10 Perhaps one of the defining features of the 21st-century human experience is the discomfort many people feel (or we feel) in relation to our bodies and the anxieties that arise in the realm of identity. It is the "sufficiency of having a name, / the filth of having skin, / the filth of a womb struggling / with all the children they will not have," as Maria Sevilla says to Pulp teeth, and which rests on centuries of virtually unquestioned cisheteropatriarchal system, extremely rigid gender norms and a paradigm that has only just begun to change in decades.

]]> Christianity, the religion that has shaped Western civilization for two millennia, suffered a severe setback a little over five hundred years ago with the Protestant Reformation. In many places, the Reformation was seen as a liberating moment and an affirmation of the value of human conscience, although in others it met with violent reactions. But the Reformation has many shadowy areas, and one of the darkest was the theocratic regime imposed by Calvin in the city of Geneva, brilliantly recounted by Stefan Zweig in his book Castellio vs. Calvin (The Second Periphery, 2025).

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