Università Roma Tre

First module (6 ECTS)

The first module intends to address the main critical and problematic nodes of early modern history in a perspective aimed at enucleating original characters and identity processes of the European continent. Particular attention will be devoted to the philosophical-political and political-institutional peculiarities that emerged in European states between the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 19th century. From the English Revolutions of the 17th Century and later with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, parliamentary democracy, secularization, religious tolerance and the recognition of human rights became traditionally not only the key ideas of the definition of "being European", but real universal guiding principles to export and, if necessary, to impose on the rest of the globe. But can we really coincide the advent of modernity with the beginnings of the process of secularization? What was the relationship between Christian churches and modernity? What was the relationship between Catholic Church and human rights since the Lumières century?

Second module (6 ECTS)

According to the definition of the League of Nations, slavery is “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised” (September 25th 1926). Slavery had an enormous importance and impact in the early modern age, but compared to the Atlantic tract, only more recently Mediterranean slavery has received the attention it deserves from historiography. Reductions in slavery are one of the (dramatic) consequences of the stormy relations between Christian states and the Ottoman empire, with repercussions of great importance not only from a social and economic point of view, but also from a religious point of view. The second part of the course intends to focus on the consistent and significant presence of slaves, often of Islamic religion, in the Italian states of the early modern age, as well as the policies posed in this regard to religious minorities moving in the Mediterranean area, such as the moriscos, expelled from the Iberian peninsula since 1609. For the Christian European countries, the Turk is the natural catalyst of an inveterate hatred, an obscure entity ready to destroy their culture and their religion. Yet, starting from the Renaissance, between the European sovereigns (and the Pope, among them) and their archenemies also exchanges and calls for collaboration happened, which provide evidence of the permeability of the borderline between two apparently irreconcilable worlds.

For the first module (6 ECTS)

F. Chabod, Storia dell’idea di Europa, Roma-Bari, Laterza.
P. Prodi, Homo Europaeus, Bologna, Il Mulino
V. Ferrone, Lo strano Illuminismo di Joseph Ratzinger. Chiesa, modernità e diritti dell’uomo, Roma-Bari, Laterza.

For the second module (6 ECTS)

S. Bono, Schiavi. Una storia mediterranea (XVI-XIX secolo), Bologna, Il Mulino.
G. Fiume, Schiavitù mediterranee. Corsari, rinnegati e santi di età moderna, Milano, Mondadori.
B. Pomara Saverino, Rifugiati. I moriscos e l’Italia, Firenze, Firenze University Press (il volume è scaricabile gratuitamente dalla piattaforma Open Access:
http://www.fupress.com/catalogo/rifugiati/3516