SPACES · Sex, disPlacements, And cross-Cultural EncounterS

Sex, disPlacements, And cross-Cultural EncounterS

SPACES has investigated a set of heretical beliefs prosecuted by the Inquisitions in the Italian peninsula between the 16th and 18th centuries. All the defendants praised the pleasures of unreproductive sexuality, believing that Adam and Eve practiced anal sex in the terrestrial paradise. Some of them were also charged with stating that “all can be saved in their own law”, that is, that the eternal salvation was open to Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike. By analyzing these cases, SPACES has explored the relationship between religious skepticism, atheism, and sexuality in the early modern Mediterranean world. The research has also highlighted how the cross-cultural interactions between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity influenced the development of radical religious doubt not only in the Mediterranean area but also in continental Europe. SPACES has challenged the well-established interpretation that attributed the birth of religious skepticism and atheism to the Northern European intellectual elites. The defendants involved in the cases under examination clearly anticipated many themes that were relevant to the development of 17th- and 18th-century libertinism; SPACES has shown that, almost a century before the emergence of this cultural movement, similar ideas proliferated in middle-rank environments marked by a high degree of social miscegenation. Moreover, SPACES has demonstrated the extent to which these dissenting ideas were part of a wider cluster of beliefs that were shared not only across the social spectrum but also across the religious boundaries that divided the three main monotheistic religions. SPACES has also contributed to rethink themes that are urgent to present-day social and political debates. Fundamentalism is escalating as a defensive response to the problems of an increasingly globalized world marked by growing socio-economic disparities. In this context, religion has been exploited as a marker of identity. Sexuality is crucial to these cultural and political conflicts. In western countries the “foreigner”, and especially the Muslim, is depicted as an enemy of both women’s and sexual and gender minorities’ civil rights movements. This rhetoric is sometimes used to justify international military aggression and internal xenophobic propaganda. By analyzing beliefs that were shared across the faiths and questioned religious fundamentalism, SPACES has revealed a long history of interactions between the faiths despite and beyond the ongoing religious and political conflicts that characterize the Mediterranean area

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз