. As Hobbes’ investment in Job demonstrates, his claims for the power of human artifice, and the possibilities of human mastery, are more modest than we have been taught to expect.

The conclusion enumerates the conundrums that ensue when theorists try to observe protocols of anonymity consistent with their commitment to modesty as a philosophical virtue. This story about the ironic twists and turns of modesty’s modern career shows how hard it is for early modern philosophers to avoid the temptations of sovereignty. The chapter concludes with a meditation on the implications, for contemporary democratic theory, of the book’s historical argument. Through an engagement with Steven White’s ethos of finitude, the chapter argues that contemporary theorists must beware of contesting sovereignty in ways that reinforce Augustinian assumptions.

This chapter explores Mah Laqa Bai’s family history, paying attention to tensions found in a woman’s role as a courtesan, concubine, or prostitute. These roles are not clearly defined, despite the protestations of those who have recorded Mah Laqa Bai’s biography. Her grandmother, mother, aunts, and half-sister shaped her life and artistic aspirations.

This chapter brings together multiple voices to discuss why women made the decision to join a patriarchal movement. By embracing modesty, marriage, and motherhood, female members debunked stereotypes of hypersexualized black women. Agency was found in patriarchal marriage because in theory a male breadwinner freed wives from financial burdens and the assaults often experienced working outside of the home. By accepting a religious identity anchored in patriarchal precepts, Nation of Islam women counted on the promise of protection and freedoms on their own terms.

Desires have a range of familiar cognitive effects, including the direction of attention, motivated irrationality, and enhancing capacities to learn about topics bearing on what one desires. These familiar effects are also seen in people with virtues or vices. The desires constituting virtue and vice thus allow one to explain the way virtuous and vicious people think, including in cases of prejudice, close-mindedness, and open-mindedness. The relation of virtue to modesty and to the content of dreams is also illuminated in this way.

Historical pragmatics, the domain of this last chapter, has developed strikingly in the past twenty years, especially with reference to English. Signs of politeness in Old English are limited, but in Middle English, the era of courtly love brings prominence to “courtesy” between man and woman; the Approbation, Generosity, Tact, and Modesty maxims are all in play. In the centuries preceding the seventeenth, the great strength of the vertical distance factor in a highly hierarchical society is manifest in honorific language showing extreme deference to aristocrats and other powerful people; but during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries this was in decline, reaching an extreme egalitarian avoidance of status distinguishers in the present democratized society. At the same time, the Tact Maxim, reflecting the individual’s right to privacy and self-determination, has gained in power. Despite these radical changes in the Modern era, it is difficult to substantiate the claim that politeness is on the decline.