ABSTRACT
‘I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you’ says Sweeny in T. S. Elliot’s Sweeny Agonistes, and this sums up nicely what many social scientists feel when they try to transport their conceptual baggage across cultural and historical frontiers. How can one suppose that one’s concepts will be able to apply to or elucidate cultures distant in space or time? Yet without those concepts, how can we possibly compare human societies across time and space? The four authors of this first, historical section of this Handbook on Religious Laws have been given the formidable task of briefly describing the origins, historical evolution and central characteristics of Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Hindu legal traditions. Each chapter had to span multiple centuries and huge geographical areas.
