Sex and Toleration: New Perspectives of Research on Religious Radical Dissent in Early Modern Italy

This article examines the inquisitorial trials of a number of heretics whose ideas are reminiscent of the heresies of Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, the Friulian miller first studied by Carlo Ginzburg in his groundbreaking The Cheese and the Worms. However, all the defendants shared a transgressive belief that seems completely alien to Scandella’s intellectual horizon – namely, the heretical proposition that Adam and Eve committed sodomy in the Garden of Eden. At this stage of my research, I suggest that this curious reinterpretation of the myth of the fall from grace is an autonomous element that originated in ecclesiastical circles and was subsequently incorporated into a more complex corpus of heretical beliefs. In addition to taking a further step into the history of religious dissent in Italy, the current research allows us to shed new light on the history of religious toleration in the early modern period, investigating the influence of Islam in Christian heresies and analysing the possible connections between the quest for sexual freedom and criticism of institutionalized religions.