Beschreibung:
<jats:p>As every historian knows, religious minorities and other ‘out-groups’ have repeatedly faced accusations of sexual misconduct and its consequences: seduction, the breaking of families, promiscuous fornication, participation in orgies, ‘unnatural vice’, incest, sadism and masochism. In the second or third century, Minucius Felix recorded such charges against the early Christians: they make ‘love almost before they are acquainted; everywhere they introduce a kind of religion of lust, a promiscuous “brotherhood” and “sisterhood” by which ordinary fornication, under cover of a hallowed name, is converted to incest’. The Cathars and other medieval heretics were accused of promiscuous, incestuous orgies. Across early modern Europe, witches at their sabbats, it was learnedly pronounced, copulated with the Devil himself and, indiscriminately, with unknown members of both sexes, even parents, brothers and sisters.</jats:p>