Neither the Holy Roman Empire nor the Swiss Confederacy held colonies overseas. For this reason, studies on the German and Swiss past have long been situated within narrow European horizons, condemning to oblivion the many threads that connected these spaces to the Americas and to sub-Saharan Africa. In recent years, the historiographical rediscovery of the intertwined destines of these regions has been accompanied by heated public debates and memorial activism aimed at promoting a «decolonisation of public space». While these exchanges of ideas between historical research and activism have overall been fruitful, in some cases tensions have emerged between academic scholarship and decolonial claims.
Keywords: Colonialism; Slavery; Memory; Social movements
Cittadini mercanti e usurai infami. Niccolò Cusano e gli ebrei
Andrea Di Giampaolo
Citizen-Merchants and Infamous Usurers: Niccolò Cusano and the Jews Niccolò Cusano’s relationship with the Jews has only occasionally been examined in studies of philosophy. Research on this topic has mostly been conducted from a historical perspective and has helped undermine the image of Cusano as a precursor of the modern ideas of tolerance and interreligious dialogue. With regard to the decree on the Jews in particular, which Cusano published in 1451, philosophical research has primarily highlighted the break between his reflections as a philosopher and his practice as a cardinal. This article offers a new interpretation of the decree, showing how Cusano was not using it to target Jews, but usury, a practice he considered dangerous in both political and social terms.
Keywords: Niccolò Cusano; Jews; Usury; Commerce
Introduzione
Fernanda Alfieri
Singular or plural? Considering Une histoire des sexualités, ed. S. Steinberg How can we write a history of sexuality in the present day, which has seen unprecedented shifts in the relationship between the individual and the body, within and across sexual communities and between method and desire? Recent trends have prompted research on the dynamics of power that converge around sexuality where it intersects with other forms of inequality, all of which affect economic systems, colonial relations, views on disability and ideas of ethnicity. From this perspective, subjectivities multiply and «sexuality» (in the singular) seems to lose the total explanatory function for the nature of the individual it had when the concept was coined in late-19th-century psychiatric discourse. The volume edited by Sylvie Steinberg, which is discussed here, seems to move in this direction, toward a plural «history of sexualities».
Keywords: History of sexuality; Knowledge and power; Epistemology of sexuality; Michel Foucault
Perché una storia delle sessualità
Tommaso Scaramella