#  RCCHU Medieval History International Seminars: I. The Slavery in Later Medieval Mediterranean Europe 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **April 20, 2023** 

 06:00PM - 07:00PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **RCCHU Conference Room, 26 Trowbridge St.**  



 

 



 

 ***Slavery and the pursuit of freedom in later medieval Mediterranean Europe***

 Daniel Lord Smail (*Harvard University*)

 This paper considers the passage from slavery to freedom in Mediterranean Europe between 1280 and 1450, during the height of the Mediterranean slave system. One of the unusual features of Mediterranean slavery is that a considerable proportion of enslaved people were manumitted after a decade or two of servitude. Scholarship, to date, has emphasized the formal legal mechanisms that enabled the passage from slavery to freedom, including acts of manumission and freedom lawsuits. This article argues that a successful passage, for those who sought it, also depended informal processes that are much less visible in the record but no less important, notably acculturation and embodiment. The gradual acquisition of the traits of a free person allowed at least some formerly enslaved individuals to pass from a state of perceived unbelonging to one of belonging in the eyes of the community. The premise is that acculturation and embodiment preceded and therefore made thinkable the formal legal mechanism of manumission. The paper will offer readings of two cases from the city of Marseille: an unusual contract of manumission from 1376 and a court case from 1406-1408. Both cases feature formerly enslaved women who gained their freedom despite the active opposition of their former masters. The analysis allows us to piece together the suite of traits and resources each had acquired while in servitude.

 ***Charity and Slavery: Childcare and Race in the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Premodern Florence***

 Angela Zhang (*Harvard University*)

 This paper discusses the gendered notions of slavery in premodern Florence by exploring the abandonment of the children of enslaved women and enslaved women’s coerced labor at the Florentine foundling hospital. This paper will use the methodologies premodern critical race and gender studies to interrogate the archives of foundling hospitals as sites of violence visited on the bodies of enslaved women. I will examine various case studies of enslaved women and their children, as well as records of adoption, abandonment, and nursing tolook at the intersections between childcare, reproduction, and labour in the Florentine slave trade. I argue that the Innocenti was founded as a strategy to manage and mitigate the social problems caused by the children of enslaved women and Florentine men and that its operation facilitated the mixture of racial language and slavery.

 ![smile](/sites/g/files/omnuum986/files/rcc/files/smail_zhang_poster.jpg)

 

 **Organized by:** [Pablo Sanahuja Ferrer](/people/pablo-sanahuja-ferrer) *(RCCHU Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of History at Harvard University)*

 **Speakers:** Daniel Lord Smail *(Harvard University)*; Angela Zhang *(Harvard University)*

 **Sponsors:** RCCHU; University of València; Harvard University



 

 



 

 

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