A discussion on multicultualism in Europe

The Difficulties of Inter-faith Marriage in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800):
after the Reformation, when Europeans became divided by faith, the issue arose whether people of different Christian faiths could marry. All the churches strongly disapproved and discouraged any interfaith – also known as ‘mixed’ – marriage. Nevertheless such marriages did occur, even between Protestants and Catholics. This lecture tells the story of a couple named Hendrick and Sara, who married despite many obstacles. They could not agree, though, on whether their newborn child should be baptized and raised in the father’s Catholic faith or the mother’s Calvinist one. The dispute that erupted in the year 1762 over how their baby should be baptized triggered violent conflict in the Dutch village of Vaals, where they lived, and surrounding areas of the Netherlands and Germany.

Recommended Readings
* Benjamin J. Kaplan, Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment. New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2014
* Benjamin J. Kaplan, `Religious Encounters in the Borderlands of Early Modern Europe: The Case of Vaals’, Dutch Crossing 37/1 (March 2013): 4-19.
* Benjamin J. Kaplan, `Intimate Negotiations: Husbands and Wives of Opposing Faiths in Eighteenth-century Holland’, in Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Scott Dixon and Dagmar Freist (Aldershot:: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 225-48
* Benjamin J. Kaplan, `“For They Will Turn Away Thy Sons”: The Practice and Perils of Mixed Marriage in the Dutch Golden Age’, in Piety and Family in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of Steven Ozment, ed. by Benjamin J. Kaplan and Marc R. Forster (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 115-33.

Forms of Religious Toleration in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800):
in the centuries that followed the Reformation, Europeans were bitterly divided among rival Christian churches. Despite this, in many places people of different faiths managed to live together peacefully, practicing toleration toward one another. Toleration however required specific arrangements to be made to accommodate people of more than one faith in the same community. This lecture examines two of these arrangements, one of them typical of the Netherlands, the other typical of parts of Germany. It examines the arrangements by comparing two churches where they were put into practice. The two churches thus exemplify two forms of religious toleration, which were both very different from modern forms.

Recommended Readings
* Benjamin J. Kaplan, `Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe’, American Historical Review 107/4 (October 2002): 1031-64
* Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
* Benjamin J. Kaplan, Robert Moore, Henk van Nierop, and Judith Pollmann, eds., Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and The Netherlands, 1580-1720. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.
* Benjamin J. Kaplan, `Coexistence, Conflict, and the Practice of Toleration’, in A Companion to the Reformation World, edited by R. Po-chia Hsia (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003) , pp. 486-505.

This lecture is organised as a little journey through some key aspects of current Italian culture: cultural heritage and visual arts, design, fashion, cinema, comics and animation, music, language and lifestyles, wine and food, family and friendship.Is there an “Italian way of life” and, if so, what is it today? Has it changed over time? What is specific to Italy and Italians in Europe, compared, for instance, to what is French, Spanish, German, British?The lecture is an informal ride across these key elements of the “Italian way of life”, and it will be counting on an active participation of the audience.

Dr. Chirkov will start his presentation by articulating some of the basic problems in understanding the phenomenon of ‘culture’ in social, cultural and communication research in psychology and related disciplines. Then, he will articulate one of possible solutions of this problem – the theory of sociocultural models. Sociocultural models (SCMs) are a structured set of prescriptions of how people interpret the world, other people, communities, and themselves; they are a set of scripts for acting in accord with these interpretations. These models are developed by people’s cultural communities and they are learned and internalized by their members as validated recipes for their lives and actions. Members of communities continuously co-construct their SCMs by enacting them through their everyday interactions. Culture is described as a distributed network of specialized SCMs that guide community members’ lives in different domains. According to the TSCM, in order to fully understand the nature of people’ actions and experiences, researchers first must examine the system of SCMs that these people were born into - the public aspects of SCMs. Subsequently, researchers must investigate how these people act, experience, and live through these models – the internalized aspects of SCMs – and determine what roles their autonomous agency and self-determination play in their existence. To study SCMs, researchers use methods such as person-centered ethnography, interviews, and experiments.