Focus Project "History of Sexuality"

The Secularization of Sexuality in Europe

Pleasure and Procreation as Religious Practices in Germany and France, c. 1850-1930

In her habilitation project, Veronika Settele examines sexuality as a religious practice in the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestant churches, and Judaism between the mid-19th century and 1930. Germany and France form the geographical focus of the study, which, however, takes into account other transnational references and sees itself as a Western European area study.

Through concrete practices of contraception, abortion, and premarital, extramarital, and marital sexual acts, the project examines a changing everyday significance of religious teachings and authorities for the experience of sexual pleasure and the organization of reproduction. With this focus, Settele follows the secularization theories of the sociologist of religion José Casanova and the anthropologist Talal Asad, who overcame binary ideas of a religious and increasingly private sphere on the one hand and a secular public (state) sphere on the other, for the modern age. The key question is the extent to which practices of sexual pleasure and (prevented) reproduction changed piety, ecclesiastical ties, and faith itself. Following Clifford Geertz, the project is based on a broad understanding of religion as a system of cultural meanings that incorporates individual needs for affection and external authority, and goes beyond narrower notions of clerical control and the legitimation of the nation-state in the nineteenth century.  In order to shift the focus of historical studies of sexuality from the normative level to everyday sexual practice, the study draws on first-person documents such as letters, diaries, autobiographies, and autobiographical novels, as well as church, police, and court records, medical case histories, and confessionals on the side of authoritarian intervention. This combination of sources is supplemented by colportage novels, joke collections, marriage guides, and press reports for the social context in which the individual actions took place.