The Mollenkott Award honours outstanding research and scholarship in LGBTQ religious history and is the only award of its kind. The jury selected Marotta’s paper, ‘The Muslim Friend: Cross-Confessional Male Intimacy in Eighteenth-Century Italy’, from among eight papers submitted this year. Marotta will be presented the award at a public event on 25 March 2025, at the Chicago Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois.
In his research, Marotta uncovers the untold story of intimacy between male Muslims and Christians in the 1700s, showing how men of different faiths could build enduring bonds of affection and mutual obligation that closely resembled ties of kinship.
Jury members, Joanne Carlson Brown, Johari Jabir, and Gillian Frank praised Marotta’s paper for “the sheer sophistication and depth of research; the critical reading of sources with and then against the grain; and the kinds of sources deployed (textual, visual, state authored, everyday people authored),” highlighting that “the writing is inviting and welcomes the non-specialist reader into a complicated past. It holds in dialogue and tension a wide range of categories in order to make sense of same-sex and inter-religious sexual encounters between men.”
Marotta is the 16th recipient of LGBTQ-RAN’s award for papers since its inception in 2005 and the third honoree since the award was named in memory of Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, a renowned trans-feminist religious scholar, in the summer of 2022.
In reacting to receiving the award, Marotta shared: “I’m honoured that my work on the early modern Mediterranean has been recognised by an organisation dedicated to preserving queer religious history in the present. I want to express my gratitude to the scholars on the jury, to the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network, and especially to the friends and mentors who supported me in conducting archival research and writing this paper.”
Marotta’s article was published in the Journal of Early Modern History in June 2024 and is freely available online in open access.
The LGBTQ Religious Archives Network is a groundbreaking venture to preserve the history of LGBTQ religious movements around the world. The organization assists LGBTQ religious leaders and groups in determining how best to preserve their records and papers; provides an electronic information clearinghouse about LGBTQ religious history for the use of historians, researchers and other interested persons; and encourages scholarship in LGBTQ religious history.
Achille Marotta is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI). He is a social historian of slavery and the early modern Mediterranean. His interests include archives, microhistory, legal history, and the comparative history of Catholic and Islamic societies in the Mediterranean. He received his PhD from the University of Bologna, defending a thesis titled ‘Slavery, Normativity, and Muslim-Christian Relations in Early Modern Genoa (1600-1800)’, in 2024.
Photo credit: Courtesy of the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze